What Numbers to Track as an IT Business Owner

Running a Managed Service Provider (MSP) or IT services business is a constant balancing act: delivering great service, growing revenue, managing people, controlling costs, and staying ahead of risk. With so many competing priorities to focus on as a business owner it can be easy to lose sight of the numbers and know what metrics to focus on. If you are unsure where to start, here are four essential metrics focused on tracking your cost, revenue and leverage drivers that will help you run the business rather than letting the business run you.

1. Managed Service Revenue per Employee

What it is: The total annual recurring service revenue divided by the number of employees.

Why it matters: This metric helps you assess how much revenue each person on your payroll helps generate. A strong number here means you have good utilisation, good pricing, minimal waste, and good mix of services. A weak number may signal over-staffing, low pricing, too much reactive work, or inefficiencies.

How to improve it:

• Increase your managed service revenue with new clients, upsells, cross-sells and seat growth
•  Improve productivity to reduce non-billable time and streamline operations
•  Ensure correct staffing levels with the right people in the right roles
• Shift to more value-added services with higher margins

2. Seats per Employee

What it is: The number of seats you support divided by the number of employees.

Why it matters: This gives you an indicator of scale and efficiency. More seats per person generally means better leverage, assuming you maintain service levels and margin. If you have very low seats per employee, you might be too heavy on people relative to your client base, or you are doing a lot of one-off/custom work rather than scale services.

How to improve it:

•  Standardise your service offering so you can scale and reduce unique custom work
• Automate or streamline tasks with automation and scripting
• Emphasise recurring seats not just project work

Watch out for: If you push seats per employee too far, you risk service quality with slower response times, burnt-out staff and increased reactive tickets. So always balance this metric with Tickets per Seat.

3. Tickets per Seat

What it is: The number of service tickets generated over a period divided by the number of seats you support.

Why it matters: This is a health-check on your support model and proactive service capability. A high tickets per seat number might mean you are too reactive, you lack automation, or your clients are unstable/poorly managed. If you have a low tickets per seat number, that indicates you are doing a good job of stabilising the environment, automating where possible, preventing incidents, and focusing on higher-value work.

How to improve it:

• Increase proactive monitoring, patching, automation
• Raise the bar on standards and baseline configurations so there are fewer surprises
• Use ticket data to identify problem clients and consider remediation or contract structure changes

Watch out for: Very low-ticket counts could also mean you are under-servicing or are not capturing tickets properly. Always ensure your ticketing system is accurate. 

4. Tickets per Employee

What it is: The number of tickets resolved over a period divided by the number of employees.

Why it matters: This metric shows how busy and efficient your staff are and is a good indicator if you are overloading or underloading them. If tickets per employee is very high, staff could be stressed and being reactive with an impact on quality. If very low, you may have excess cost, under-utilised staff, or too many resources chasing too few issues.

How to improve it:

• Improve ticket triage and assignation so that tickets go to appropriate staff
• Use automation and self-service to reduce low-value ticket
• Ensure staff are not spending disproportionate time on non-core tasks such as reporting, meetings, and inefficient processes
• Monitor staff utilisation with a focus on not just billed hours but productive hours
  
  

Putting It All Together

Tracking one metric in isolation can be misleading. A dashboard of these interconnected metrics can help highlight what areas need to be focused on:

• Revenue per employee: Are you leveraging your team to generate revenue?
• Seats per employee: Are you scaling your service base effectively?
• Tickets per seat: Are you delivering reliable, low-incident service?
• Tickets per employee: Are your technical resources being used efficiently but not over-burdened?

Once you have these metrics, here are some practical next steps to help you grow your business and profitability:

1. Baseline: Pull together your numbers for the last 12 months for each of these metrics.
2. Target: Set realistic but aspirational targets for each metric for example increase revenue per employee by 10 %, decrease tickets per seat by 15 %.
3. Track regularly: Put these into a dashboard and review them monthly with your leadership team.
4. Diagnose variances: If a metric is out of line drill into why: is it a client environment issue, staffing or automation gap etc.
5. Take action: Allocate resources, process changes, staffing adjustments, tool investments based on what the data tells you.
6. Communicate: Share the metrics with your team so everyone knows what is being measured and why. Transparency builds alignment and accountability.
   
   

Why It Matters Especially Now

In a competitive IT services market, clients demand more value, faster response, and predictable costs. At the same time, staff costs are rising, talent is harder to attract, and automation/AI are changing service delivery models which are impacting margins. By focusing on the four metrics above, you are shifting from “react and respond” to “measure, optimise, scale’’.

If you are feeling like your business is keeping you busy rather than allowing you to lead, then having the right offshore team with Dijital Team might be just what you need to allow you to work on the business rather than in the business.

Let's Talk