Quick WINs: Growth, Opportunity, Business Curveballs, and New Offerings with Jennifer Bleam

By Ian Richardson, Managing Partner, Richardson & Richardson Consulting

Podcast Season 1, Episode 13 Guest: Jennifer Bleam, CEO, MSP Sales Revolution

Jennifer Bleam is the founder and head “sherpa” at MSP Sales Revolution. Jennifer is a legend in the IT channel, and her credentials include building numerous multi-million-dollar internal divisions for robust and profitable companies, being an award-winning speaker, an author with a best-selling book on Amazon and soon to be released on audible (Check the show notes for links), and a member of the CompTIA Emerging Tech Council.

When she’s not busy helping people raise the tide on cyber security, she enjoys spending time with her husband and three boys, and enjoys traveling, marvel, and is a serious board game competitor.

 

I had the opportunity to sit down with Jennifer on a recent episode of W.I.N. and dive into how she and her team at MSP Sales Revolution have dealt with balancing business growth and capacity limits, dealt with unexpected business curveballs, and successful launched new business endeavors that keep revenue coming in while maximizing utilization of team resources. I took copious notes and wanted to share them with you here.

1. Growth and managing team capacity: Jennifer and I talked at length around the balancing act you must strike between growth of your organization and managing your capacity to service clients. It does you no good to “sign” 10 clients worth of business all at once if you will be unable to scale and service those clients. Making sure you understand your total capacity on a per seat and organization design basis is important.
2. Business Curveballs: Business never goes according to “plan” perfectly. Jennifer and her team had an unexpected resignation (from a team member who was inspired to go out on her own and start her own business – a great reason to have turn over!) The management of that unexpected gap in the organization’s human capital required a rapid pivot; job descriptions needed to be updated to reflect the role’s current responsibilities and requirements, job ads had to be created and posted, and interviews performed. Managing this “curveball” while not allowing other important initiatives as well as the daily operations of the company to go off the rails proved to be an achievable task through careful attention and having some playbooks pre-developed around the issues presented.
3. New Offerings: One of the most interesting take away items I gained from our discussion was around the development of an offer specifically designed to gain additional capacity from billable resources. Jennifer shared her development of a one-to-many service offering. Both of our organizations have a significant “services based” arm, mainly through consulting. Consulting revenue means human capital capacity management must be a well understood and executed skill set. By pursuing a strategy around using human capital to service multiple clients with relatively the same amount of labor expenditure, Jennifer has increased her organizations capacity for client work. This was a fantastic idea, and one that I absolutely plan to take back to R&R for our own consulting engagements.

I gain so much value from meeting with fellow entrepreneurs and leaders. Each and every person I speak with brings their own experiences, knowledge, and viewpoints to the table, and without fail, I walk away with a head full of ideas and motivation to do better in my own business. I so greatly appreciate Jennifer’s willingness to come onto W.I.N. and share her story.

If you’re interested in joining me on an episode of W.I.N., it would be my privilege to host you. You can book your spot by visiting https://randr.consulting/connect and selecting the Podcast Booking option from the services menu. You can find previous episodes of W.I.N. on our website and subscribe to it on whatever your platform of choice is.

Always Forward,

Ian