At an $18 million MSP, the founder personally managed $2–2.5 million in annual equipment procurement, finding margin and mastering shortcuts. But his hands-on approach became a bottleneck: orders stalled waiting for his late-night approvals, and the team couldn't move without him.
WorkSmart was an $18 million company. I want to see if I get this right. Doing like $2, $2.5 million a year of equipment sales, like servers, workstations, firewalls, that kind of stuff, right? And until 2022, I was the one doing all that ordering. Like literally. Wow. Because, oh, okay. Yeah. I mean, purchasing. Awesome. Well, I mean, it sounds crazy now, but I— Right, right. But I could always find a reason when COVID hit and there were shortages of computers and you had to like do a bunch of crazy stuff. And I was like, I want to be in the middle of that. I like craved the, uh, and also like when I could find an extra half a point of margin on a server deal, I was like, oh, that was the juice, man. Um, and then at some point the team was like, dude, you're the bottleneck. Like when we have to wait for you to order stuff at 10 o'clock at night, that's not— we're missing stuff, right? And so— Yeah, yeah. That was one of those things where like, I loved it. I thought I was pretty good at it. I had all my keyboard shortcuts memorized, you know, like I was really efficient at it. Uh, but I was holding onto it like for me, not for anyone else.
