The MSP Growth Hub’s Post

Transcript

So integrating the vision, the mission and the values is one of the most important things. And pretty much every single one of our clients does this. As soon as they start, they don't understand the importance of it. They don't kind of like realize why they need to do it. But the most important thing is that this is the one, this is the key thing that sets the vision. It sets the identity. It gives you clarity on who you are, where you're going and what you're going to do. So just be interested to hear, do you have a clear company vision and mission statement and values that everyone knows and that are prominent in the workplace? In terms of a strategic framework and why we need to do this, you know when you started out in your MSP, we're really, really good at sales. And start getting some people in, realized we got the businesses we go through on the MSP journey. Then all of a sudden we've got a team around us. And the teams now built up and what's happening now, we now need to start building that team and we now need to start teaching them how we do things in this place and what good looks like and what the culture is starting to organize. And then once we start to get more and more people, we recognize that the importance of the, you know, still getting in that bottleneck. And we, the importance is that we're getting people, we're getting processes in place now that other people can operate to help us go faster. And most of the time we kind of stop at that and we go, yeah, that's fine, that's all good. You know, we're in a, we're in a good place. That's the business. But the problem is it's still needing you to direct everything and it's still needing you to move things forward because you've got an idea in your head where it arrives on the MSP journey and you've got an idea on where you want to get to. But we need to bring everyone else along with it because we need to connect that team, remember, And we need to engage them, We need to inspire them and we need to get them away from working for money and get them working for the core of the business and the purpose of the business because that's where the success is. So all of a sudden we start giving them we, you know, we create the vision of the business and where the business wants to go. We then look at the mission. And understand why is it we're doing what we're doing. We then look at the values and we'll talk about the values in a moment. And then we have rules in the culture which embed it and this helps you then solidify. The slide we were talking about the roles responsibilities in the people and minute ago and embedding all it brings a purpose into all why do we need to do this sort of stuff? What's the point of doing all of this stuff? And then all of a sudden, when we look at the operating model of the business and we look at understanding, you know, how the, how it works from the, the, the progression of the business with the grown up vision, mission and values. And then we embed rules, culture and accountability as well. All of a sudden it really starts to move forwards and your life starts to get easier. And that's when you start to see a real growth in your business results. So just for clarity. The vision is where the business wants to go, where are we going, What does the business want to achieve in the next three to five years? You might want to be the best MSP, the best IT support company in Basingstoke, London, wherever you might, wherever you might live. You might want to be the number one IT partner for pharmaceuticals or for the education sector. But it's where you want to go and what do you want to be and, and and how you how you know the the direction of the business and without vision. It's kind of this many, many cliches, you know, There is just no direction. The mission statement is how are we going to achieve the mission? So for example, we're going to be the number one partner of choice, say, for example. You know, the IT in pharmaceuticals, I'll just pick that one straight out the top of my head. How are we going to achieve that? We're going to do this by partnering with our clients and solving their their technical issues or their business issues using technology and helping them achieve more each day or get good ROI on their technology. The mission statement is how we then achieve the vision, really important differences there. And then the values are the behaviors and the belief that the company lived by. That needs to define the culture of the organization. And what we mean by this is that, you know, the values are really important because not only are they core around your values and what you think looks good in any day, but it's who you want to employ and the people that you want to work with. As I kind of say many, many times, if you want me to go and work in a library and a job, working in library have been nice and quiet and not standing up doing this sort of thing all day long, organizing books, I'm not going to get on very well because that's not one of my values. I don't, I'm not wired like that. It's not going to happen. And likewise with many MSPs because they're very detailed and they're very focused and they're very deliberate and steady. Again, we asked them to go and perform a sales function or do a speech. It will shudder through them. So values are really important for your employees. And what we can do by that is we can also measure the value. So once you set the core values of your business out, if somebody does some really good work, you can say, hey, cool, well done. You've lived the company value of customer 1st and you really delivered that project. It was fantastic. Well done, you're living the values of the company. Pat on the back, give them an award or whatever it might be. But likewise, if somebody doesn't do something that's that's that's good in the organization, you don't wanna have that difficult conversation because it's like this is gonna be a bit tricky and a little bit clunky. You can then say, hey, John. Leaving that customer off over the weekend wasn't a great thing. You know, when we look back at our values, which is, you know, consistently there for our clients or whatever it might be, that doesn't align up with our values. But also the second thing to this is not only an internal thing, it's also the clients that we want to work with. If you look at the clients that you've got, and I'm sure you've all got clients that you want to sack because they're just noisy and not profitable and they're just the pain. They probably don't line up to your values. They don't get tech, they don't get it the way that you get it. And what will happen by doing this exercise is people will all of a sudden start to see how you then become a bigger business, how you become a serious business, because this sort of thing is really important.