I think your experience is universal. Big customers call the shots so a standard monitoring plan may not get you to first base. A successful enterpise strategy is typically targeted at solving problems for which they do not have the skills. So this could be monitoring and management of their IP telephony, email, security, etc. A lot of our partners are actually selling the entire platform to the larger end customer for their internal use but bundling this with a specialized monitoring and management service package – a great way to make a lot of money while building a deeper customer relationship by delivering solutions that meet their needs. Would this kind of strategy be useful way for you to differentiate your services and target these larger businesses?

If remote monitoring and management means that you essentially don’t need to go on site except for hardware and customer relations (which I and most others I know believe to be true), then the entire issue of physical proximity to your customers becomes less important and maybe not even relevant at all. One of our partners is managing the IT for a customer’s small overseas offices in several countries and many are narrowing their focus to vertical and horizontal niches on a regional or national level, outsourcing the small amount of off site work to sub contractors. The only remaining issue is customer management so the key question is whether you need to be face to face with your end customer. I think the jury is out on this one and ulitmately it depends on your business model.

To answer your question any small service provider should be able to dramatically extend their range. The math is fairly simple. If you used to visit a customer once a week and now you only go once a month to discuss customer priorities and opportunities, all of which can be tightly scheduled, you should be able to factor this into a cost model, pick a niche where you have a competitive advantage and start to grow your business competing based on strategic business focus rather than on customers within a 30 minute radius of your office.

I wonder if you can tell me if MSPs are increasing their geographic footprint compared to resellers.

Do you have any data indicating how many the total miles a typical small business MSP serves? I ask because I’m trying to determine how much additional reach, if any, my business can gain through remote services. Thank you for your consideration.