Managed Services: Industry Brief

The PLACE business model provides a managed services platform (MSP) for top producing real estate agents and teams across the U.S. and Canada. The MSP powers the key operating systems that top professionals need in the areas of; sales and marketing, recruitment and retention of talent, organizational design, financial management, and technology. The MSP model is new to the real estate industry, however, it's a well-established model in other industries driven by independent small business professionals such as; financial advisory, insurance agents, dental practices, and others. The challenge therefore is to develop a series of research outputs that allow PLACE to create context for our MSP in the real estate industry by providing the context of the MSP model that exists in these other industries. We'd like to take the outputs of this research and leverage it for; white papers that we'll leverage in our industry outreach, sales and marketing materials to communicate our value to prospective customers (top producing agents), communications content for consumers (real estate customers), website copy, and other purposes.
I would first define the industries that deploy a managed services model. Examples include independent financial advisors (Edward Jones, Ameriprise), insurance agents (Farmers, American Family Insurance), dentists (Benco Dental, et al), and even some retail models where the mall operator (Brookfield) charges their retail customers (clothing, restaurants, etc.) a percentage of gross revenue as the rental rate factor as opposed to a rate established by the square footage of the location. Then, I think it'd be helpful to outline the economic model for the industries and each of the players. For example, a percentage of the gross revenue, a royalty of gross, a percentage of net, etc. Then, I think it'd be enormously helpful to understand how the MSP's offset their cost by delivering value at scale. For instance, if a company provides marketing and lead flow, do operators of that system spend less than their industry counterparts for customer acquisition. Similarly, if an MSP provides technology for operations, do their customers spend less than their industry counterparts on tech?
We're looking to take the data from this project and use it to super-charge our sales and marketing efforts. Our definition of success would be rooted in our ability to capture more lead volume for prospective customers to our website, higher conversion rates for the prospects we engage with resulting in closed sales, and in more organic traffic to our website based on the unique content we could publish online through our various channels.