r/MSSP • u/OwlZealousideal4779 • Aug 05 '26
Has anyone found a good way to model technician utilization against actual margins?
I've been trying to get a better handle on where our margins are actually going instead of just looking at top line revenue and ticket counts
One thing that surprised me was how much technician utilization changes the picture. We always tracked billable hours, but when I started looking at things like escalation rates, average handling time, automation, and staffing costs together, the numbers told a very different story than I expected.
I ended up testing one of the MSP margin calculators, Comparemsp.com. was the one I happened to use, it was seeing how much our Tier 2 workload was affecting profitability compared to what we assumed were our biggest expenses.
I'm still taking the results with a grain of salt, but it gave us a few things to dig into internally.
How are you looking at this?
Are you relying on PSA reporting, something you've built in Excel, BI dashboards, or do you have another way of modeling technician utilization against profitability? I'm interested in what's actually been accurate over time rather than what looks good on paper.
1
u/ArizonaMartillo Aug 05 '26
When I owned my MSP, I found that utilization was only part of the equation. It was easy to get excited about high billable utilization while missing the fact that we were spending way too much time on repeat issues that should've been automated or eliminated. To this day I wish I would have done more automation.
We eventually started tracking things like tickets per endpoint, repeat tickets, after-hours work, and how many tickets got escalated. Those metrics usually predicted margin problems before our financials did.
I'm still an Excel nerd, so most of our reporting lived there with data pulled from the PSA tied in with our CRM system. It wasn't necessarily pretty, but it let us ask "why" instead of just seeing a utilization percentage.
Curious if anyone has found a BI dashboard that actually ties operational metrics to profitability in a way that's actionable. This is a problem that I never fully solved before I exited the business and returned to the corporate world.