Founded in 2003, Impress IT Solutions, through an aggressive marketing effort, has been gaining clients every month. But founder Roland Parker says the bigger story is their growth in annual recurring revenue. In this conversation with MSP Success, he reveals some of the acquisition and retention strategies the Katy, Texas-based company employs, plus offers some tips for overcoming challenges.
MSP Success: You have a big hairy goal of reaching $500 million in annual recurring revenue and 20% EBITDA. What top business indicators are you using to get there?
Roland Parker: The figures don’t necessarily tell the whole story. We’ve been decreasing our break-fix side of the business and replacing it with ARR. What tells the bigger story is we went from $300,000 in ARR to $3.5 million in three and a half years. Our business focus went from trying to get the phones to ring to getting one or two new clients every single month with our marketing efforts.
Our key indicators are client retention and customer satisfaction.
MSP Success: What is one key secret to your success over the past year or so?
Parker: Consistency of our marketing. Prior to joining TMT, and even when we first started, we tended to be a bit inconsistent. We would slow down [marketing] when we got busy and then when we were on top of the situation we would play catch up. But that led to months and months of not getting new clients. Consistently keeping our foot on the gas with marketing, even when the technicians are swamped with onboardings, is key.
If you keep all your marketing efforts going all the time, you come in [to a prospect] with the approach of being an advisor. I think the biggest thing that we’ve really learned over the past two years is quiet confidence. We’re not selling, we’re not pushing, but we’re really trying to be your trusted advisor.
That confidence has changed our approach to first-time appointments (FTAs). It’s not just the documentation that we provide them has improved, but the confidence in the way that we present it and making them feel comfortable. The focus is more on the client, how we can solve their problems and ultimately how we are the best choice for them. Sixty-nine percent of our FTAs end up signing [with us].
MSP Success: Has there been a vendor or tool that has been instrumental in getting you to where you are today?
Parker: One of the big things we’ve done is partnering with Kaseya. We were already using some Kaseya products when we heard about the ProfitFuel program. They audited what we were using for our RMM, our PSA, our security, and they were all different things. They told us we could save $70,000 a year by going with the ProfitFuel [recommendations].
We told our technicians this is not going to happen unless you guys are on board and it makes sense from a technology point of view. So the techs were involved in deciding, yes, this is going to make our lives easier. It’s going to be more beneficial to the customers. It’s going to give them a better backup solution, a better security solution. And from a financial point of view, we’re going to save $70,000. So the dashboards were better, the integration was better, the backup restore time was improved. And the customers got their own dashboard which they didn’t have before, so we were able to consolidate billing from five different vendors into one. That was further improved when we went with Kaseya 365.
The end result is the customers are more satisfied. The techs are finding it easier to work with, and the company saves more money, so it was a win-win-win.
MSP Success: What were your biggest challenges this past year?
Parker: As you grow and take on bigger companies, we’ve had to do a lot more training. Not only have our existing techs had to learn a lot more, but we’ve also tried to employ people with that specific industry knowledge that we needed. So that was one of the hurdles.
And from our ProfitFuel exercise, we were changing all our systems between Christmas and New Year’s. Because of my wife’s medical situation, I was working from the ICU with a laptop, trying to coordinate everything. So that made it extremely challenging, but our staff was able to rise up to the occasion and take responsibility for what they could do. As you grow and get more senior-level staff, it makes it easier as a business owner to step back when you need to.
MSP Success: What advice would you give to other MSPs that are looking to grow their business?
Parker: Spend each quarter focusing on one thing and do that extremely well. So, what’s one thing I can do to improve my security stack? My workflow? My marketing? Because if you start to think, “I’ve got this problem, this problem, and this problem,” it becomes overwhelming. We all face challenges, but when you look back on your life, you start to realize that you’ve gone through this challenge and that challenge—and came out of it. Nothing is insurmountable.
