Over the past 100 years, the world has increasingly been going global, with supply chains lengthening and industries reliant on manufacturing overseas, typically in places such as China, Japan or Bangladesh. During this time, even service industries have become increasingly outsourced abroad, which has broadly reduced trust — scripted calls often don’t resolve complex issues effectively. Large companies have increasingly centralized operations, so local services have become less common.
However, people still want these local connections — when everything goes wrong, as it sometimes does, you need to know that you can ring someone up and they will be there. Having said that, working with a specialized global team can provide major benefits. Even better, working with a global brand can significantly increase your revenue as an MSP.
Why Local Businesses Remain Relevant
No matter where you go, many people love doing business face-to-face, particularly when it comes to MSPs. This means they want someone they can feel they can relate to and trust. It’s difficult to get that level of face time with a global business — especially one that is located thousands of miles away, often on the other side of an ocean. While local teams can significantly help, they can still struggle to adapt the business to local tastes and needs.
In addition, a local business usually understands how to operate within the country and fulfill its legal obligations. This means that they can advise on issues specific to the area, and they can create highly customized packages that work for different businesses, such as incorporating regional tools, software packages and even cultural preferences.
And by building business locally, they create local success stories that resonate with others in the area. This hopefully builds good word-of-mouth referrals and allows them to expand further — while getting feedback and testing the market.
Building Beyond Local
Of course, not every MSP will remain local. A few are strong enough to go national and possibly even global. While this was a difficult path even a few decades ago, it’s become much easier in the world of technology, especially with the growth of customizable software solutions.
The next step for many businesses is to start getting contracts nationally, especially larger companies that have global operations. With a good set of technology solutions and a great reputation, MSPs can quickly build contact lists, refine their abilities and start generating revenue from supplying global solutions.
In some cases, businesses prefer to deliver highly specialized offerings and become a major supplier for a specific industry. Some companies like to focus on the healthcare niche, while others might provide software and solutions for retail. While these limit the market, they also make it much more attractive to those within that market, as specialized knowledge is often hard to come by.
It’s at that point where you decide which direction you want to go and whether to take your company global.
Of course, even growing your business from local to national comes with specific issues, usually stemming from local regulations, travel times and where to open your next office. As you grow, you’ll have to build your sales structure and organize your processes carefully — and you will likely need training to do that.
Building a Global Business
Exploring neighboring markets is key to building your brand. At Wildix, we went from growing the Italian market to making careful forays into France and then Germany. The United States came a little later, as did the UK. Then, we began to explore the Swiss and Middle Eastern markets.
While this is a little more cautious than some businesses, we wanted to remain relatively debt-free, which gives us a lot more freedom. However, some businesses prefer a more debt-funded approach that lets them enter a wide range of markets immediately. The approach that you choose depends on your appetite for risk.
Scaling your operations, however, requires a careful appraisal of each market. This includes creating teams, setting in place legal structures and marketing and selling your business services. Of course, you may be up to skip some of these steps — you might not need local teams to install as-a-service solutions such as Wildix. Instead, you can do it completely remotely, especially for multinational businesses that are headquartered in your own country.
Ultimately, you don’t have to be relegated to a single country to sell your services as an MSP. With the appropriate solution and a good understanding of your key strengths, you can sell your solutions almost anywhere, even beating out local suppliers who are less focused. This is especially the case when local MSPs don’t have great solutions or have relatively poor reputations.
Global or Local?
In short, your business can grow where you like, as long as you do the appropriate research and have a solid solution backing it up. At Wildix, we pride ourselves on our ability to help MSPs move their local offerings into national and global markets with the Wildix Blue Ecosystem.
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