Pumpkin Plan Your MSP – The Growth Strategy You Can’t Afford to Miss!

In our 38 years of growing our seven figure MSP from the ground up, we’ve seen a lot of strategies come and go.

Today, we’re sharing a game-changing approach that really helped us to grow our 7 figure MSP with cloud and avoid the usual bumps in the road: the Pumpkin Plan method by Mike Michalowicz!

Have you ever wondered how the world’s top pumpkin growers create those giant prizewinning pumpkins? Funnily enough, the same principles of growing those giant prizewinning pumpkins can be applied to growing your MSP.

If you haven’t read the book The Pumpkin Plan by Mike Michalowicz, that’s what this is based on. It’s a roadmap for focusing on what’s important to grow a healthy, thriving business just like those pumpkin farmers!

If you’ve been feeling stuck or spread too thin, or you’re spinning your wheels trying to serve every customer that walks through the door, this blog is for you. Let’s get started!

Why do you want a pumpkin plan?

The Pumpkin Plan is all about shifting your mindset to focus on your most valuable customers and really getting rid of the ones who aren’t a good fit for your MSP.

Think of your clients like a pumpkin patch: you can grow a lot of mediocre pumpkins, or you can focus on the biggest, healthiest pumpkins and help them to grow. That brings us to step one: identifying the biggest pumpkins in your client base!

1.      Identify your best customers

Not every client is a good client. I’m sure you had several clients pop in your head as soon as your read that!

When you first started out growing your MSP from scratch, there’s a good chance you primarily looked for new revenue and business. It’s what happened to us! You take on any customer that is willing to give you money, but then you start to realize that some of these clients just aren’t the right fit.

As an example, we gave one of these clients a proposal for a service that we knew that they needed. It wasn’t fluff, but rather something that would add real value to their business! However, the client would either not do it, bicker about how much it cost, or question everything relentlessly.

This creates a lot of problems for your MSP when you’re stuck in a seemingly endless loop of quoting and spinning your wheels with troublesome clients!

So, who are your top clients? They’re the ones who truly value your services and are willing to pay for them: the opposite of the clients we detailed above.

“Top clients” doesn’t mean that they’re the clients generating the most revenue for your MSP. You can’t just look at MRR! Your giant pumpkins are customers that are easy to work with, trust you, and pay on time. That’s really what you’re looking for!

As the famous 80/20 rule says, 80% of your revenue is likely coming from 20% of your customers (in this case, your giant pumpkins). And as you know, dollars coming in doesn’t mean you’re really making money on all your “top” customers…

Once you locate and start focusing on your top customers, you’re really going to notice a change!

2.      Weed out the bad customers

Now that you’ve identified your best customers, it’s time to let go of those that don’t fit. Remember the unideal clients we mentioned earlier?

Turning away business is scary! However, letting go of customers that are dragging your MSP down will pay dividends in the long run.

I still remember when we let go of our number one dollar generating customer. It was one of the most difficult things we have had to do, but they just would not listen to us! We kept holding on because we felt like we needed their business, but we were still losing money despite the amount they were bringing in.

After we let them go, it was amazing how fast our MSP grew! Our technicians were able to focus on our highest value customers, our customer service improved, and profit started trending in the right direction.

As an MSP with a cloud focus, we started to weed out customers that would refuse to migrate to the cloud. This really helped us streamline our client base and build our business around cloud! The reality was that the customers that weren’t going to move to the cloud were never going to move to the cloud, so we had to rip the band-aid off and let them go.

3.      Systemize your services

When a pumpkin farmer waters and tends to their prize winning pumpkins, they grow. They understand that they aren’t just going to grow by themselves!

The third step of the Pumpkin Plan is to create processes that ensure that you are delivering top notch service to your top customers and really taking care of them. You want them to feel like they are your only customer!

One of the things that we did to really systemize our services is that we created SOPs, or standard operating procedures, for everything. We standardized what we did so that all of our technicians always did the same things for our customers. Priority #1 was to make sure that work got done the way it needed to get done consistently!

Your clients notice when they see consistently good service and consistently have their systems up and running.

Time to start pumpkin planning!

Pumpkin planning your MSP is all about working smarter and not harder and focusing on what matters most, which is your best customers.

If you’re overwhelmed, just remember that you don’t have to get rid of all your bad customers at the same time: just start pruning the vines! Step by step implementation will pay off.

I think you’re going to be amazed at what this method will do for your MSP, just as we were all those years ago!

Today I’m going to leave you with a quote from John D Rockefeller: “Don’t be afraid to give up the good to go for the great.” 

Have a great rest of your week!