Excerpted from the AgenticMSP Substack. Read the entire article https://agenticmsp.substack.com/p/what-a-notion-msps-drive-new-revenue
AI Brings Platform Explosion
With everyone rabidly focused on LLMs, you may not have noticed the emergence of many very interesting system platforms that leverage AI to make magic.
Note-taking itself has undergone a transformation. What many people use today is far more than a note-taking platform. It does much more. When you adopt one you’ll soon find it has far more functionality than you first realized. These platforms are variously referred to as a wiki, project manager, CRM, knowledge base, knowledge management system, client portal, or second brain. Much more than just note-takers.
Integration
If there’s one word that has always been important to our IT channel community, it’s “integration.”
Many of us have referred to ourselves and our companies as “System Integrator” or “Network Integrator” of “Solutions Integrator.” From the start we distinguished ourselves and served our customers best by bringing the best-in-breed of each component of our customer solutions. We are, deep in our souls, integrators. We integrate.
And so it was that I commenced a search for the best platform I could integrate to get AI to help me do what I do. It had to be easy to maintain, easy to use, highly accessible from all my various devices, user friendly, highly integratable with as many other platforms and applications as possible, and driven in every way by AI so I could really fulfill the goal of having a true digital AI assistant.
I found an explosion of candidate products, including Asana, Monday.com, Confluence (Atlassian), Microsoft Loop, Obsidian, Anytype, Airtable, and more. Each handled a piece of what I wanted, but I’d have to maintain multiple products to get everything I wanted.
A Champion Emerges
I finally came upon Notion. I really couldn’t avoid it given the plethora of videos and articles that barrage us constantly. Notion could easily handle everything on my list. In fact, it opened my mind wider when I looked at Notion’s list of capabilities:
Knowledge Management
Company wiki and internal documentation
SOPs and process documentation
Employee handbooks and policy libraries
Meeting notes and agendas
Research repositories
Personal knowledge bases (”second brain”)
Project Management
Task tracking with assignees, due dates, and priorities
Kanban boards
Timeline/Gantt views
Calendar views
Sprints and milestones
Roadmaps
Status tracking and progress dashboards
Database & Data Management
Relational databases with linked records
Filtered and sorted views of the same data
Rollup and formula fields
Gallery, table, board, list, and calendar views of any database
Data entry forms
Document Creation
Long-form writing and rich text documents
Embeds (video, maps, code, PDFs, etc.)
Templates: Both personal and team-wide
Publishing pages publicly to the web
Collaboration
Real-time multi-user editing
Comments and mentions
Page permissions and access controls
Guest access for external collaborators
Team spaces with separate permissions
Client-Facing Work
Client portals
Shared project workspaces
Deliverable tracking and approvals
Branded public pages
CRM & Sales
Contact and company databases
Deal pipeline tracking
Interaction logging
Follow-up task management
HR & People Operations
Onboarding checklists and workflows
Employee directories
Job tracking and recruiting pipelines
Performance review templates
Time-off tracking
Content & Marketing Operations
Editorial calendars
Content pipelines with status tracking
Campaign planning and tracking
Asset libraries
Brand guidelines documentation
Finance & Operations (lightweight)
Budget tracking
Vendor and contract management
Invoice and expense logging
OKR and goal tracking
Automation
Automated property updates triggered by status changes
Recurring task creation
Slack, email, and Zapier/Make integrations
API access for custom integrations
Notion AI for summarization, drafting, Q&A over workspace content
IT & Technical Teams
Bug and issue tracking
Sprint planning
Technical documentation and runbooks
Incident logs
Ticketing (lightweight)
Why Am I Telling You All This?
Having begun to build my own business operations system on Notion, I quickly realized what a great opportunity it is for MSPs. Just like the “Solution Providers” I grew up with developing solutions of top of database products and document managers, today’s MSP can build a universe of excellent customer solutions with Notion.
Think about what you charge for an M365 or Google Workspace deployment. Now think about a Notion engagement with comparable scope:
· Discovery and architecture: You’re diagnosing a business, mapping their workflows, and designing a system that fits. That’s a billable engagement easily commanding fees of $1,500 to $5,000 depending on complexity. And that’s just the start!
· Build and configuration: A well-built Notion workspace for a 20-person company can run 40 to 80 hours of work. Templates, databases, relational properties, automations, integrations. All of it has to be designed and built. Price accordingly.
· Training: Notion’s flexibility is only valuable if people know how to use it. Training engagements for admins and end users both are a natural add-on.
· Ongoing Design and User Support and iteration: Business needs change. Businesses change! Notion implementations need maintenance, but they also frequently call for expansion, and improvement. A constant flow of consultative engagements. Now that’s a recurring services opportunity, either hourly or retainer.
This is high-margin professional services work. You’re not shipping hardware or managing licenses. You’re designing something of value, developing it, building it, helping your customers get the most out of it, and you’re doing it with a relatively low tooling cost on your side. Best of all, it calls for the same skills you’ve developed and delivered to customers for years.
And it puts you firmly in the AI business!!!
Why Now
Notion is adding AI capability aggressively. Notion AI is already embedded in the platform bringing summarization, writing assistance, Q&A over workspace content. As customers start to ask for AI-augmented operations, a Notion practice positions you at that intersection without requiring deep AI engineering. You’re implementing a platform that already has it baked in.
The competitive moat is also still wide open. There are no established Notion practices in the channel the way there are for Microsoft or Google. If you build this now, you’re not fighting for scraps. You’re establishing a position.
Excerpted from the AgenticMSP Substack. Read the entire article https://agenticmsp.substack.com/p/what-a-notion-msps-drive-new-revenue
