Mark Shaw invests heavily in all his relationships, from employees to vendors and clients and other MSPs – he says it’s his key to success for growth, profitability and staying ahead of the game.
Note: This article is taken from a live interview and has been edited for clarity and length.
Mark Shaw is all about people. This MSP Titan and CEO of StoredTech swears by the formula that developing partnerships and relationships with employees, clients, vendors and other MSPs is the pathway to success and the only way to truly expand and grow your business.
Robin Robins, founder of MSP Success Magazine and Big Red Media, spoke with Mark to understand how an investment in relationships and partnerships has propelled his company to $15 million in revenue and a 20% growth year-over-year.
Robin Robins: StoredTech is an MSP with a global reach, sporting locations in New York, North Carolina and the Philippines. It’s at about $15 million in revenue and growing at a healthy clip of 20% year-over-year. Mark, tell us a little bit about your company.
Mark Shaw: We started about 13 years ago. We have about 75 employees across multiple time zones, with clients from the small to medium business size all the way up to a large enterprise with 30,000-plus endpoints. We do a little bit of all the things you’d see in a normal MSP, but we also do a lot of access-control camera systems and phone systems as well. We kind of have a scope or scale that’s maybe different than other MSPs out there, but we really try to be that one-stop shop for our clients.
Robin: Are you growing organically or are there acquisitions involved here?
Mark: Both. We like to grow organically, but we have done six acquisitions over the last 13 years. We’re hoping to double our size with a large acquisition in the next 12 to 18 months.
Robin: From your perspective, what do you see as the biggest challenges facing MSPs right now and how are you overcoming them?
Mark: The labor market is tough. We see that everywhere. Finding the right people, getting them on board, getting them ramped up is big. And we want to manage the growth that we’ve been seeing. It just gets bigger, larger and more complex. You add in multiple locations and a global span, and you have a lot of stuff going on there. The biggest thing for us to manage is obviously tech talent. Everyone’s having that same problem. And with acquisitions, it used to be, “Hey, listen, we’re buying you for your book of business and they’re getting a new market” that’s gone. Now, I just want your staff. I want you to make sure we try to keep every one of your top-notch people and bring them on board for us.
One thing that can help with hiring, if you can afford it and you can do it, is to bring recruiting in-house. Having somebody work for us full-time who understands our culture, our people, and who’s embedded and ingrained in our culture, who’s also on our payroll, has been a game changer for us. Hands down. The #1 thing I could say is if you’re an MSP with the means, hire your own recruiter in this market.
Robin: How are you dealing with inflation? Just talk a little bit about that. How have you dealt with having to raise your prices and did you lose clients over it?
Mark: We really held firm and we did not raise prices at any time through most of the pandemic. It was just not something we wanted to do. We thought it would really come off pretty badly: You’ve shut down your business. You’ve had a lot of rough times. Oh, by the way, give us more money. But as we were coming out of it in the first quarter of 2022, we did a 10% increase across the board. We just made it even. We made it straight. It was just a nice precision cut. And we didn’t lose a single client. Clients aren’t going to get upset if they’re paying for what they bought.
It’s scary to you as a business owner. I hated doing it. No one likes to do it. No one likes to be on the receiving end of it. But it’s just smart business. Raise your prices. That’s the one thing we did. And honestly, it really shored up our bottom line. Ultimately, you have to do it or you’re going to have continuously shrinking margins. And then if you do look for an exit or if somebody wants to buy you, they’re going to look at that 10%, 12%, 15% EBITDA and you’re not going to get bought. You’re not going to be the ones they want because of the amount of effort needed to come in and take over.
Becoming partners with your vendors is also just as important as becoming partners with your clients. When you’re having problems, they can help and they’ll be willing to help, especially if you’ve been willing to help them in return. People always spend all this time talking about customer delight, but it’s always focused on the customer. Don’t focus on the customer all the time. Take some of that energy and put it in your vendors. If all you know is your account manager, you don’t know your vendor.
Robin: Where do you see the big opportunities for you as an MSP this year?
Mark: OpenAI, or ChatGPT as most people know it, it’s monetized. You pay for tokens. It’s something that all these people bought these massively powerful tools. I almost pity the smaller MSPs because I know I’ve got at least a dozen people who have all sorts of competencies in this stuff. If I were a three- or four-man band, I don’t know how I’d keep up. It’s getting tougher and tougher. I don’t know if I would have started an MSP in today’s market. But I think there’s a huge opportunity there to train our clients. Our clients have these tools, they have all this power. We always ask, how do we become stickier? We’ve started actively hiring certified trainers and then going back to our clients and offering them training. Make the internal IT departments your friends.
Robin: What other advice do you have for MSPs out there?
Mark: I know a lot of people are saying AI is a fad, but I think MSPs should be ready for it. I was reading an article the other day and it said, and I’m summarizing, that your MSP will not be replaced by AI, but your MSP will be replaced by an MSP that’s using AI. We’re already testing it. Is it going to be perfect? No. But you need to start figuring out how to use it. You know, can we use it for marketing or automation?
If you’re not finding a way to do training and you can’t do it yourself, partner with somebody. Get in front of people and go, “Hey, listen, all this fancy tech that we gave you – how do we show you how to use it better?” If we can help them go from zero to 60 in knowledge, it makes their teams more profitable. It makes them more productive. And the C-level suite loves to see that. They love to know they invested in something that turned out to produce some sort of ROI. So again, talk to your business clients and help them understand the value of training on all these tools they’re already paying for.
