How One MSP Used Automation To Unlock $1 Million In New Revenue

‘By automating even small tasks, you create exponential time savings. In just a few years, those minutes turn into millions,’ says Dawn Sizer, CEO of 3rd Element Consulting.

For Dawn Sizer, staying ahead often means investing in the right technology, which has been a key revenue driver for her. Automation, in particular, wasn’t just about convenience but rather a “game changer” that unlocked unprecedented growth.

Through a strategic approach to automation, she reduced overhead costs, freed up her team’s time and drove new revenue – more than $1 million in additional revenue to be exact.

“It used to take us about 200 hours a year just managing our old security awareness platform,” said Sizer, CEO of Mechanicsburg, Pa.-based 3rd Element Consulting. “The time and resources it consumed were overwhelming. But after transitioning to a new, automated vendor, the onboarding process took just five minutes. That’s when I realized how much more we could accomplish.”

Sizer (at right in photo) spoke to a room full of MSPs at The Channel Company’s XChange NexGen 2024 conference in Houston, Texas, this week about how she worked on the business to untap additional revenue and new opportunities.

Through automation, she and her team started “buying back time,” a phrase she used to describe how freeing up resources allowed her to shift her focus toward more profitable projects.

“Instead of spending 30 minutes on each user setup, our new process takes just seconds,” she said. “This alone gave us back around 150 hours a year, which we could then bill as project hours or use for other revenue-generating tasks.

“It’s all about that cost-benefit analysis,” she added. “The 150 hours saved each year is time we can use for client projects, compliance work and other things that bring in more revenue. After implementing a few of these automations, we were well on our way to reaching the million-dollar mark.”

But her strategy didn’t stop with automating user setups. She tackled other time-consuming processes, such as policy management where her team transformed policy updates and approvals from “a tangled web of emails” into a seamless, centralized system.

“We created an automation where I simply drop a new policy into a folder, notify my team, and once everyone has signed off, it’s automatically pushed into our training system,” she said. “It saves so much time and removes human error from the equation.”

Daniel Langton, CEO of Datatel Solutions, Martinez, Calif., said that the “obvious” end goal for MSPs is to automate everything as much as possible.

“That's the direction everything's going, but it’s the question of doing it,” Langton (at left in photo) said. “What’s most important is to prioritize it.”

Going forward, Sizer is optimistic about the role AI can play in further simplifying her business operations.

“AI is helping us write policies and processes faster and more accurately,” she said. “By using large language models to draft documents, I only need to double-check them, rather than write from scratch. With AI, I feel like we’re only scratching the surface of what’s possible in MSP automation. By automating even small tasks, you create exponential time savings. In just a few years, those minutes turn into millions.”