The MSP BCDR Profit Playbook
Uncovering 5 Secrets to MSP BCDR Profit Margin Growth
In the competitive world of the channel, maximizing margins isn’t just about cutting costs – it’s about intelligent strategies that drive consistent profit growth. This MSP-specific guide outlines the steps needed to transform your MSP business into a profit powerhouse.
The Axcient team wrote the eBook on strategies for better BCDR margins that walks you through five actionable strategies to boost margins while delivering exceptional client value. We start by delving into the art of bundling managed services, increasing client revenue, and simplifying your business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) offerings for greater appeal. Next, we explore how to right-size infrastructures from the start, ensuring you’re not overinvesting in unnecessary resources or underprepared for client needs.
We also show MSPs how to sell the value of vendors, turning partnerships into profit by effectively communicating the benefits of your chosen security solutions. Highlighting and educating clients about product upgrades is another key strategy, helping you stay proactive in offering clients the latest tools and features they need for business continuity and competitive edge. Finally, we’ll cover how to enable cross-team collaboration to streamline operations, reduce inefficiencies, and create a more cohesive, profit-driven MSP.
Get ready to unlock the full potential of your MSP business with these five proven strategies:
- Explore proven strategies that successful MSPs use to optimize operations, streamline service delivery, and boost profitability.
- See how refining service offerings and leveraging strategic vendor partnerships allow you to elevate margins and secure long-term growth in a dynamic market.
- Use the free guides to implement these strategies for seamless integration and maximum results.
- Test your BCDR margins with the companion checklist quiz to see how well you are currently maximizing your margins with BCDR services.
1. Bundle Managed Services
High-performing MSPs with healthy BCDR profit margins enhance business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) by consolidating and standardizing their services with a comprehensive solution from a single vendor. By streamlining vendor systems and reducing technical and = administrative complexities, MSPs can lower overhead costs, speed up recovery processes, provide consistent data protection across all clients, and inherently expand margins. Thoughtfully planning your bundled services can drive business growth, increase profitability, and reinforce compliance with service level agreements (SLAs).
- Develop Core Service Bundles: Set minimum security standards that apply to all clients, ensuring every client receives a baseline level of BCDR protection, regardless of their unique needs
- Customize Bundles Based on Specific Needs: Build on established minimum-security standards by tailoring service bundles to different use cases by considering factors like demographics, environment, compliance, reporting, and SLA obligations.
- Evaluate Your Technology Stack: Analyze the real and total cost of your BCDR services, including appliance management, vendor diversity, administrative overhead, support, and troubleshooting, to identify barriers to profitability, particularly those arising from managing multiple vendors and solutions.
- Simplify with a Single Vendor Solution: Consolidate efficiently on a vendor and solution that can address the broadest range of BCDR needs with minimal effort, labor, and overhead and ensure your chosen vendor is reliable, experienced, and continuously improving products and services, and offers 24/7/365 support for quick disaster recovery with minimal downtime.
- Sell Your BCDR Expertise: Highlight your experience and track record as an established MSP to build trust with clients, using your bundled services to transparently educate clients on today’s risk factors and how bundled services accelerate recovery – all while benefiting from a clean stack with minimal BCDR management and better BCDR profit margins.
2. Right Size Client Infrastructure
Client infrastructures must be assessed and designed before moving into a consolidated stack. This proactive step is crucial for MSPs to enhance margin growth while ensuring optimal disaster recovery (DR) and incident response (IR) capabilities. MSPs need to know where clients stand in their cyber resilience before taking them on as clients. For example, are they willing to accept your minimum security standards? If a client pushes back due to budget concerns or fears that you’re overselling, they may not understand today’s threat vectors, which can cause clients to seek DR loopholes in the future. Not only do these SMBs put your business reputation at risk, but they will inevitably incur high recovery costs that significantly damage margins when the worst happens – and based on statistics, it will.
Luckily, it can be simple to right-size client infrastructures before establishing new architecture – you just need to know where the client is now.
- Content Assessments and Testing: Perform full-office IR and DR testing at onboarding and analyze results to identify and recommend the ideal infrastructure, preventing costly recovery problems in the future.
- Gauge Client Pain Threshold: Understand the client’s tolerance for disruption during testing to tailor recommendations accordingly. Recovery time objective (RTO) planning is crucial for informing BCDR solution choices and deployment decisions. Knowing the cost of downtime for clients is critical for determining what kind of investment in BDR makes sense for their business. With the right RTO and a consolidated solution, MSPs quickly complete recovery processes with fewer resources to increase margins and profitability.
- Select Equipment Aligned with SLAs: Ensure the infrastructure can meet SLAs efficiently. For example, opt for 2-terabyte volumes instead of one 4-terabyte server to optimize recovery times and costs. Or choose an appliance-agnostic vendor that allows you to reduce client costs by repurposing existing hardware. Regardless of the choice, be sure your solution and vendor support your ability to meet competitive SLAs for an edge in the market.
3. Sell Your Vendors
MSPs are only as strong as their weakest vendor because vendor decisions reflect MSP values. For instance, if you’re taking a security-first approach to BCDR, you’ve probably chosen an MSP-focused vendor whose solutions are created for SMB data protection with custom features, tools, and capabilities. On the other hand, if you haven’t entirely consolidated, vendors in your stack may be less aligned with your intentions and expectations. One is a selling point, while the other is often disguised by MSPs hoping to avoid uncomfortable quality conversations with savvy SMBs.
Partnering with a solid, qualified, and reputable BCDR vendor not only centralizes cybersecurity for streamlined operations—and thus expands margins—but also creates many sales and messaging opportunities. Build on your vendors’ accomplishments and enablement as extensions of your team and commitment to keeping businesses running. For example, if you were using Axcient x360Recover for BCDR, campaigns could include the following:
- Rapid Recovery and Limited Downtime During Disasters: Virtual Office for instant cloud failover lets your MSP self-manage DR so that one or more systems can temporarily virtualize in the cloud to replace all impacted production infrastructure for business availability.
- Automatic Ransomware Protection: AirGap anti-ransomware and data loss technology separates data deletion requests from deletion mechanics to prevent malicious or accidental deletion while ensuring near-instant recovery.
- Provable DR Readiness for Peace of Mind: Automate DR testing and demonstrate recovery capabilities with generated results and reporting to sleep soundly at night.
- SMB Solutions for SMB Cyber Threats: BCDR tools are tailor-made exclusively to support SMB data protection, business continuity, and cybersecurity risks – using automation, integration, and a security-first approach.
4. Always Mention the Upgrades
Another way to leverage what you already have is to ensure clients know everything behind the scenes, including updates and upgrades to products, services, and support. While these are usually things that happen anyway, often because of vendors, they add value to your relationship with clients, and that level of trust pads margins. Reinforce your client’s decision to partner with your MSP by highlighting your consistent commitment to enhancing data protection, and this can add to your BCDR profit margin by boosting your overall sales and stickiness.
- Partner with a “busy” vendor who gives you something to talk about. For example, Axcient regularly updates and upgrades x360Recover for BCDR by adding cost-saving capabilities to the single, all-in-one platform. Recently, x360Recover expanded with Local Cache, Geo+, public APIs, Linux and macOS support, and Direct-to-Cloud (D2C) deployment for Microsoft Azure. Fulfilling all those use cases with one solution dramatically adds value for clients while significantly enhancing margin growth with BCDR simplicity.
- Announce hardware updates loud and proud with a regularly updated list of aging hardware and software to address increasing vulnerabilities before disaster strikes.
- Provide post-sale technical support during onboarding and beyond using on-demand training to ensure clients can access new and updated features as they become available or new hires join technical teams.
- Publish new case studies that illustrate how your services saved the day, prevented a crisis, or met clients’ unique needs to give clients and prospects a sneak peek into how you deliver on promises.
- Cultivate client reviews to let your SMB clients sing your MSP’s praises to other SMBs.
- Conduct quarterly business reviews (QBRs) to discuss your client’s current and future business state using the materials above to introduce new features, expand on upcoming improvements, identify potential vulnerabilities, and mitigate issues.
5. Enable Cross-Team Collaboration
MSPs are typically SMBs themselves, but you don’t need big teams to benefit from collaboration across your MSP. With that said, enabling communication, even amongst small teams, can be a tremendous efficiency, cost-saving, and labor-saving method for margin growth. MSPs often have leadership, technical, and sales teams, as well as sales and marketing support. The key to achieving cost-efficiency is connecting these roles with a top-down strategy that flows both ways.
Marketing
- Creates and embeds an overall communication strategy to drive KPIs through sales and marketing efforts.
- Designs marketing packages to outline product information and sales messaging for sales teams.
- Optimizes sales and marketing efforts based on new product information and feedback from sales teams.
Leadership
- Sets the high-level goals and key performance indicators (KPIs) that will demonstrate strategic
effectiveness in delivering BCDR to clients. - Selects the vendor and BCDR solution with the input of technical leadership.
Sales
- Educates, informs and interacts face-to-face with potential and current clients to sell services.
- Provides client feedback to technical teams for service improvement and new feature requests
to vendors. - Relies on marketing support for collateral, call scripts, and email campaigns to reach clients.
Technical
- Manages and supports the technical solutions implemented through your vendor using the KPIs set by leadership for guidance.
- Responsible for educating marketing support to ensure messaging and use cases are discussed accurately at and leading up to the time of launch.
- Leverages feedback from sales and marketing heard in direct conversations, through email, and on social media.
Strategize Margin Growth with Axcient
Axcient is an MSP-only solution provider fueling both cybersecurity resilience and business success for MSPs. Focused exclusively on the channel, Axcient x360Recover for BCDR delivers best-in-class, always-on features and critical capabilities that reflect data security best practices. Leveraging innovative automation on a consolidated platform not only streamlines operations for reduced overhead but also reduces labor-intensive, expensive, and error-prone manual tasks for better BCDR profit margins.
While many vendors nickel and dime MSPs, treating “must haves” as “nice to haves” for a higher price, Axcient treats “must haves” like “must haves” and automatically includes them embedded into each product. With everything you need to expand margins at your fingertips, Axcient MSPs are seeing dramatic lifts without forcing higher client prices. This adds a competitive edge to MSPs as SMBs compare capabilities and costs across the market.
Margin growth in 1, 2, 3…as easy as A, B, C:
- All-in-One Deployment Flexibility: Choose cloud, appliance, or hybrid-based deployments using one or a combination of capabilities, including turnkey BDR, hardware-free, private cloud, or public cloud like Microsoft Azure. Use x360Recover Direct-to-Cloud for Microsoft Azure to deploy straight to the cloud and eliminate the extra step of deploying on-prem first.
- Built-in, Best-in-Class Security: Enjoy automatic backup integrity testing (AutoVerify), near-instant cloud failover and virtualization (Virtual Office), anti-data deletion and ransomware technology (AirGap), < 1 hour RTO, minutes-long RPO, and 24/7/365 support – all included and on-by-default as part of your Axcient partnership.
- Consistent Product and Service Updates: See what we’ve done recently and what’s coming next on our roadmap of improvements – including public API integrations, a new interactive classification menu for protected systems, and an updated Axcient Marketing Portal to expand your sales and marketing efforts further.
Next Steps for BCDR Profit Margin Magic
Implementing the strategies outlined in this eBook will position your MSP for sustainable growth and maximum profitability as you navigate the evolving landscape of managed services. By focusing on service bundling, infrastructure size, already-there sales techniques, and collaboration, you can streamline your operations, reduce costs, and deliver exceptional value to your clients. Remember, expanding your margins isn’t just about cutting expenses – it’s about smartly enhancing your services while optimizing your internal processes. Applying these strategies will boost your bottom line and build stronger, more resilient client relationships that drive long-term success.
The journey to higher margins is continuous, requiring ongoing adaptation and innovation. With the insights and approaches provided in this eBook, you’re well-equipped to thrive in a competitive market and ensure your MSP remains profitable and ready for the future.
Download the companion checklist quiz to see how well you are currently maximizing
your margins with BCDR services.
>>Take the MSP BCDR Profit Margins Quiz
Additional Resources
- Case Study | Cygnus Systems Saves $12,000 Over Datto Every Month with Axcient
- eBook | BCDR Consolidation Guide for MSPs: When to Think Cloud-First
- eBook | BCDR Buyer’s Guide: How to Choose the Best BCDR Solution for Your MSP
- Whitepaper | Reference Architecture Overview for MSPs
See how Axcient can help put these strategies into action:
Schedule a 1-on-1 Demo or start a no-cost 30 day trial
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