Buying Small to Build for the Long Term ($300k SDE)

Like in my mind I was like this thing could fail in the first year pretty quickly or you know, this is, this is going to go in the right direction and, and, and we'll have a good platform to start growing from. So I definitely didn't want to spend money but the biggest thing I think was just doing it.

The, the, the classic EOS style was just not going to be, we couldn't take the team out of work for a full day or for two days to talk about these. Like then there would literally not be somebody to answer the phone. Right. So we had to find, we had to morph it to a way that would actually work.

Why. So there's a lot, there are a lot of acquisition targets out there. Also probably less advertised is the fact that this is a business where a lot of the talent can be offshore short and you can create instant margin there. And in fact you see it now among other MSP owners. How are you approaching this question?

So I think we, we're really kind of going against the grain here. MSP is such a broad term and encompasses so many different things that I think, I think the offshoring is, makes most business sense for, for a lot of MSPs. I actually, I don't think it makes the most sense for a few reasons.

One of which is the businesses that we serve are all local, local small businesses, kind of between 10 and our largest client is 500. But that's really kind of an outlier. But I think where we are positioned in the market is we are a high service msp.

And I think where things are going, the trends that I see is I think we want to go from our clients IT partners to really their technology partner, kind of taking over the whole tech stack and helping design, implement and manage what their technology side of their business looks like, especially in the age of AI. And where should we put an AI agent? What kind of workflow can we automate versus…

Are all of our systems integrated? I think that's the future and I think that to best move towards that future and frankly to run the kind of business I want to run, I don't want to run, run a sweatshop, right? Like I want to run a business that gives people the opportunity to build good livelihoods.

And because of that, you know, we're opting for at least at this point and this could change at some point, but we're opting for an all, all local team. And really one of the big things we're doing right now is, is moving more in office. Like during COVID everybody was working remote and, and a number of the employees still work remote most of the time.

And we're moving to more and more in office because again, kind of going back to the EOS and understanding the why. For us to get to 20 to 40 people and have a high quality business, we want to be the Costco of msps, which is a whole thing. We could unpack that if you want, but.

We can't do it without in person training new people, building camaraderie. Like there's just so much nuance in the MSP world and understanding your clients, IT environments and all these kinds of things that it's just really hard to do. Not in person at least, you know, the segment of the MSP world that we live in.

So I think going against the grain Here most of the. I'm in a couple of different MSP peer groups. Most people are looking to offshore more and more and I can totally understand why.