Zero to $60M 100% Organically w/ Serge Bukhar

Welcome to the $10 Million MSP Podcast. This podcast is where I dive into the real stories of MSP leaders who have gone beyond $10 million in revenue, how they built their teams, created scalable systems, and turned their businesses into valuable wealth-building assets. I'm Brian Hoppe, strategic coach to MSPs. I work with MSPs generally in the $5 to $50 million in revenue range. In each episode, I sit down with leaders who have built MSPs beyond $10 million in revenue to unpack the inflection points that truly matter. From the personal stories behind their journeys to the fundamentals like culture, operational maturity, and driving profitability. This isn't another MSP podcast about tools and tech. On the $10 Million MSP Podcast, you'll get behind-the-scenes conversations with leaders who've built thriving MSPs, their biggest wins, their toughest lessons, and the practical takeaways that you can take back and use right now. If you're an MSP owner who knows that growth starts from within, That mindset, leadership, and strategy align to create both wealth and meaning, then this show is for you. New episodes are released every other week. So let's jump in.

All right. So today I am joined by Serge Bukhar, and he is the founder and CEO of Atlas Technica. Serge has spent his career building and scaling managed services organizations and has a really unique perspective on. growth and leadership and, and what actually helps MSPs to scale. So Serge, welcome to the show. I'm really excited to have you here.

Thanks a lot, Brian. Really happy to be here.

Awesome, man. Okay. Well, so, so obviously, um, well, not obvious to many of our listeners, but you have scaled an MSP organization much further than most people ever do. And so what I'd love to hear from you is what do you think that most MSPs Fundamentally misunderstand about what it takes to scale?

I think the biggest problem I should say that I see is the lack of focus on talent, right? To me, this business is all about people. And, uh, I, I remember this, this is like, I think this will be, this is painting a good picture. Like I had an engineer that came over and he said that he was sat down by his MSP, the director or owner. And said to him explicitly, you are a cog in a machine.

Oh my goodness.

And he's like, okay, got it. I'm going to go find another job. And he did. He came to us. He's been great. And so my point is that I think a lot of people don't understand that this is a people business and you've got to get that right. And if you get that right, lots of other things fall into place. So we spend a lot of time on cultivating that culture and creating a place that people want to call home. And I think that's a big thing that people miss. And then the second part, I think, of this secret sauce, if you want to call it that, is focusing on service, right? We are a service business. I've heard MSPs call themselves technology businesses like product businesses like that. To me, that's just wrong. I think it's a service business and I think that if you make your clients happy, they're just never gonna leave in this space.

Yeah.

And so, but you gotta make them happy, not just be okay with a service. They gotta rave about your service to their friends, talk about it, and really see value in what you bring to them. And so then I think that the 2 things then feed each other, right? The people and the service. We have an internal slogan, we keep our people happy, our people keep our clients happy.

I like it. I like it. Okay, very cool. So, okay, so I want to give you a chance to kind of talk about your background a little bit. So your journey, kind of how you started the company, and then what you've been able to do over the last decade, um, or what you've been able to accomplish in your company over the last decade.

Sure. Yeah. So just to take one step back behind that, like, we— I spent 10 years at another MSP helping them grow from being 80 to about 400 people. And towards the end, about, you know, 80 of those reported to me. So it was kind of like fast-growing organization. And I, in my career, were also, you know, grew very fast as part of that. So it was a great experience in that. And then I left. I to work for Bridgewater Associates, which is the biggest hedge fund in the world, spent a year there and then started Atlas.

Mm-hmm.

And I started Atlas with those 2 goals in mind that I just talked about, to focus on service and creating environment for people. And also there was a big change in the technology at the time, kind of like a transition from private cloud or on-premise infrastructure to public cloud infrastructure. So within our niche, we were the first vendor to do public cloud infrastructure. And so we were kind of able to grow a lot faster than a lot of our competitors because of that. So fast forward 10 years, we're 350 people, we're global. We did all of that without any acquisitions, without any financial backing. And so all been just consistent, relentless, sometimes gross.

Okay.

And, you know, we are here now. We're still serving the exact same niche. We're very verticalized. So it's alternative investments. So all of our clients are hedge funds, private equity, family offices, and other boutique investment firms.

Okay. Okay. Gotcha. All right. So, so, you know, let's just Pause there for a second. So, so a decade, um, 0 to 6 to, to 345 employees, um, no outside investment, no acquisitions. Um, that's a story that almost nobody can tell. Um, or I haven't heard that story told before, let's put it that way. So, so that's a big deal. And then also you have, um, you've really verticalized. And I'm always curious, you know, I have a feeling I know your answer, but how much of the success that you've had would you attribute to being a vertically focused MSP and specifically to the vertical that you chose?

It's a really interesting question. You know, I don't have a magic ball to say whether or not we would have been successful without the verticalization or specifically to our industry. I'm pretty confident in saying that I think being verticalized was an incredible benefit, right? Because now there, we actually, in the alternative investment industry, there's a saying that it's extremely incestuous, right? Like everybody knows each other.

Mm-hmm.

If you make, and so our approach, specific approach of this, like outservicing our clients. of providing the best possible service really worked because everybody told their friends, right? And so in that sense, it's very much helpful. I think my guess is that if we did this in a different vertical, it would work just as well. So it's not just because we did it in this vertical, it's just any, I think, verticalized approach would work, whether you're in medical or you're in legal or something else. I think that Um, this approach would work. So that, that's my kind of 2 cents on, I think it is important to be verticalized and I don't think the industry, you know, the particular vertical matters.

Okay. Gotcha. Yeah. Yeah. And you hear arguments kind of both ways in the industry as far as, well, you know, it doesn't matter that much that you have a vertical and, and, um, and there's, I guess I would say relatively few that do have a vertical as opposed to those who are just kind of serve every industry. But I see a lot of advantages. My MSP was a vertical MSP in the banking industry. And so I definitely am a big fan of that because I also think that it makes, well, it makes a lot of things easier, right?

Well, yeah, to your point about making it easier for us as well, I didn't mention is the fact that, you know, most of our engineers are supporting the same applications, the same type of client, the same type of situations. The same for us, like order management system or portfolio management system or accounting system. They're all roughly the same. That makes it so much easier for our engineers to be successful. So I think that that is also very important, you know, from a focus on the same cybersecurity posture versus you got clients, you know, if this is generalist MSP, right? You got clients that are going to really care about cybersecurity because they're maybe in medical or Maybe they're in finance, right? Versus the bakery down the street that couldn't care less about cybersecurity. And so balancing that for engineers, I think, is difficult.

Yeah, yeah, for sure. And when you have all those similar systems and everything, I mean, you could presumably, um, you don't have to have that as high of a level or highly paid technicians when it's like, well, I'm basically, you know, however many clients we have, let's say it's 100. Well, 95 of those are pretty similar, right? And so you can kind of push more of the work down to a lower level and there's a lot of benefits to that. What would you say is the effect of that on what you're able to charge and how you're able to price your services?

Yeah, I mean, for us specifically, it's definitely a huge benefit that most of our clients are roughly the same. It's all kind of investment firms, right? And so This allows us to charge a premium compared to the, again, the mom-and-pop shop, you know, generalized MSPs, and it's a significant premium, but in return for that, we're providing the white glove level of service, right? I think that if you talk to an average MSP, they're going to say that, you know, their response time is going to be very valued by the clients if they get back to them within the hour. Right. For our clients, if they don't get— if we don't get back to them within 15 minutes, they're going to be upset.

Yeah.

Yep. It's a very different, you know, kind of value proposition and what you're actually giving to, you know, to the client, but the clients are willing to pay more for that. And so I think it's— that's also an important kind of differentiation around verticalized MSPs.

Yeah. And I won't ask you to share specifics, but I would imagine it's a significant premium to what kind of the, you know, normal MSP would charge for, you know, a regular, um, you know, dental office or something like that on a per user seat price. And I would imagine, uh, and, you know, as, as general or specific as you'd like to be on this, but I would imagine that you're, you're running a, you know, best in class profitability, uh, at your MSP as well.

Yeah. And I, so I think that. I know plenty of other generalized MSPs that are just as profitable as we are, right? But they're charging a lot less per seat, and they have a lot more seats, and they just, they do the math work in a different way, right?

Right.

I think that for us, our clients expect the best, which means that they need instant responses, they need the highest levels of cybersecurity, they need the highest level of engineering talent on our end, And so there's much dramatically higher costs on our side, but in return we're providing a better value and we're providing, and we're obviously charging more. So I think those 2 things have to be catered to your clients. And for us, it's easier for us to cater the clients because of the verticalized approach, but it is significantly, we charge significantly more than an MSP that's servicing a bakery down the street.

Right, right. Totally makes sense. Okay. So, so I want to go back to something you said around obsessing over your people and obsessing over your clients. So let's start with people. How would you say that, like obsessing over the people fleshes out in practice? What does that look like in the day to day if somebody is curious about like, well, obviously, you've done something that's really special here. What, what could, uh, what could another MSP look at doing that would kind of maybe get them to the, the place where you're at?

I think, you know, there's, it's a very long list of things, right? Like I could probably create a list of 100 different things that we're doing internally. But, you know, those are specific to us and different MSPs and maybe different specific things. Well, I think the overarching theme is that we care about our people. Right? What, and what does that mean? It means that we care if they're working too hard. We care if they're getting burnt out. We care if, you know, they're not happy doing what they're doing. I have countless examples of engineers here that said like, I don't want to do this, but I don't want to leave. Okay, well, let's create or let's find a different place for you. What do you want to do? How do you want to do it? And so We have a lot of people here that have changed jobs, moved laterally, moved in a different department. And so that's an important piece of it. Creating a culture where people feel valued is really important, right? So to the example I made earlier, like, that's a culture where people don't feel valued, and that really resonates.

Mm-hmm.

I think that obviously having the right benefits and compensation and working environment and even technology systems, all of that is, you know, paramount to any MSP. And I think that creating a place where people can grow is a huge part of this, right? So we've got people that have been promoted 3, 4 times in the 10 years that they've been here. Well, in the 9 years that the, I think the longest employee's been here.

Right.

Um, so creating that culture of like, If you put in your— if you put in the work, if you learn, if you get certifications, if you progress even on the management side of things and you become a manager, like all of these things will be valued, will be taken into account. And obviously there's— that means there's going to be more compensation, there's going to be more benefits. As a simple example, for every year here, you get an extra 2 vacation days. It's a small thing, but it works. Like, like, there's a ton of people now that have been here for 5 years and they have an extra 10 days. And if you're a manager, you get an extra few more days. And so going from a basic 15 days to 28 days for a bunch of people that are managers that have been here 5 years, I mean, that's a significant benefit, right? So there's a lot of these, like, they're small things, but they, they, they matter in aggregate.

Yeah. Where, where I think, um, you know, A lot of MSPs tend to be perhaps a little stingy with some of those things, um, that you're kind of talking about and, and have, uh, you know, have a harder time being, um, I guess, I guess generous with some of that stuff. And speaking of, like, would you say, uh, you know, as far as your management layer and even executive layer, uh, has it, has it been the trend that they're, they're growing from within? Or has your strategy been to hire from outside or what is that? What does that kind of look like for you guys?

Yeah. And I think it's, I think it's a mix. We probably have, we have a number of people in very senior roles that have been here from the beginning, been promoted from engineer to director level, right? There's also a number of people that had to bring in from the outside onto the leadership team because We needed, we were just growing too fast. I just didn't have enough people coming up the ranks, right? But I'll give you an example. Last year we had, we had 260 people at the end of the year, and obviously a number of those were just there for, you know, there's probably another, I don't know, 50 people that were hired in, in the last year or so that, um, are newcomers.

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

And we had 66 promotions.

Wow.

So we are consistently promoting. We've given people a path, right? You go from junior engineer, mid-engineer, senior engineer, team lead, client technology manager, associate director, director, right? And there's lots of people that have traveled that entire, you know, path.

Yeah. Yeah.

Right. And so I think that, um, we are very aggressively promoting from within.

Mm-hmm.

But at the scale that we're at, we also had to bring people from the outside. And I think another important part I forgot to mention earlier is that we also are very engineer focused, right?

Okay.

So the leadership team has 8 people and 6 of them are ex-engineers.

Right.

Including the, you know, the, basically the, the chief customer officer that has 250 people working for him, the chief revenue officer, like a sales guy who's an ex-engineer. So every, obviously the chief technology officer, they were all engineers doing desktop support, you know, 20 years ago.

Yeah. Yep.

And so I think that allows us to create that culture where we understand what the bulk of the people in the company are going through on a day-to-day basis. Because we've lived it and we went through it, myself included, by the way.

Yeah. Yeah. Gotcha. So you, so you also started as an engineer and—

I, I was in, I, I, so like 20, I spent a year at one MSP, a tiny, like 3-person MSP. And then I spent 10 years at another MSP and I joined as an engineer.

Yeah.

And I, same thing. I went up the ranks all the way to senior vice president and on the leadership team. But, you know, it took time.

Yeah, absolutely. And I have a similar, similar kind of story starting as an engineer and developer and, and all of that back in the day. So, okay. So, so that's, I mean, that's obviously as far as people goes, there's, there's a lot of different ways to address that. But, but obviously the, the focus that you've had around the people has made a huge difference. And then, and then let's talk, and we've talked a little bit around it, um, as far as obsessing over the client. And the client experience and we're a service business and all of those things. So, so what would you say distinguishes you, um, or your business from kind of the, the average MSP?

I think what distinguishes us is the retention rates. Like the, to me, there's some like very basic metrics. We're fairly data-driven. We, we, by the way, we run our company on EOS, Entrepreneurial Operating System. I know there's a lot of MSPs that do the same. And it's been a very popular thing in recent years, but it's very data, you know, part of the EOS is being very data-driven. So it's something that we really spent a lot of time on kind of changing the way that we do things over the last few years as we've grown, where we've got to have data for everything. And so part of that data, right? Retention rates for our employees, retention rates for our clients, I think are dramatically better than our competition.

Okay.

Right. And that ultimately allows us to be successful, to be profitable. Actually, that's a really important part about the retention of people I forgot to mention earlier, but most MSPs you mentioned are stingy, right, on some of this stuff. Well, guess what? They're still paying for it. They're just paying it in a different way. They're paying for it for replacement of employees. There's lots of different statistics on this. But it's like, you know, some people, I think I've quoted like $40,000, the replacement cost of an engineer. Well, guess what? If you just pay, you know, that engineer a little bit more, you're probably not gonna lose them. I mean, you don't have to pay that $40,000. And most MSPs that I've seen, they're revolving doors, people in and out, in and out. And the same for clients, they're in and out, right?

Mm-hmm.

Lots of MSPs I know, you know, even amongst our competitors, competitors that, you know, you're basically like bringing in 50 clients, you know, in a year and you're losing 45. And he's just like, you know, like that's not progress, right? You're just standing still, you're treading water.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And the churn rates are, I mean, both for employees and clients are, you know, less than ideal, I would say. So it's like by the time, if you grow your Monthly recurring revenue. I think the numbers are somewhere around the average MSP loses about 10% of their monthly recurring revenue every year. So if you want to grow by 10%, well, guess what? You got to go, you got to go get 20% in order to do that. And, and I would guess from, yeah, so much harder. So, uh, than just adding the 20% and, and not, not shedding the clients. And so, um, that, yeah, that totally makes sense. And as far as You know, we've alluded to a few things on the, on the client side of things. So it's response time, obviously. It probably has something to do with the, the care that your team gives to the clients. How would you characterize it? Like, if you had to kind of describe, here's, here's what it looks like practically when, you know, as you're serving your clients. What would you say that looks like?

It's 100% like that care is paramount, right? Like if your engineers care about the client, you like, like half the job's done, right? Forget if they can actually solve the problem. If they just care and the client sees that they care, you're already like half the battle, right? And then you just gotta have the right engineers, right? One of the biggest things that we focused on, and it's another differentiator Is the recruitment process.

Okay.

We spend just absolutely ridiculous amount of time on recruiting. Like I've heard of lots of MSPs that, you know, interview basically a person for 30 to 45 minutes and like, hey, have you done this? Have you done that? Can you do this? Can you do that? Okay, good. Sounds good. Let's go. You're hired, right?

Yeah.

You know, like we spend, you know, for more senior hires, 2 to 4 hours and we go through the paces, right? Personality testing, like just talking to talking to us, understanding their values, understanding their technical capabilities on the right technical set, giving them actual problems to solve, like here's a broken laptop, fix it, right? And watching how they fix it, because we don't care about the result, we care about the process. Do they understand how to troubleshoot? One of my pet peeves in the MSP industry is that 50% of engineers Have a toolkit. They have a toolkit of like on their belt with like 100 tools, right? And they take a tool, they throw it at the wall and see what sticks, right? When in doubt, ipconfig /flushdns. When in doubt, ipconfig /renew. Reboot, you know, the computer, restart this, redo this, change this, you know, reset You know, this, and one of these things eventually will work.

Right.

But they don't actually necessarily understand what's happening under the covers. They don't actually understand if when I do this, it's this, and when I do this, it's this, right? Like, you know, I came up in a family of scientists, and so I think I got the scientific method with breast milk, right? And so You know, for me, it's a scientific method. You do this, either result is this or this, and based on that, you, you follow the chain up to the resolution. And I think most engineers just don't understand how technology works to be able to do that and to be able to understand how to troubleshoot faster and more efficiently. They just keep throwing the tools until something hits. And so being able to interview on that and being able to interview that Um, you know, each individual person on that is, is critical to the success.

Okay. Yeah. Gotcha. Yeah. It makes a lot of sense. And, and the, and, and I would imagine, uh, I mean, you're hiring what, 50 people a year or something like that? And, and so you probably have a full internal recruiting team and, and, and that kind of thing as well. Right. So yeah.

We've been hiring 50 to 100 people for the last 3 years, I think.

Wow. Brilliant. That's, uh, oh, well, that's a problem that I know a lot of MSPs would love to have. So, uh, right. Having to hire that many folks and, and, and, and do it well in a way that you're actually building the team that you want to build and, and, and retaining the culture that you want to retain in the process as well.

That, that's been the hardest part, retaining the culture, right? When we were growing, Yeah, we were doubling in size for the first 5, 6 years, but we were doubling from 10 to 20, right? 10, 20 to 40 and 40 to 80, right? And so that's, it's a lot of growth, but it's not that difficult to keep the culture when you're still can, like when me as a CEO, this is like one of the business classes I did the MBA at Stern. And one of the classes there said that the CEO can only see 50 people down. Like once you grow beyond 50 people, you can't see all the way to the bottom. That was like one of the strategy courses that we talked about. And so, but up until that level, like when you're in the 50, 60, 70 people, you can still know what's happening in the company. Once you're below, beyond that level, you can't. So you gotta have a team of managers and leadership and All this stuff. And at that point, it becomes so much more difficult to keep the culture because you can no longer see all the way to the bottom. You don't know what's happening. And for us, that's been one of the hardest things is to keep the culture strong as we've continued to scale the business.

Yeah. Yeah. And, and, and that's one of the bigger challenges and, and that's where a lot of, a lot of focus has to go into that and everything. So I want to shift for a second and talk about, as far as the growth, like, I mean, brilliant level of growth over the last several years and doubling often and all of that. Talk to, talk to us about the sales engine that, that has driven all of that.

So we're just about to turn 10 years old in 2 months. We are, yeah, so 3 years ago. Up until 7 years, we didn't have a single salesperson and zero marketing dollars.

Wow. 7 years. Okay.

I was the only one doing sales. I was probably spending 30% of my time on sales. And it was, it wasn't sales in the, you know, there's the, you know, in sales you usually talk about hunter versus gatherer, right? Like, so there's the hunters and there's the gatherers. It was pure gathering. Like it was order taking. Clients came to us and we said, sure, we can do it.

Mm-hmm. Okay.

And so all of that was generated purely through word of mouth, referrals, references, industry groups, right? And so clients came to us because they knew that we were doing a good job.

Okay.

Because their friends told them, because there's a COO network that said, you know, somebody posted something like, hey, my MSP sucks. And somebody else would reply, well, we have Atlas and they're great. And suddenly we get 2, 3 leads.

Wow.

Because everybody saw that, right? And so there's network effects there. But for us, you know, and I said this in, in my, in the previous MSP where I worked, you know, I think 10% of the budget went towards sales and marketing. 10% of the revenues went to sales and marketing. And to me, I was in my kind of thought was always, I'm gonna take that 10%, I'm gonna put it right back into service. I'm gonna hire better people. I'm gonna get, you know, escalation points, managers, more senior engineers, and that will pay its dividends.

Mm-hmm.

And so that's what we did.

Okay.

And it, it worked, right?

Yeah.

At 7 years basically is when I brought on, you know, a, a head of sales. He's our chief revenue officer now, and he's now building a team. He's got a few people underneath him. But for the size of the organization we are, I think our sales team and our sales budget is probably, you know, anywhere from 1/10 to 1/5 of the average.

Okay.

Right? And it's because it's still, most of the leads are coming to us. Even today, we're still not hunting.

Wow. Wow. Brilliant. So, and, and would you attribute, so you'd attribute that, I guess, just to the high level of service? And essentially having raving fans who are telling other people about you.

That's pretty much it. And again, there is like market effects. So we've now started going into conferences where, you know, we can show thought leadership and we can start kind of like, I wouldn't call it sales, I would call it marketing more than anything, right? So we've done some events, we've done this, this, the other, but we're still not hunting clients. We're not cold calling, we're not doing email campaigns, we're not doing any of that.

Okay. Yeah. Wow. So, and so you, so essentially it was just you, um, kind of having the conversations and making the sales of it. How, I'm curious, how far did that take you as far as, if you're willing to share, like revenue-wise?

Uh, if I remember, so this is like 3 years ago, so probably $20-something million in revenues.

Okay. Okay. Yeah. So, so it took you far. It took you really far.

took us far. Like we're now above 50s and we are continuing to grow, but I think I personally just didn't have the time anymore to even take the orders, right? Much less start developing some sort of market presence and thought leadership as we go into larger clients. We gotta have that. And obviously like our, you know, chief revenue officer has done a great job of building onto that momentum and obviously bringing his capabilities and contacts, that has allowed us to double since then or more than double since then.

Yeah.

So that's important too. But at the core, we're still, you know, working through, we call ourselves a reputation-based business. It's all about our reputation and it's paramount to us.

Yeah. Well, and I would imagine reputation and, And some level of differentiation, right? It's not, you're not just like the, the guys next door. You've got, you've got some, some unique things going on because I can tell you from, from experience and talking to many other MSPs that are your size, no, I've never heard, I've never heard anybody say they, they, they just grew by taking orders. Right. And so you're, you're in a very unique spot in that it sounds like what you've done is you've built something. That, that speaks for itself essentially by the service and by the level of care that you show your customers. And that just creates an effect that's, that's, that snowballed things for you, which is, well, I'd imagine that most MSP owners would like to be in that exact same spot.

Absolutely.

Yeah. Yeah. So one of the things that we've talked about in our previous conversation was being really process-driven as you've scaled. So maybe talk a little bit about that as far as like how, maybe how did you figure that out that that was really important? And then what's that process been like for you of really becoming a process-driven organization?

Sure. Yeah, there's a lot there that I think is kind of like core to our success and to me personally. So I've always been a process person. Like I'm a lists guy, right? I need to have a list for everything. And I think that when I came into that previous MSP, there was zero documentation, zero processes. It was like a free-for-all, lots of engineers just running around, no, not even managers, just like, you know, the, the help desk would just say like, go here, go here, go here. And what we've, what I found there was like, that's not very efficient. As you're saying, you quickly start burning out. And so myself and a couple of other people, we started writing down standards. That was the first step, like how to build a desktop computer, how to build a domain controller, how to do a BEDS server, for those of you who remember what that is. Back in the day. Exactly. How to do an Exchange 5.5 to 2000, you know, Exchange migration. And, you know, we started creating these documents and immediately like things got so much better, right? Like, and so we're like, this works. And again, we're, you know, in our early 20s, so we don't know too much about what this means or how to do this. I didn't have a computer degree either. And so psychology major. And so to me, I started like going down that path and we started doing more and more processes and standards and documentation and it worked. So like, okay, this makes sense. And so later after that, I went to work for Bridgewater, Bridgewater Associates, biggest hedge fund in the world. You know, Ray Dalio is, is huge on, he calls them machines, but ultimately machine equals process. Like Bridgewater is extremely process-oriented. They also have a process for everything. So kind of com— and that really clicked in my head as well. But it, it, you know, I think Ray really helps you understand how important it is and why it's important rather than just like, Through like, I have a fire to put out, so the best way to do that is to create a process so I don't have that fire tomorrow.

Right.

And so when, you know, when we started Atlas, I really focused on that and I said, look, from the beginning, everything we do is gonna have a document and a process. Mm-hmm. If you do it more than once, you gotta have a process.

Mm-hmm.

And we scaled that up to today where we have, you know, Confluence and Thousands of documents and processes and documentation and kind of an overview of our core processes flowing down to individual instructions. So it's key to our success because we're able to— any one of our engineers can walk into any one of our environments and see things set up exactly the same way.

Yep.

And that allows us to be a lot more efficient than an engineer walks in, is like, I don't know what's going on here. I'm going to have to figure it out. 3 hours later, like, okay, I figured it out, now I can actually start working on the problem.

Right, right, right, which, yeah, just creates all kinds of inefficiencies that, well, you just don't need, right?

Exactly. So that process focus, I think, has been paramount for us, and it's not just on the troubleshooting IT side, it's also internally, like, for people ops and for recruiting and for, you know, for technology. Every department is focused on process that allows us to be efficient in that particular area.

Okay. And who kind of makes sure all of that stuff is in order and up to date and actually followed by people?

So that's the tricky part, right? So we have core values and part of the core values, process-oriented, and That means that every department head and every manager are focused on it because that's what their responsibilities are. But it's really tough. We literally just had our all-hands and that's one of the things that came up that said like a lot of the documentation is not always up to date, right? So we're working on figuring out, okay, now that we've, you know, as we've scaled, how do we make sure that the documentation stays up to date? How do we create a process on revamping that, right? Like you created it, great, but then there's gotta be a cadence. What is that cadence? How do you do it? Who's the owner? Who's in the Bridgewater terms responsible party or RP? Who's gonna ensure that, you know, it's actually gonna get updated on a regular basis? And, you know, one of the big things I try to vocalize is, you know, you see something, say something, New York. Subway slogan.

Yep.

Every person in the company is encouraged when they see a problem or something that's out of date, say something. You don't have to fix it if it's not your responsibility, but at least say something so somebody else can, right? And with enough inertia, that continues and carries us forward, allowing us to update these document— documents and stay up to date.

Okay.

But it's a challenge.

It's a real challenge. Yeah. And that's what I find is that it's— everybody thinks this is a great idea. And the question is, how do we actually operationalize it? And then, you know, everyone is either creating a, you know, some kind of documentation, following some documentation, or updating some documentation all the time. Because like anything that you're doing, you should be either following the process or updating the process or creating a new one if it's not there. And just managing all of that and keeping it front and center, it can really be a challenge. And so I think that's probably why it tends to fall to the wayside a lot of times because of that. Yeah, but I hear like, and you said something interesting, it doesn't matter what I think, what matters is what's written. Talk to me about that a little bit.

So we, we actually had an interesting thing. A couple of times this happened, after which I had to kind of like publish this in the, uh, our manager's channel. I said that they, that we seem to be developing the C-suite magic wand effect. Somebody on the C-suite said something, people just do it. Mm-hmm. And like, stop. I don't care who it is. I don't care if it's me.

Uh-huh.

If I'm saying something that goes against process, you stop.

Uh-huh.

And you go back and like, okay, we either need to change the process or we need to not do what Serge said.

Right?

Yeah. And that's a key part. And more often than not, it means that we don't do what Serge said. We go back and we follow the process because it's usually a misunderstanding, misinterpretation, Or something else. But ultimately, the processes are there for a reason. The processes are there to be followed. And sometimes processes get outdated. They maybe don't make sense anymore. Maybe they need some clarifications, but nobody's above process.

Including you. I love it. I love it. Yeah. And that I can imagine is a challenge sometimes to kind of, because essentially you're relinquishing control. your personal control to the system that you've created, right?

If you think about it, we as CEOs, like I imagine a lot of the people that are watching this are gonna be CEOs or senior leaders in an MSP, right? We need to, you know, that there's a, as part of the EOS, there's a phrase, but I don't think it's EOS originated, is that you need to be working on the business, not in the business. Right? So if you're working in the business, then you're just firefighting. You're constantly working on the minutia, the stuff that needs to be done, but you're not working on the business. You're not trying to improve the business and grow it and mature it and so forth. And so if, you know, these processes, they exist to remove that, the in the business part, so you can work On the business and be above that.

Yeah, absolutely. I think that's an E-Myth concept from the old Michael Gerber book, but it absolutely remains true to this day. And I think that's sometimes one of the biggest challenges for CEOs is that, well, you like to be the one to make the call and to, you know, and that people come to you with important decisions to make. And so You just have a lot of trouble just saying, you know what, actually, I'm going to create a system for this. So not every decision has to come to my desk. Instead, we have a process for that. And so go follow the process. If there's a problem with it, okay, maybe we need to have a conversation. But otherwise, well, let the business run without you, right? So that you can work on it.

Absolutely. That's key. And it's tough, right? Like, I can, I can vouch for that. I've spent the last 3 years delegating every single little thing that I do. It's been really difficult, but there's no way to, you know, for me not to do that because at the scale that we're at with 350 people, it's just, there's no way for me to be involved in anything day to day.

Mm-hmm.

And so creating the right processes, delegating, hiring the right leaders that can take over. And making sure that they're the ones also, you know, growing and continuously delegating to people below them. This is going to be key in terms of being able to scale the business.

Yeah. Yeah, man, totally makes sense. So, so, so kind of on that note or adjacent to that, what would you say would be kind of some of the biggest shifts that you have had to make as a leader? During this process of rapid growth of your company?

I think that when I started, I was still very much a technologist and I'm slowly kind of like moving away from that. I still like technology. I still enjoy figuring out big technology challenges and consulting clients on major changes, but I'm doing less and less of that. So kind of getting, getting myself to step away from technology, that's been challenging. The biggest challenge was delegating and, you know, delegating everything. And especially the decision-making is so difficult to delegate. So I've spent a lot of time with leadership team crafting the right processes That remove the responsibility, so remove kind of the decisions away from me. Mm-hmm. But still leaving controls in place.

Right.

All right. So for example, like basic thing, I don't want to be involved in any of the day-to-day procurement, purchasing of software, hardware, et cetera. But if we're gonna spend half a million dollars on something, I'd like to get the final say-so.

Right.

But we're only gonna do that, you know, once, twice a year. Yeah. But that's just an example, right? So having the right controls in place and making sure that you have the right people that are gonna be just as thoughtful as you and they're gonna act as owners, another core value, to, you know, act in the best interest of the business. Obviously a huge part of this, but I think that delegation of everything, including the decision-making ability. That's been the biggest challenge I've had. The other challenge I would say is time efficiency. There's just incredible pressure in terms of time, right? Like you're constantly squeezed for time and being able to prioritize the right things is really difficult. And I, especially for me, you know, and I imagine a lot of Uh, people have the same challenge of, you know, I'm a perfectionist and so stepping away and, you know, delegating that is difficult from a perfectionist perspective, but also from a time perspective, right? I want to do things the right way and I can no longer do that. I can only do 80/20, right? Like I can only do up to a certain level and then I've got to get somebody else to finish it.

Yeah.

And so time pressure is real.

Yeah. Yeah. That, that's a big, a big piece of thing. And it's, and it's some, some also some stuff you have to relinquish that you kind of like to do. Right. Um, and, and that's ultimately for the greater good of the company. So, so how do you, um, or how have you kind of thought about, you know, well, and I like to think of it in terms of. Okay. So as a CEO, what is my highest and best use for the company? What are the things that I should be doing that I'm uniquely good at and that only I can do and that are going to bring the most value to the company? So how have you thought about that for yourself?

It's been an ongoing kind of thing, right? Over the last 10 years where I've had to, you know, slowly delegate more and more and more and more and more and more. At this point today, Pretty much nothing that I should be involved in. And so I'm, I've now become in many ways, um, kind of the chief strategist and chief coach, right? So like I'm coaching the team, both the leadership team and sometimes, you know, 1, 2 levels below that. I'm trying to help them be successful.

Mm-hmm.

And I'm looking at long-term strategy for the business, what's best for the company. And those are kind of like including, you know, on the strategy side, including the culture of the company, right?

Yeah.

Those are the, the primary things that I'm trying to focus on because that's where I can add the most value. And it's not necessarily because I'm sure I could be the best possible desktop support engineer, but that's not adding enough value to the business, right? Like I can fix that computer, at least used to, I don't know about any— yeah. You know, better than anybody else, but that's not adding enough value. And so even if I am good at that and then maybe I even enjoy it, like no longer, I can no longer do that. I can only do things that add the most value, um, you know, to the business. I actually liked one of your articles that specifically talked about the shareholder.

Mm-hmm.

Right? You go from, you know, kind of like the doer Then you become the CEO and then you become the shareholder, right? And the shareholder, the goal is how to increase the enterprise value of the business. And so you have to spend every moment of your active work on the business, not in the business, should be about how to increase the enterprise value. And that's all about strategy, culture, and coaching the team.

Yeah, absolutely. And I love that thought.

Okay.

So, uh, so just as we're kind of wrapping up here, I had just a kind of a thought around what do you, what do you think is coming, uh, for the industry over the next 5 years or so? What do you think the, what do you think are the major things that will change or, or how will the industry grow or kind of, yeah. What do you, what do you see for like the 2030 MSP?

So 5 years is a long time.

Yeah.

We might be, uh, in 5 years we might, we might be, uh, being run by AI as a, as a planet. Uh, so who knows? But assuming that doesn't happen, I think that that's kind of like the, the big things that we look at is one, you know, I, I forget who's talked, spoke about this, but the, it's the managed intelligence provider. I think that's the term people have been using, you know, so like Getting a lot more involved into AI and the workflows and the day-to-day kind of like data management and information management for our clients is going to be a big part of it. I don't know exactly what that's going to look like.

Right.

You know, I don't have a crystal ball. We have some thoughts, but that's, I think, going to be a big part of the, you know, 5-year plan. The second thing I think is going to be We're gonna see a continuation of rollups, right?

Yeah.

I think it, if the data is like 40,000 MSPs or something like that in the US, it's some crazy number, right?

Yeah.

We don't need 40,000 MSPs in the US. It just doesn't make sense. It's not efficient. And so is that gonna be, you know, 20,000, 10,000, or 5,000? I don't know. But there's gonna be a continuous roll-up happening in this industry, roll-up trend happening in this industry where, you know, there's gonna be more and more large MSPs and less and less small MSPs. I think that trend will, uh, will continue.

Yeah. Um, yeah, but most likely.

And then the third trend I think is gonna be And by the way, I don't know if I made it clear, but on the intelligence side, like it's going to be a lot about AI services as well.

Right, right.

But the third trend I think is going to be cybersecurity. That's going to continue. Like we're going to be more and more— I remember us 20 years ago, cybersecurity was an afterthought. Yeah, we had good firewalls and, you know, basic kind of like, you know, cybersecurity around the perimeter. Cybersecurity in the way that we think about cybersecurity today, Was nonexistent, basically.

Right.

And so I think that trend will continue. I think especially with AI, you know, we've seen the new AI-amplified attacks, right, in the last couple of months. I think that will continue so that fight between the, you know, the good guys and the bad guys will continue. And as the bad guys start using more AI, the good guys will need to start using more AI. And then it's going to be that, continuous escalation of the conflict. And so there's going to be more and more cybersecurity tools, cybersecurity kind of investments happening, and we'll see that through the MSP lens.

Yeah, no, totally makes sense.

I think that's the 3 things that I would call out as the big ones.

Yeah, yeah, I love that. And I always love getting kind of the opinions around that because obviously none of us knows exactly, but But there's, you know, there's some writing on the wall in a lot of key areas. So, okay. So, so one more question for you before we wrap up is as you, as you kind of look back, uh, and then, and this might be like, you might have to, you know, dig a little bit, but what do you think is the biggest mistake that you've made as a leader? And what is that? What has that taught you?

Biggest mistake that I've made as a leader is probably Not investing early enough into kind of like supplementary services, finance, sales, um, operations. Like I, I, I was 100% focused on service and nothing else. And so not investing in that early enough, I think was a big kind of like something that didn't allow us to grow as, as quick as we could have. So that's number one. And then I think the second one is not making decisions faster. And when I say decisions, I mean people decisions. For good and for bad, right? Meaning that sometimes you have a cancer in the company and you have to make that decision and it's a really tough decision, but you gotta make it. And sometimes you have, you know, a superstar 10x person and you gotta promote them faster and sometimes you don't. So I think on both sides, making those people-based decisions faster is critical and even if it's just, maybe it's not even making decisions, but just taking lots of time to think about that decision so you can make it easier, I think is key.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And we tend, I think we as leaders, we tend to make those kind of decisions slower just as a practice. And so that makes a lot of sense. Well, so before, is there anything else that that you feel like, uh, is like something that like every, every MSP should know or every MSP should do? Um, you know, just kind of as a final word as we wrap up, would you, can you think of anything like that?

Outside of everything that we've talked about, because I, I really believe in people and service and all of that, but the things that we haven't, maybe something that we haven't said yet, talk to your clients. And talk to your people. Just have a conversation, whether that's a survey, whether that's an in-person QBR, whether that's a skip-level meeting with lower-level people, you know, for your managers. Talk to your people. Talk to people, right? Whether it's your people, your employees, or your clients, it's going to be invaluable what you learn by just talking to people.

Yeah, absolutely. And a lot of times we just don't take the time for that. Uh, to actually have those conversations and, and hear from our clients and, and, uh, you know, the good and the bad. Yeah, 100%.

And sometimes even bad is the most valuable advice you can get.

Yeah, exactly.

Somebody that kicks you and says like, this needs to be fixed. Okay, got it. I'm gonna go and fix it.

Yeah. And, and, and then, yeah, and then you actually have to fix the thing, right? You can't just sit on it and, and, uh, and hope that it fixes Yeah, man, Serge, this has been really, really great. I know that's going to help a lot of people. So really, thank you so much for your time and just sharing your perspective and experience.

Absolutely happy to help. And I do hope that it helps the next generation of MSPs.

Absolutely, man. Well, thanks so much and we'll talk soon.

Thanks for having me on the show. Thanks, Brian. Take care.

Absolutely.

Thanks for listening to the $10 Million MSP Podcast. I'd like to encourage you to take just one insight that you heard today and put it into practice because small shifts create big momentum. If you enjoy the episode, make sure to rate and subscribe on your favorite platform so you never miss a conversation. Thanks again for tuning in, and I'll see you in the next episode.