Solving IT skills shortage one MSP at a time. James talks with CRN

I had a great conversation with Chris Player of CRN on the evolution Benchmark 365. Looking back it's been quite the ride and we have learned so much. Take a look at the article here. Here are few of the key points:

• The initial insight that birthed Benchmark 365 was that MSPs are inherently quite difficult to scale. There's a few reasons for that, but the main one is that labour is quite expensive. Customers are not willing to pay more for service, despite rising costs.

• Benchmark 365 allows MSPs to tap into our support capacity and only pay for what they consume - anything from a group of people answering the telephone 24 hours a day and logging tickets, all the way up to level three or even level four technical service.

• Calibrating the expected service level requirements for a global market was one of our biggest learnings. So we threw more people at the front end. We added free software solutions to help accelerate the process and automated some functions.

• The managed services industry is actually a labor business. Yes, there are RMM tools that can help automate. But at the end of the day, if Karen's printer is not working, Karen's printer is not working. There's no automation for that, someone has to find out what model, what trays it's supposed to be printing to, whether it is connected by USB or by WiFi.

• So we've actually found employing people, and optimizing how those people work is actually what MSPs need today.

• We help MSPs focus on the things that are important and laser focus on the problem that the client has got and who is supporting that.