MSP SPOTLIGHT
John Hill :
Expand Your
By Narrowing You
John Hill , President / CEO , TechSage Solutions
Company : TechSage Solutions
Founded : 2000
Headquartered : San Antonio , Texas
Geographical Markets Served : Texas
Top Growth Indicator : Monthly Recurring Revenue ( MRR )
YoY % Of Growth : 15 %
CEO And Founder : John Hill
What Are The Top Three Business Indicators You Use To Measure Your Company And Why ?
Our first is monthly recurring revenue because that ’ s how we know how we ’ re doing and if we ’ re meeting our goals . We also look at client acquisition to see how many and what type of clients we ’ re bringing on board . Our third top indicator is profitability because you can have all the top-line growth you want , but if you don ’ t have some profit to go with that , then you ’ re in trouble .
What Is The Top Lesson You Had To Learn To Kick-Start Your Business Growth ?
Don ’ t prejudge . Some clients , when you start to speak with them initially , appear to be awful clients . However , by the time you go through the process with them , it turns out they are terrific clients . That was a big thing I had to ingrain : to not prejudge before taking them through the entire process . Most of the time , it turns out okay . Every now and then , you ’ ll disqualify somebody just because your first impression was right , but overall , having a sales process in place is a good yardstick to figure out whether they are a good fit .
What Would You Say Is The Single Biggest Secret To Your Success This Past Year ?
We refocused on compliance . We focus on the new DOD standard
Cyber Maturity Model Certification ( CMMC ). That ’ s our big focus with DOD contractors as a vertical niche client . That has really made a huge difference , and it ’ s where the biggest part of our growth came from those types of clients .
What Would You Say Is The Biggest Challenge You Had To Overcome This Past Year Related To Reaching That Growth ?
The biggest challenge was how to get to those DOD contractors . Figuring out the places we needed to go or the outreach we needed to do to zero in on them for the initial contact and close them differed from the standard outreach we ’ d been doing in the past .
What Is A Partner Or Tool That Helped You Along The Way ?
Kaseya ’ s Compliance Manager has been a key component because we ’ re able to do evaluations and assessments and run different types of scans and tests to collect data . Compliance Manager allows us to do this in an extremely orderly fashion , so we can feed that data in where it needs to go in the compliance process to track exactly where we are . This is important because you must meet a ton of requirements for the CMMC . This is all spelled out in Compliance Manager . ( Compliance Manager is a compliance process automation tool for achieving continuous compliance with HIPAA , GDPR , CMMC , NIST ( SP ) 800-171 , and cyber insurance policies .) It will assign us