The 5 Policies You Need to Have in Place as an MSP

Are you confident that your MSP has all of the crucial policies in place that it needs to help drive success and to protect itself in the long run? Hi everyone, I'm Paige Taylor. I am general counsel of Seven Figure msp and I want to talk to you about some crucial policies that you should probably have in place for your msp. Policies are something that a lot of business owners don't think about. They right, you're too busy in your day to day, you're working with clients, you're trying to get work done and you forget that some policies might be necessary to protect you in the long run. If you're familiar with 7Figure MSP, you know that as an elite member at 7Figure, you get access to our MSP contract kit. That contract kit gives you amazing templates, some of which are these policies I'm going to discuss for you today. I want to go through about five top policies that I usually talk to clients about implementing in their business. Again, this is about protecting you in the long run, not trying to make your life more difficult. In fact, we're trying to make your life more simple and to make you relax a little bit in areas that you need some headspace in. Right? You want that emotional bandwidth back. So let's talk about those top five policies that your business should have in place. The first two policies I want to talk about are kind of related to each other. We have a data security policy and we also have incident response policy. Those two, as you can imagine, might go hand in hand. You want to always make sure, as with any policy, that if you update one policy, you might need to update other policies in your repertoire. A data security policy is crucial to protect client data and your client's client's data. You want to make sure that you have a standard procedure to deal with data privacy questions that your employees might have, that your clients might have. It's good to have that in writing as a guide. You want to make sure that you're always staying up to date with legal changes because as we know, the laws are changing very quickly when it comes to cybersecurity, even state by state, there are different laws of requirements that you need to keep data safe. So it is crucial to have a strong data security policy that governs both how you handle data and how your clients might handle their data. The other policy is the incident response policy. This is related to data policy, right? Because data privacy is crucial when data is breached. You need to have a sop, a standard operating procedure, or for how you're going to respond. That's your incident response policy. As we know, there have been recent laws issued by the FCRA that give you some guidance on what a good incident response looks like. Data breaches are a primary concern for cybersecurity companies and MSPs. So we wanna make sure that we have a tight incident response policy that's tried and true. You should talk to a lawyer about what should be in your incident response policy, but also keep in mind that it should be a little bit flexible because each incident might be different and you want to be ready for anything that comes along. The third policy I want to talk about is your service level agreement. That is the standard that lets your clients know what level of service they can expect from you. It's also just a nice way to put your MSPs mantra right, your goals, in writing so your clients get to know you better and they know that this is the level of service we should expect. It also goes both ways. It lets your clients know that, listen, if we're going to do our job, we need your help. Help us help you. So it's nice to have an sla, a service level agreement policy that helps guide you and your clients and their expectations. Because remember, when you're talking to clients face to face, sometimes people only hear what they want to hear. They may not remember everything you say, they often won't. So an SLA policy can help you put that in writing, hand it to your clients and have a fallback to say, this is what we discussed and this is what you should expect. The fourth policy after the SLA policy is the acceptable use policy. I think of this policy as more of kind of the policeman policy. Right. This tells people what they are allowed to do, but primarily what they are not allowed to do, whether that be with data, with company property, with email, all those types of things. Right. And it's very important that that is clearly outlined what they are absolutely not allowed to do. That's what an acceptable use policy is for. It helps prevent misuse by clients and also by your own employees. Last but not least is a policy that is close to my heart. It's the compliance and legal policy that is a policy that ensures that your company is striving to abide by all of the laws and to hold itself to the highest standards. You should make sure that you update this policy, as with all your policies, because again, there are laws being passed every day, every year. Absolutely. That you should be aware of. Sometimes you need to update your compliance and legal policies. But at the very least, your compliance and legal policy should make it clear that you are striving to abide by all regulations and you expect your clients to do the same. That is definitely a policy that you want your legal counsel to take a look at with you to make sure that you are abiding by all your legal obligations and that it's updated regularly. Implementing these five key policies that I discussed will help protect you, will help ensure compliance, and help make your client relationships stronger. So we discussed the five Data Security, Incident Response, SLA Policy, Acceptable Use Policy, and Compliance and Legal. Those policies and more can be found on the MSP Contract Kit. They might be under different names, so please reach out to me if you have any questions about what is included in the MSP Contract Kit.