MSP 501 Winners Share the Smartest Thing They Did
What smart decisions have you made this year? Compare them with those made by MSP 501 winners.
August 3, 2023
![smartest thing I did smartest thing I did](https://eu-images.contentstack.com/v3/assets/blt10e444bce2d36aa8/blt3f41e68db5e795b5/6523ebc507590cb1f977e82b/great-idea-cover.jpg?width=700&auto=webp&quality=80&disable=upscale)
shutterstock TierneyMJ
Ashu Bhoot, president of Orion Network Solutions: Monetizing customer feedback
Figuring out how to monetize customer feedback was the smartest thing Ashu Bhoot, president and owner of Orion Network Solutions in Washington, D.C., did in 2022. The move helped increase sales in the first half of this year for Orion, which ranked No. 2 on Channel Futures NextGen 101 list of up-and-coming MSPs.
“It’s a very simple thing, but for the longest time we struggled with it,” he said.
The trick, Bhoot and his team found, was to include positive customer comments and feedback in the sales process. The team, for example, began mentioning customer satisfaction survey results on check-in calls with clients and adding customer testimonial videos to sales and marketing packages.
“Prior to that it was, ‘Here are our three plans and the value of them.’ But then we included videos of customers talking about the Orion services they use and why other businesses should hire Orion,” Bhoot said. “That helped us a lot in creating and converting some really high-value clients that we otherwise struggled with.”
The Orion team also started using ChatGPT extensively in 2022. At first, the marketing division used it to streamline the content creation process, which cut down on the amount of edits and back-and-forth questions between content writers and the marketing agency. Orion then struggled a bit with how to integrate the technology and leverage its efficiencies throughout other areas of the company. Bhoot solved that by giving everyone a ChatGPT account. His team started using it for simple tasks like writing emails.
Today, the team uses it to quickly create much more customized content than it could in the past. Orion isn’t ready to roll out AI solutions as a service, but it is offering training sessions to help clients learn more about the technology’s uses and capabilities.
“As a technology provider, we want to help to contextualize the issues our clients struggle with,” Bhoot said. “We’re trying to bridge those gaps for our customers.”
MSPs used to name marketing and sales as their biggest challenges. Today, most say hiring tops the list. In the next few slides, MSPs talk about some of the strategies they use to find and retain the right people.
Tim Guim, president of PCH Technologies: Developing a full hiring strategy
Almost every MSP has faced hiring challenges over the last several years. Tim Guim, president and founder of PCH Technologies in Sewell, New Jersey, is no exception. But what he did to ease the problem could be considered exceptional. No doubt that Guim’s hiring and retention strategies helped the company shoot up the MSP 501 list to No. 15 from 72.
PCH had no trouble attracting customers in late ’21 and early ’22, but it did have trouble hiring the talent needed to support them. Realizing early on that hiring would not get any easier as the brunt of the pandemic faded, Guim sat down with his head of marketing and created a full strategy to attract talent.
“That’s the No. 1 smartest thing we did,” Guim said. “Having a talent recruitment strategy was the biggest thing ”
As part of the strategy, PCH created a social media campaign that showed, among other things, what it was like to work at PCH and why peopled liked working there. The marketing crew created a weekly schedule of postings that highlighted veteran and new staff members, employee promotions and company events. To help improve team spirit and retention during the grim days of COVID, Guim ordered pizza every Friday for those working in the office and set up a DoorDash account for those working remotely.
“We gave them unique benefits for working at PCH,” Guim said. “Our business is built on our team. Anybody can buy all these different products from all these different vendors, but it’s the team that’s delivering a service to your end-clients. It all comes down to the people and your team.”
Keeping those teams engaged, productive and healthy is always challenging. Find out in the next slide how Kenny Riley, president of Velocity IT, solved some of those issues, especially a high rate of employee burnout.
Kenny Riley, president of Velocity IT: Establishing SOPs for Hiring and Training
Velocity IT, a Richardson, Texas-based MSP that hit No. 5 on the MSP 501, burned through five techs in 2021. As more business and fewer hires came through the doors in ’22, company president Kenny Riley knew something had to change.
“We were basically throwing people into the fire as they came onboard. We were just growing so fast, it was intimidating to your average tech,” he said. “We didn’t have proper training programs in place. It was a bad method that resulted in a lot of burnout.”
To improve the situation, Velocity established standard operating procedures (SOPs) around vetting, hiring, onboarding and training. The company also increased salaries and benefits.
“That was instrumental to us in being able to acquire higher level talent just to support our growth,” he said of the SOPs. “It allowed us to properly scale our operations.”
Brian Curtis of DominionTech in Vermont went a lot further than many small MSPs to solve his company’s hiring problems. At first, the people said the idea was kind of odd for such a small company. Find out what he did on the next slide.
Brian Curtis, DominionTech: Hiring a dedicated hiring manager
The smartest thing Brian Curtis, founder of DominionTech Computer Services, in Williston, Vt., did was hire a dedicated hiring manager, even though the company had only 20 employees.
“Everybody said it didn’t make much sense for a company our size,” he said. “But it changed the game a bit for us.”
DominionTech’s market includes the Burlington area where a handful of tech companies and startups from Boston and New York moved to during the pandemic. Within weeks of their arrival, they started gobbling up available talent.
Finding good talent is still difficult, Curtis said. But the new manager during the last year helped to systematize the hiring process, develop relationships with recruiters and adopt a candidate rating process the company calls CRAV to measure a potential employee’s culture, relatability, ability and velocity. The “velocity” section turned out to be a key piece that Dominion was missing. It measures a candidate’s sense of urgency for completing tasks.
“I’m very much type A. Give me a list of things and I’ll get through it. But we were hiring people that just didn’t have the same intensity. So we found a way to label it,” Curtis said. “For the first time in 10 years we’re completely staffed.”
MSPs still can’t seem to find enough good security engineers, given how much that side of the business continues to grow. Rob Stephenson, CEO of Thrive, based in Massachusetts, made a really smart move in ’22 that will continue to pay off in the future. Click on the next slide to learn more.
Rob Stephenson, CEO Thrive: Doubling down on security
The smartest thing Rob Stephenson, CEO of Thrive, Foxborough, Mass., did in ’22 was doubling down on the company’s security practice. He attributes Thrive’s 40% YOY growth to that move. Some of the buildout included CISO services that now counts about a dozen vCISOs that Thrive rents out on an hourly basis to clients that need a more robust security posture. The CISO program naturally generates the sale of additional services and tools.
Other investments and additions Thrive made to its cybersecurity practice over the years include Fortinet’s SIEM and EDR tools, SentinelOne’s SIEM, Microsoft Sentinel and Microsoft Defender for eXtended detection and response (XDR) and EDR, and a robust SOAR within ServiceNow.
“We can start ingesting alerts and configurations in different information and multiple tools to be able to provide a single dashboard for our security SOC analysts to act on,” Stephenson said of the SOAR. “Making those investments in security give us a tremendous ROI. Our cybersecurity practice is growing at a record rate”
Rob Stephenson, CEO Thrive: Doubling down on security
The smartest thing Rob Stephenson, CEO of Thrive, Foxborough, Mass., did in ’22 was doubling down on the company’s security practice. He attributes Thrive’s 40% YOY growth to that move. Some of the buildout included CISO services that now counts about a dozen vCISOs that Thrive rents out on an hourly basis to clients that need a more robust security posture. The CISO program naturally generates the sale of additional services and tools.
Other investments and additions Thrive made to its cybersecurity practice over the years include Fortinet’s SIEM and EDR tools, SentinelOne’s SIEM, Microsoft Sentinel and Microsoft Defender for eXtended detection and response (XDR) and EDR, and a robust SOAR within ServiceNow.
“We can start ingesting alerts and configurations in different information and multiple tools to be able to provide a single dashboard for our security SOC analysts to act on,” Stephenson said of the SOAR. “Making those investments in security give us a tremendous ROI. Our cybersecurity practice is growing at a record rate”
We asked the managed service providers who made the Channel Futures 2023 MSP 501 ranking a simple question: What was the smartest thing you did in 2022, the year represented in the survey, to achieve success in 2023. The answers, as you’d expect, varied. Some MSPs deployed basic strategies often overlooked by those overwhelmed with day-to-day distractions. Many focused on building long-term, profitable cybersecurity practices. A few made quick decisions to address immediate problems like finding and hiring the right people in a tight labor market.
Whatever the answer, MSPs of all sizes can learn from what others have done to build among the best managed service companies in the world. Let’s kick off the gallery with Pam Miranda, owner, president and CEO of Triella, a company based in Toronto, Canada, that moved to 75 on this year’s MSP 501 list from 86 last year. The smartest thing she did was to retain the owner of Triella after buying the company and improving many of the company’s business practices.
Hear from the MSP 501 Winners
Triella’s Pamela Miranda
Miranda found herself at a crossroads during the pandemic. She lost her job working in M&A and financing for a large investment firm after it restructured. She was stuck at home with two small children, craved flexibility and definitely did not want to return to banking. “I was like, okay, what am I going to do with my life?”
She ended up partnering with a former client with a background in technology and decided to buy an MSP.
“The MSP space (in the Ontario area) is very fragmented so there was a nice opportunity to be a long-term investor,” she said. “The smartest thing I did was to keep the seller to run they day-to-day operations so that nothing was changing in the clients’ eyes.”
But Miranda made other smart moves once she become familiar with the strategic side of the business. She rebranded Triella and began marketing at area trade shows for specific audiences like law firm managers. The company has invested in four trade shows this year and recently signed up a client from one of them.
“It’s an investment because (trade shows) are expensive,” she said. “We got one client out of it, so it’s testament that it’s working out.
“It’s about investing in the marketing and branding,” Miranda added. “I rebranded everything. That was something that needed to be done. So that was very smart. Branding plays a huge role in growing your business.”
More from the MSP 501: Ashu Bhoot, president of Orion Network Solutions, found another way to grow business. Click our gallery to find out how.
About the Author(s)
You May Also Like