A TECH OWNER S GUIDE TO PROFITABILITY

Transcription

1 A TECH OWNER S GUIDE TO PROFITABILITY

2 Profitability. It makes the difference between loving your technology business and struggling through sleepless nights. You started your business to provide valuable technology services to clients. But business ownership comes with unanticipated management challenges. Has your business provided you with financial freedom? Or does it feel more like an anchor of anxiety? We understand; we ve been there, too. ConnectWise started as a technology services business more than 20 years ago, and experienced the same challenges as we searched for the fastest path to profitability. So have thousands of our successful ConnectWise partners. In The A Tech Owner s Guide to Profitability, we ll distill the business profitability lessons we ve learned and share best practices that will help you take control of billable hours, pricing, and cash flow the three pillars of an efficient and profitable services business. This guide was designed for you. Jump to a section that describes your current challenge, or read the entire guide from cover to cover. Part 1: Capture and Track All of Your Billable Time Part 2: Choose the Right Pricing Strategy for Your Business Part 3: Understand Your Company s Cash Flow

3 Part 1: Capture and Track All of Your Billable Time Back to Navigation

4 Capture and Track All of Your Billable Time Time is money in the technology services industry. Your first order of business is making sure your hourglass doesn t spring a leak. Billable minutes or hours slipping through the cracks is the most common cause of lost profitability. Time (along with expertise) is what you sell, and it is a perishable commodity. When technicians don t account well for time and billable hours are lost, it lowers your profitability just like when a retail store loses its inventory. Accurately capturing billable time is one of the biggest struggles for service providers. The good news is that there are proven methods for overcoming this critical challenge. We captured five hours of additional billable time per engineer when we implemented ConnectWise, so the ROI was immediate. -MICHAEL COOPERSMITH, PRESIDENT, INTEGRATED TECHNOLOGY SYSTEM NYC LLC A Tech Owner s Guide to Profitability : Part 1 - Capture and Track All of Your Billable Time

5 Measure and Monitor Employee Utilization Rates Employee utilization refers to the time your staff spends working on tasks that can be billed to a client. Low utilization destroys profitability. You re paying employees, but they aren t generating enough billable hours. So, clients aren t paying you. Most technology services businesses average 50-60% employee utilization. Best of breed service providers average 80% or more. To measure your company s current utilization rate, review the billings for each employee over the previous year. How many billable hours total did the employee generate? Then divide this total by 2,080 hours for a full-time employee (one work year equals 40 hours times 52 weeks). Employee payroll is the largest expense on your P&L report. If your annual payroll is $500,000, then every extra 10% of employee utilization you can achieve is worth $50,000. Over time, utilization can easily make the difference between profitability and insolvency. ConnectWise partners routinely benefit from utilization rates of 80% or greater; some exceed 90%! Here s a good rule of thumb for utilization: Employees should generate billings worth at least 2.5 times what you re paying them. Use the chart to determine the hourly rate you would need to charge based on each technician s current salary and utilization rate. TIP: Make utilization rates part of your regular discussions with employees. Generate a utilization goal for each employee, and make it part of the annual review process. Give staff bonuses for reaching billable-hour milestones. W2 of Professional (per year) $30K $35K $40K $45K $50K $60K $70K $75K $80K $90K $95K $100K 50% $85 $99 $113 $127 $141 $170 $198 $212 $226 $255 $269 $283 Utilization 60% 70% 80% 90% 100% 105% 110% $71 $82 $94 $106 $118 $141 $165 $177 $189 $212 $224 $236 $61 $71 $81 $91 $101 $121 $141 $152 $162 $182 $192 $202 $53 $62 $71 $80 $88 $106 $124 $133 $141 $159 $168 $177 $47 $55 $63 $71 $79 $94 $110 $118 $126 $141 $149 $157 $42 $49 $57 $64 $71 $85 $99 $106 $113 $127 $134 $141 $40 $47 $54 $61 $67 $81 $94 $101 $108 $121 $128 $135 $39 $45 $51 $58 $64 $77 $90 $96 $103 $116 $122 $129 Let s say your employee earns $50,000/year at a utilization rate of 70% - you would want them to bill at a rate of at least $101 per hour. By increasing the utilization rate of that same employee by just 10%, you would bring an additional $13 in profit per hour from that tech. That s almost $24,000 per year per tech in found profit! A Tech Owner s Guide to Profitability : Part 1 - Capture and Track All of Your Billable Time

6 Tips for Improving Employee Utilization Rates Use a Timekeeping System to Account for 40 Hours Per Week Your full-time technicians need to account for eight hours of their time, five days each week. Jotting notes on paper is unlikely to create a full accounting. Likewise, it s impossible to remember everything worked on at the end of the week. Implement an automated timekeeping system and require staff to document time spent as soon as jobs are completed. This will allow you to see where gaps exist in the process and gain visibility into how much time techs are realistically spending on each job. Start Their Day at the First Client s Site The morning commute could be costing you a fortune. If field service techs come to the office first, then the drive to the first client engagement is on the clock, taking time out of your tech s busy schedule. Instead, start off in billable mode; have field techs skip the commute into the office and drive straight to the first client site on their daily schedule. If the work day starts at 8:00 a.m., techs should arrive at the client s office at 8:00 a.m. You can still bill the client for travel time, but now your tech is ready to start as soon as the work day begins. Finish All Paperwork and Document Time at the Time of Service Techs may be tempted to finish one job and move directly to the next. Require them to finish notes and document their time as soon as they complete service, whether that is at the office or at the client s site. Most techs underestimate how long they worked with a client if they wait to record time back at the office or at the end of the week. By having techs finish paperwork at the time of service, you can ensure thorough documentation and accurate timekeeping for accurate, detailed client billing. Have Techs Check Their Schedules Before Returning to the Office Techs in the field should phone home or check their schedule on their mobile devices between every service appointment and before they return to the office at the end of their schedule. This allows your dispatcher to remain more agile and free to reprioritize clients and appointments if pressing needs arise. When you use a business management system like ConnectWise, techs can see real-time changes to their schedules in ConnectWise through the mobile app. The simple act of checking the schedule between appointments could add several billable hours by the end of the month and will also enable you to deliver more responsive client service. CONNECTWISE TIP: ConnectWise Mobile enables techs to document time against a ticket right on the app. Even if they re in an area with no service, the app stores the information, then syncs back with ConnectWise when they reconnect. A Tech Owner s Guide to Profitability : Part 1 - Capture and Track All of Your Billable Time

7 5 Best Practices to Stay Booked Up, Busy, and Billable To improve profitability, you need to get jobs in, assign them to techs, have billable time against the job tracked accurately, document that work, and then bill the customer. The following five best practices form a proven, expert system for increasing client service efficiency to improve profitability. 1 Everything is a Ticket In technology services, accountability is the biggest part of exceptional customer service. Clients hold you accountable to make sure that their requests are handled properly, based on the expectations that were set at the beginning of your relationship. You need to have a system in place to track every incoming client issue and ensure that each item is resolved. Whenever a need arises, be it a client request, incident, or problem, an automated ticket should be created to steer the work. Tickets ensure nothing slips through the cracks. When every issue becomes a ticket, you don t have to worry that a client request will get lost or stuck in an employee s inbox. Never give in to the temptation to just make a quick phone call to the client without a ticket. 2 All Roads Lead to Rome Think of your service boards as Rome. Every ticket should end up here, regardless of how the request came in , phone, chat, or customer portal. Use a dispatcher to get fully booked up. If you re not billing a client for this hour, you re paying the bill yourself. Don t leave techs to self-select the tickets they work on. Instead, give a dispatcher responsibility for prioritizing tickets on the service board and assigning them out until all techs are fully booked up. CONNECTWISE TIP: The ConnectWise Connector can generate service tickets in ConnectWise directly from incoming client s. Set up a dedicated address for client requests, and teach clients to send new issues to that address. A Tech Owner s Guide to Profitability : Part 1 - Capture and Track All of Your Billable Time

8 3 Paint Tomorrow Green Plan each tech s schedule to ensure a profitable day. Color code schedules so that you can see overall utilization for each day. Once a tech has enough work scheduled to achieve 80% or greater utilization, consider that day painted green it s a go! Create tomorrow s schedule today. Complete a schedule for the next day s work for every tech before the end of the day, so techs can get started first thing in the morning. Field techs should be able to access schedules, tickets, contacts, and client configurations on their mobile devices. Leave a little room for extra work. Have your dispatcher schedule a little extra time for on-site client appointments. If the client has extra items they want addressed, your tech will have time to open a new ticket for each issue, and then complete the tasks and the paperwork. 4 My Life is My Schedule Techs should live by their schedules every day. If it s not on the schedule, they don t pursue it. Schedules keep techs accountable for their time. When they live by their calendars, your business will be able to maximize employee utilization. The goal for techs is to capture all of their time for accurate client billing and internal reporting. 5 Enter All Time, All of the Time, and on Time Whether in the field or in the office, employees should document all of their time, in real time, on everything they work. All too often, employees to try to recollect their time at the end of the week or even at the end of the day. Eliminate the reliance on memory. With a centralized ticketing system, they can do this as they document notes on the ticket. Actual time should be logged, without rounding. Accounting for time at the time of service will result in accuracy you can count on. A Tech Owner s Guide to Profitability : Part 1 - Capture and Track All of Your Billable Time

9 Does this sound familiar? Capturing and tracking all of your billable time is absolutely essential to managing a profitable technology services business. Get paid for all of the work that you and your staff accomplish. Your time is a very valuable and extremely limited commodity, so account for every bit of it. This is much easier to do if you have a centralized ticketing and service dispatch system, like ConnectWise, along with defined business processes that require techs to document and account for all of their time, at the time of service. We were losing probably 15% of just straight time because people were unaware of how they were spending time and weren t tracking it daily. -JASON LENARDSON, COO, WINXNET Watch the video to see how Jason and other ConnectWise partners increased billing with ConnectWise. A Tech Owner s Guide to Profitability : Part 1 - Capture and Track All of Your Billable Time

10 Part 2: Choose the Right Pricing Strategy Back to Navigation

11 Choose the Right Pricing Strategy Choosing the right pricing strategy plays an important role in improving profitability. The right price should cover all of your costs, provide a reasonable margin of profit, and convey a premium for the perceived value of your services. Come in too low, and your business will struggle to achieve profitability. Too high, and you ll lose customers and opportunities to competitors. You never get a second chance to make a first impression with a new prospect, so come in with the right pricing. In technology services businesses, setting pricing can be especially challenging. When starting a business, it s not unusual to win the first few clients by underpricing local competitors. But business owners should be careful not to get stuck in that mode for too long. A Tech Owner s Guide to Profitability: Part 2: Choose the Right Pricing Strategy

12 Conduct Pricing Research When trying to determine the right strategy for pricing your services, you ll want to conduct as much research as possible. Here are some suggestions to get you started. Scope Out Your Competition As a general practice, you should avoid competing solely based on price. However, you need to have awareness of your competitors pricing strategies and allow that information to inform your pricing decisions to some degree. If your business is just starting, if you are introducing new services, or if you are making a switch from a break/fix business model to managed services, competitor pricing can give you a starting point for determining what your product or service may be worth to your market. You ll also want to periodically check your competition for pricing changes. Don t enter a price war, but keep an eye on how far apart or different your pricing is from your primary competitor s. If your pricing is significantly higher, you need to ask yourself if the value your customers receive is worth the higher price point. Evaluate Your Current Agreements To build out your future pricing strategy, start by analyzing your agreements with existing customers. Understand your costs in fulfilling each current agreement. Which agreements result in a profit? Which result in the most profit? A business management platform like ConnectWise, with automated agreements functionality, makes it much easier to perform this analysis. ConnectWise automates the collection of time, expenses, and products for invoicing, so you can access all of this information instantly. When reviewing your recurring revenue agreements for managed services, you ll want to keep a close eye on two metrics: gross margin and effective rate. Each of these metrics yields important insights for making business decisions when you conduct periodical business reviews. A Tech Owner s Guide to Profitability: Part 2: Choose the Right Pricing Strategy

13 Two Metrics to Measure Gross Profit Margin: The difference between your total revenue and the cost you incur to deliver your products and services is known as your gross profit margin. To calculate gross margin, add up all of your revenue and then subtract your Cost of Goods Sold (COGS). For a service business, COGS should include your labor costs as well as any hardware or software. This provides you with gross profit. To calculate your gross profit margin, simply divide gross profit by total revenue and express it as a percentage. Gross margin is good way to compare how your business is doing versus your industry, or to compare the financial performance of your business over time. Listen to Your Market Don t rely solely on your past experiences with your own customers to guide your decisions. Listen to what the market is telling you. What technology, demographic, and other trends are going to drive what s in demand in the future? By keeping your ear to the ground, you can pick up a lot about potential disruptors on the horizon and improve the competitiveness of your future service offerings and agreements. Effective Rate: The average rate your business actually earns for a billable hour for any given agreement is known as your effective rate. To analyze a particular client agreement for effective rate, simply divide the amount invoiced by the total number of hours spent on that client for the invoiced period. For example, if you bill $1,000 and spend 10 hours on the client, the effective rate is $100 per hour. Use your most profitable agreements as a guide to develop your future pricing strategy. Define your value in a way that supports the pricing found in this type of profitable agreement. Constantly review this measurement against your current business conditions, and choose what service packages to offer based on your costs and profitability. The agreements part of ConnectWise really allows us to track what goes into an agreement as far as our service, our cost, and equipment, so that we can see at the end of the year or a couple-year timeframe how profitable we really are on that agreement. -AARON HAMP, OWNER, INC SYSTEMS AND POS OF MICHIGAN A Tech Owner s Guide to Profitability: Part 2: Choose the Right Pricing Strategy

14 Decide Between Value-Based and Cost-Based Pricing Cost-Based Pricing Cost-based pricing is easy to understand. You figure out what it costs your business to deliver goods or services, and then tack on a profit margin. Voila! You ve arrived at your pricing. It s relatively simple and it seems fair. But this pricing strategy actually has serious drawbacks, as we ll see in a moment. Fixed Versus Variable Costs It s important to know where your revenue is going, so you can create a successful pricing strategy. Each of your company s expenses fall into two categories: fixed or variable costs. Variable costs vary with output; as sales go up, so do the variable costs associated with output. An example of a variable cost is a sales commission. Fixed costs, such as office rent, do not change if your sales increase or decrease. You ll need to consider both types of costs when you set your cost-plus pricing. To distinguish a variable cost from a fixed cost, ask yourself this question: Does this cost vary with my level of production? If you answered yes, it is a variable cost. If you answered no, it is a fixed cost. Once you know your variable and fixed costs, you are ready for a break-even analysis: Units Sold = Fixed Cost / (Price - Variable Costs) With this simple formula, you are able to determine a price point fit to your expected level of output. The Problem with Cost-Based Pricing The downside to cost-based pricing is that customers don t care about your profit margin, and if you only compete on price, you ve encouraged them to shop around. What if some of your competitors control costs better? Or receive larger volume discounts? Cost-based pricing quickly leads to the commoditization of your services and products. In order to remain competitive, you eventually resort to lowering prices the only way you can by shrinking your profit margin. Cost-based pricing wars can spiral down into a race to the bottom. Don t become a commodity. Differentiate your business by emphasizing what s unique about your capabilities and expertise. If you sell on value, you ll make much more in the long run. TIP: Painful business challenges are what drive prospects to consider your technology services. Show prospects how your solution overcomes their pain, and don t sell yourself short by cutting your price when customers find value in your services. A Tech Owner s Guide to Profitability: Part 2: Choose the Right Pricing Strategy

15 Value-Based Pricing In today s competitive environment, a value-based pricing strategy produces greater long-term results. Value speaks to something you bring to the table that no one else can, or the pain relief or cost savings a customer enjoys as a result of employing your service. What makes your company different than other technology service businesses or more qualified than in-house IT departments? What s unique about your services? Do the products or services you deliver help your customers save time or money? Can you quantify that for them? Does your company help its customers gain a special advantage over their competitors? How to Find Your True Value It s still very important to understand your cost of doing business, so even if you choose to follow a value-based pricing model, it can be beneficial go through the exercise of determining the right cost-based pricing first. Then, follow these steps to discover your best value-based pricing. Create a list of value-based statements about your firm. Focus on outcomes. How does each value statement benefit each type of prospective customer? Once you ve distilled what you believe are the most important sources of value that your company delivers, run your list of value statements past some of your current customers. Use this value-based pricing research as an opportunity to have a conversation with customers and further develop their relationship with your company. You may learn things you didn t know about how your customers perceive the value of your services. Alternately, you can produce a quick online survey asking customers to rate your value statements on a 1-10 scale measuring both agreement with each statement and its importance to them. A Tech Owner s Guide to Profitability: Part 2: Choose the Right Pricing Strategy

16 Ways to Modify Price without Sacrificing Value The most important part of your sales process will be establishing your company s value proposition before presenting a proposal. But when it s time to negotiate pricing details for your new agreement, there are a variety of price modifiers you may want to use, depending on the products or services you re selling. Quantity Discount: When you discount for quantity, the goal is to increase volume. The more customers buy, the less they pay per unit, but the total value of the sale goes up. Settlement Discount: We all know getting customers to pay on time can be a challenge. A settlement discount adds an incentive a small percentage discount for paying early. The discount provides incentive that gets the money on your side of the table sooner, and that can help improve cash flow. Promotional Discount: If you re introducing a new service or starting a new business, you might want to offer a limited-time promotional discount to attract new customers. The promotional discount usually applies to a specific product for a specific period of time. Seasonal Discount: If your business carries inventory that is seasonally sensitive, a seasonal discount can be used to clear out this stock. For a technology business, an example of timesensitive inventory would be hardware or software in which the vendor plans to release a new version soon. Cash Rebate: A rebate occurs after the sale and can be a way to incentivize a customer taking up an agreement now, without lowering the stated price of your product or service. An example in technology services agreements might be offering a cash rebate when customers trade in used equipment during a network upgrade. Ranging Allowance: Give your sales team a range of discounts that they can offer to prospects at their discretion, in order to seal the deal. For example, you might tell sales professionals they are empowered to offer between 5% and 10% off without having to seek managerial approval. Promotional Allowance: Occasionally, hardware or software vendors will provide your company with an incentive (allowance) for participating in a promotional campaign designed to sell more of their products. You can use such an allowance to increase the profitability of your deals during the promotion, or to offer customers lower pricing, or a bit of both strategies. A Tech Owner s Guide to Profitability : Part 2: Choose the Right Pricing Strategy

17 Developing the right pricing strategy is a key ingredient to running a profitable technology services business. You provide important services for your clients services that solve painful problems for them and have great value. Conduct careful research into how your most profitable agreements have been structured, how your competitors are pricing services, and what the market is telling you about any future disruptors. Then, base your pricing on the value you provide rather than your costs to increase your profitability. When you and your clients agree that the price charged is a fair reflection of the value you provide, all parties will be highly satisfied. A Tech Owner s Guide to Profitability : Part 2: Choose the Right Pricing Strategy

18 Part 3: Understand Your Company s Cash Flow Back to Navigation

19 Understand Your Company s Cash Flow Many technology services entrepreneurs went into business for themselves because they had a special aptitude for and love of technology. If you didn t have a business management background, starting a business can mean a crash course in financial strategies. You ve probably heard it said that cash is king. Being a business owner requires careful management of cash flow. Your business must meet its obligations, from paying employees to keeping the lights on. You need your customers to pay so that you can pay others. Expenses cannot exceed revenues for long before your company is in trouble. Maintaining a positive cash flow can be particularly tricky in a declining economy. You may find clients are slower to pay and your invoices have a higher delinquency rate. Some customers might not pay at all. To manage these realities, business owners need to understand their operating cycle and what is coming in versus what is flowing out at all times. First, let s examine the operating cycle, and then we ll cover some ways to improve cash flow. A Tech Owner s Guide to Profitability : Part 3: Understand Your Company s Cash Flow

20 Understand Your Operating Cycle Cash enters and leaves a business on a fairly predictable cycle, known as your business operating cycle. Understanding each step in the operating cycle can help you manage your business more efficiently and avoid cash flow traps. OPERATING CYCLE FOR SERVICE COMPANIES An operating cycle is the average time taken, starting from cash and ending in cash. Put another way, it s the length of time that passes between when your company spends cash to serve its customers and when the business receives payments from customers for products and services. CASH IS ON HAND 1 Your operating cycle determines the amount of working capital your business needs to have on hand to operate. The shorter the operating cycle, the less cash you need to ensure continued operations. That leaves more cash to invest back into growing your business. Study your own operating cycle for insights all businesses have historical ebbs and flows. Once you understand these patterns and know why they occur, you can predict them better in the future. This puts you at an advantage for managing your cash flow proactively. 4 CUSTOMERS PAY FOR SERVICES 3 SERVICES SOLD TO CUSTOMERS CASH PAID TO EMPLOYEES 2 A Tech Owner s Guide to Profitability : Part 3: Understand Your Company s Cash Flow

21 Four Ways to Improve Cash Flow Once you understand the ebbs and flows of your business operating cycle, you can begin to anticipate cash flow crunches and become more proactive. To improve cash flow, you ll need to manage revenue into your business as well as expenses going out. One of the best ways to guard against poor cash flow is to negotiate good, mutually beneficial agreements with your customers, as we explored in the previous section about pricing strategies. If your prices are too low, it will hurt revenue. It s difficult to manage cash flow solely from the expense side. Here are four strategies you can implement to boost your company s cash flow: 1 Slash Expenses You gained visibility into both fixed and variable costs when you researched your pricing strategy. Knowing where you stand is half the battle of reducing expenses. Look at everything you re spending through a critical eye. From taxes to office supplies to payroll, find places to cut. For most service businesses, payroll is by far the largest expense. That s why improving employee utilization and adding automation can be key to unlocking additional revenue and reducing expense, as we discussed in section one. Identifying opportunities to reduce on-site work or manual processes can put money back to the bottom line immediately. Two examples of business process automation that can help contain expenses are business management remote monitoring and management (RMM) platforms. As a business management platform, ConnectWise helps technology services businesses automate from end-to-end, including service ticketing, dispatch, timekeeping, and billing. This kind of centralized automation ensures that all billable time is accounted for and nothing slips through the cracks. ConnectWise helps streamline businesses for maximum efficiency, so you can do more with the same amount of staff. Better employee utilization helps keep your payroll costs in check. With powerful remote monitoring and management, LabTech empowers technology services business to proactively monitor their clients networks without physically driving to the client sites. With LabTech, your techs can resolve issues and do preventative maintenance like software updates, without leaving their desks. LabTech also automates routine issue resolution, so you can bill clients for the value you provide whether a tech is directly involved or not. LabTech integrates with ConnectWise ticketing and invoicing, so it s easy to document even remote work performed for the clients. You might be able to reduce fixed costs by quoting out competitive offers for your company s phone, Internet, and other services. You may be able to negotiate a better real estate lease at renewal time, if your business is a good tenant with a record of on-time payment. Alternatively, you might want to seek a new location with smaller, less costly office space. A Tech Owner s Guide to Profitability : Part 3: Understand Your Company s Cash Flow

22 2 3 Seek Better Payment Terms Talk to your vendors, if possible, before you even have a cash flow problem. If you have excellent credit history with a vendor, it s perfectly reasonable to seek better terms like additional time to pay or a discount for paying early. You ll never know unless you ask. Get Tough About Receivables Delinquent invoices can quickly cause hiccups in your cash flow. The primary reason that clients pay late or refuse to pay is that they question the bill they ve received. The best way to combat this problem is to track time carefully and present detailed invoices listing all of the work performed. Be proactive about invoicing as soon as work is performed, particularly for your break/fix clients. Offer incentives for early payment. Accept credit cards and/or direct deposit wire transfers to provide your customers with fast and convenient payment options. Build the cost of early payment incentives or credit card fees into your pricing so getting paid doesn t reduce profitability. Incentives are the carrot, but you ll also need a stick. Make your team aware that work should not start on a new project for a client who has unpaid invoices. 4 Explore Financing Options If you ve cut expenses, negotiated with vendors, fine-tuned your pricing, and toughened up on receivables but cash flow is still short, consider looking for outside financing. A business credit card helps you establish credit history for your business. A credit card can enable you to pay vendors now while buying some time (short term) before the full amount has to come out of your company s coffers. Make sure the interest rate is low, or switch to a different card provider. If you foresee a need to access working capital longer term, consider approaching your bank for a loan. Be prepared to present a detailed business plan and excellent credit history. A Tech Owner s Guide to Profitability : Part 3: Understand Your Company s Cash Flow

23 Managing cash flow well is a hallmark of an experienced, confident business owner. Understanding the ebbs and flows of your business cycle will help you predict when cash flow may get tight and avoid common business pitfalls. Knowing how to cut costs or bring in revenue quickly when needed will help you reduce stress and concentrate on building a solid, profitable business. A Tech Owner s Guide to Profitability : Part 3: Understand Your Company s Cash Flow

24 You ve just completed THE ULTIMATE GUIDE TO A MORE PROFITABLE TECHNOLOGY BUSINESS A healthy company returns profits to its owner(s). Without profitability, it s impossible to invest back into your business and grow it for the future. To ensure the continued profitability of your technology services business, you need to utilize employees efficiently, develop effective pricing strategies, and carefully manage cash flow. The best practices described in this guide are built into ConnectWise business management software. It s designed as an expert system for achieving profitability in the technology services industry. With ConnectWise, businesses automate key aspects of employee utilization through centralized ticketing and dispatch and a consistent system and business process for time keeping. ConnectWise facilitates pricing strategies with automated agreement management. By capturing information about time and expenses and helping to bill customers more quickly and efficiently, ConnectWise provides reliable insight into cash flow for management. After implementing ConnectWise, our company grew from roughly $1.5 million per year to $2.5 million per year. -NICK MESZAROS, VICE PRESIDENT, MOBIUS WORKS About ConnectWise Made for companies that sell, service, and support technology, ConnectWise is the #1 business management platform worldwide. Today, more than 100,000 users rely on ConnectWise to achieve greater accountability, operational efficiency, and profitability. The platform fully integrates business-process automation, help desk and customer service, sales, marketing, project management, and business analytics that dramatically streamline a company s operations. ConnectWise also gives its users access to a powerful network of ideas, experts, and solutions. A veteran in the technology services industry, ConnectWise has been the premier business management platform for technology companies for more than 15 years. For more information, visit or call