Once in a great while, disruptive financial models are created. Take derivate trading in the financial markets and how that led to high speed trading an amazing disruption. Atera is out to do the same by essentially offering a futures contract where you lock in your PSA/RMM pricing based on the number of technicians you employ, not the number of device. It’s a brilliant strategy and makes sense with the commoditization of IT at SMB customer sites.
Why the "paying per device" model is killing the growth of your MSP business
If you avoid Atera’s attractive pricing offer, you do so at your own peril. That’s because you subjective you and your family’s financial welfare to the diminishing returns of IT management. Allow me to assert my argument.
- Penalized for growing – when you grow, your traditional PSA and RMM supplier grows on your expense, since new customer will require you to spend more money on monitoring of new servers & workstations. Loosely translated, there is no upside financial leverage. Your RMM and PSA costs are essentially variable costs and that makes it tough to increase profitability margins.
- Makes you uncompetitive – you need to charge your customer for every PC, laptop and server added. Remember I made mention of the oft accepted theory of IT commoditization? In such a marketplace, it’s essential you control if not lower your costs. A market that is being commoditized doesn’t support a cost-plus inflationary strategy. You can’t pass on your costs easily and thus you become uncompetitive to more efficient operators.
- Hurting your customer growth & relationship – when your customer grows (and needs more PC, laptops and servers), you have to charge more, and the customer most likely will not care about the fact that this money isn't going to your pocket at all. It’s going to fat cat PSA ISV owners and RMM executive’s wallets!
Atera to the rescue: per technician pricing
So I’ve saved the best for last. Atera is asserting an optimistic investment approach that reduces risk and increase profitability with maybe a bit of fun thrown in. Atera’s PSA and RMM solution has three pillars.
- Predictably – you know how much you pay each month. That’s your hedge strategy facilitated by buying Atera’s solution set. By analogy, think of it this way. Each and every day, corn farmers in Iowa sell futures on the Chicago Board of Trade. Big Ag (large agriculture companies and distributors) buy those futures as part of a financial strategy to lock in its corn commodity prices. Right or wrong, Big Ag knows what it’s be paying.
- Competiveness – You can charge less and provide better service because all devices will be monitored. Smart idea in a cloud world and facilitated by Atera, a born-in-the-cloud ISV.
- Relationship with customer- you avoid the tension of the whole “I need to charge you more for your growth” conversation. Whereas in the financial community, I’d offer personal friendships are minimized because “they” are not nice people. It’s just the opposite in SMB. MSPs are often personal friends with customers. So expectation management is paramount to a long-term relationship!
