MSP clients Minimum qualifying systems/seats for onboarding

Hello,

I am new here and first time posting a MSP thread. I have been in the IT side for awhile but want to expand to prospect and offer MSP services to clients.

I like Tom’s business model and we have a lot of small to mid size businesses in the area that could benefit from MSP services. I’ve read some documents online through some people on the MSP side of things saying you should not onboard clients unless a minimum number of PC’s/servers is reached. Basically saying if you are on boarding like small insurance offices, retail, or restaurants with maybe 5-10 computers on premise that it’s not worth your time and you should seek a minimum of 25 seats. While the business case is sound for this, I feel like it could also be profitable to onboard some of these smaller businesses since their overall requirements are low and may take less/no time to support. I can see that these clients would be less demanding then some mid size clients who achieve the 25 seat threshold.

I was wondering your thoughts on this and what your qualifying criteria is for on boarding a customer. I’m trying to flesh out an offering and need advise.

Although my company’s clients are mostly >25 seats/client we have several clients that are small <10 people shops. We don’t really have a minimum quote but we do make a fair amount of our income on the infrastructure side of things so this may be different for you if you’re just doing desktop management.

We don’t mind the less than 10 seat clients. Once they are a client all the computers are just part of the collective in our systems as we are not thinking about things on per client basis. They almost all run Windows whether they have 3 workstations or 300 which means they all need the same updates, run the same stack, same browser, etc,etc…

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Thanks @DroppedConnection and Thank You @LTS_Tom for clarifying this. In my market we have a lot of small business and I was doing the numbers and it made sense to sign on or seek these small amount of workstation clients. As Tom put so clearly on his post. Everything will run the same stack so by numbers game it doesn’t really matter how many clients you have as it’s same level of support for each if I have 5 clients with 25 seats or 1 client with 25 seats. This is much more clear to me.

I want to sell a mix or project consulting, break fix and MSP work. It makes sense to do a project and then offer MSP as an option for long term support. Several of these businesses are multi location as well which makes more sense to them.

I started to doubt myself because I saw a “MSP Consultant” do a talk on youtube basically stating that less the 25 seats for an MSP is basically suicide that techs would burn out on the amount of support. However, I didn’t fully subscribe or agree to this point of view. this gives me a direction to go forward with now. Cheers.

How much support that is needed varies greatly on a per client basis. Clients big or small can quickly become a nightmare of “I just have one more question” combined with companies the are at some level of chaos internally. it’s something I think about on a per client basis and will change how we handle to choose not to handle that client.