Is Your MSP Holding You Back? See How Ryan Broke Free from his MSP and Exited!

I am Ryan o', Hara, VP of Member Services of Seven Figure msp. I just want to talk a little bit about my journey because I know that a lot of you are probably going through similar things that I went through. So before I came here to Seven Figure msp, I had an MSP of my own. I was a member of Seven Figure msp and I went through this journey of scaling that ultimately brought me to 7 figure MSP to scale my business, and then took me down the path that led me to become an employee of 7 figure MSP. So I started my MSP about 15 years ago now, took the path that many of you have taken from starting off with break fix and project work, transitioning to more of an MSP model and proactive maintenance. And then that's about when I found Seven Figure msp. I was starting to make the transition to cybersecurity, kind of seeing the writing on the wall, everything that was changing and all of these cyber attacks that were happening increasing at an exponential rate. So as I was starting to do that, the natural path took me to Chris Wiser and 7 figure MSP started popping up in my feeds. Really good sales and marketing. He will follow you around for the rest of your life. And I started engaging, looking at some of these things, joined the program and that took me to that next step of being able to take the path that I was looking to go on, supercharge it to get there much, much faster and start offering the solution that I knew that my customers needed when whether they knew that they needed it or not. Some of the challenges you face running your msp, obviously growth and scale, not everybody does things exactly the same way. Not everything is the same fit for everybody. For me personally, I very intentionally wanted to keep my MSP small. I resisted hiring my first employee for a considerable amount of time. Basically any path that I was given, Crossroads, if you will, if it was to choose between hiring an employee or finding automation, I went automation, automation, automation, until I reached that point where I needed to hire somebody. And so that's how I chose to scale my business. Some people go the opposite route. Everybody does a little bit of automation, but getting those staff members to take that stuff off of their plate sooner. But the path that I went is a little bit of a struggle because I did put more on my plate to try and do this. But I also chose to do things very strategically with those automations of trying to get these take the thing, use those automations to take things off my plate to give myself more time for sales and marketing. Because especially as a smaller msp, as you're scaling, nobody's going to sell your business the way that you do. And it's really, really important that you are the one having those conversations with customers because they're not buying what you're selling at that stage. They are buying you and what you are talking about and the whys that you're doing those things. So the way that the program helped me do this was by having a community of individuals who have been at different stages of this business, different approaches, different tactics for this, and taking all of that information in to help me better make those business decisions for my business. So using the experiences of others, both their successes and their failures, and inputting that into my decision making process to see. So obviously I made some mistakes of my own prior to getting there. I still make mistakes. But taking that information both from my peers and then sharing it with others really helps. Just, you know, entrepreneurship can be a very lonely and challenging thing. Being a business owner in general can be a lonely and challenging thing. There's not a lot of people out there that go that route. So you don't always have that many people to talk to. Leveraging this community basically gave me both friends that had these similar experiences, but basically a board of directors of my own that I could run these ideas past, get that feedback. And it really helped make me better prepared for some of the decisions that I needed to make in order to grow my msp. So when I started my msp, it was very much by the seat of my pants. Just like many, many MSPs out there. Most of us start this type of business because we're good at techs. We're techs by trade, but not necessarily business owners. We don't know accounting. It's more of a second language to us. So those were some of the major challenges in really growing this business. So one of the things that I took out of some of the programs that I was a part of prior to seven Figure and very specifically Seven Figure and the Trailblazers program as well, is learning lessons of running the business itself. The tech was something I could handle. That's the part that came naturally. But really learning the business aspect of things, kind of going from that very much trial by fire, learning through failure business experiences to learning how to properly run not just a business, but an MSP business, Getting things like my chart of accounts in order and streamlining all of those processes from an operational standpoint beyond just the tech, to put my business in a Position to where when the opportunity came up to go in a different direction and join this team full time as a staff member, I was able to do that very, very easily. Just because all of those things were in order, it was a relatively quick turnaround as far as MSP sale and acquisition, because all of those things weren't in order, it didn't take as long to do that discovery process because the relationship was such that they were able to take a look, get the information that they needed really quickly. A lot of MSPs struggle with that business side of things and when something comes up, whether they need to sell, decide to sell, you know, investigating what their business is worth, they're not in a position to even have that information available to be able to evaluate and figure out how much their MSP is worth to do something like that. So I very, very much learned a lot of the business aspects of things that really helped make that sale quick and easy. So to kind of summarize everything, you know, the trials, the tribulations, the things that I've learned over the years, a couple of the things that I would say are the most important lessons that I learned. One, don't lose sight of the business aspect of things. We obviously have to provide that service delivery, that technical resource. That is what we built our business around. But you need to still know how to run a business because otherwise you're just, you know, basically doing ticket by ticket and not, you know, I would argue that you're not even really running a business at the end of the day. So really make sure that you focus on the business side of things because without that you're, you're really just a gun for hire doing tickets, you know, left and right. Two, sales and marketing is mission critical. You are never going to grow your business just by that accidental referral growth. You know, referrals are great, you're never gonna run out of those. But it's not going to ever allow you to grow your business at the rate in which you need to in order to keep things going. The number of MSPs that I've seen who just relied on that referral based business either ended up getting acquired and out of the game entirely or you lose a couple of big customers. And if you're only worrying about that referral business, you can't keep up with that type of churn. We run into things like pandemics, global pandemics that affected everybody's business. They didn't see it coming, they didn't know people who were relying on referral. Business alone couldn't recover from that. So you really need to make sure that you're focusing on growth. Because not only is it going to help your business, but it's going to allow you to do the thing that got you into this in the first place. You wanted to be there to help your customers, and there's no way that you can help your customers if your business goes under. If you've enjoyed my story, if you've taken a little bits and pieces out of this, any of this sounded familiar, please let me know and comment below. And I'd love to have a conversation with you, find out a little bit more and see how we can help. Plus, to learn how to take your MSP from support focused is cybersecurity focused in 30 days or less? Click below to grab the link to get the guide to help you do that.