u/PayThemWithBlood

I work at a mid size company, been here a bit over two years. Somewhere in the last year I got a lot faster at my recurring stuff and I never told anyone, mainly because I got lazy and kept researching how to automate my tasks, like our monthly variance pack which used to eat a whole morning, I rebuilt most of it in Cube, templated straight into the sheet and now it's maybe 40mns and half of that is me double checking it because I don't trust that it was that easy, and the accrual support docs, all those invoices someone used to key in by hand now just goes through Hypatos and their data comes in structured, Im assigned the supervision role in it and I get more time to check outcomes than I need to. None of this was "sly" type of clever nor groundbreaking in any way but as they say, give a lazy person a hard task and they'll find the best way to do it, and Im a very, very lazy person.

My manager still thinks these take as long as they used to so I don't know what I'm supposed to do with my spare time. Do you just say nothing? Deepen your analyses and improve quality? Ask for more tasks/roles and try to negotiate higher pay? Learn a new language? I feel a bit guilty for what's essentially working 4 hours and getting paid for 8, but Im also hesitant to say it because I dont want to be punished for being efficient

Im leaving this here because I see people asking about many aspects of profit here but Im yet to see a post replying to all of them at once, soooo here it is.

Growing profit boils down to 2 things, either charge more for the same work, or spend fewer hours per dollar billed. Hiring adds capacity, not margin. So, for margins:

- Automate repetitive delivery: patching, monitoring, routine remediation, and onboarding steps are hours a script can take back. Each thing automated is capacity returned without a salary. This, of course, doesn't mean you have to (or can or should) automate everything, especially with the current AI frenzy going on. Calm down, people.

- Fire or reprice unprofitable clients: some clients eat support hours far past what they pay, and it stays hidden until you track contribution margin per client. Reprice them or let them go and use the recovered capacity on better fit clients. Do not be afraid to let a client go.

- Resell a service line under your own margin: Im only gonna speak of the one I tried myself, password management. We serve a lot of EU clients that ask for it under NIS2 and GDPR anyway, so when we found that Passwork has an MSP partner model we capitalized on it immediately. We pay a wholesale per-user price, then resell at a higher cost, so basically thicker wallets for no additional work. Each client's data sits in an isolated database with an audit trail so they're all safe, no issues so far.

- Bundle and price on value: tiered bundles raise average revenue per client and simplify the sale. Instead of a client picking line items, they choose bronze, silver, or gold, and each tier folds in more services at a price set on the outcome, so the higher tiers carry the fatter margins while, paradoxically, offering the most options. Example: a flat per-seat managed plan at 90 euros covers helpdesk and monitoring. Wrap that same delivery into a Gold tier at 130 euros that adds security awareness training, a compliance review, and priority SLA, and the extra 40 euros is mostly margin because the added services cost little incremental labor given that the process is already established.

- Consolidate the tools you use: overlapping platforms cost money and slow techs with context-switching. One core PSA/RMM and cutting the extras lowers spend and gives better vendor leverage.

Good luck! I'd also love to hear any corrections/additions you guys have.