ABOUT MSP REBOOT
I started in a garage.
Literally.
Not as a metaphor. My business partner and I co-founded an MSP in 1999 with no investors, no clients and no office. We built it, ran it together for 24 years, and sold it in 2023.
I learned this by having to make payroll, answer the phone, deal with customers and fix the problem — not by studying MSPs from the outside.
HOW IT WENT
Chronologically, then.
1994
Before any of it was called managed services.
I started in IT in 1994 and founded DCS, doing warranty work and enterprise consulting. My background goes back further than that — Token Ring, ThinNet, ThickNet coax. A Commodore VIC-20. A TRS-80.
I didn't read about infrastructure. I ran the cables.
1999
A concrete-block garage and a cable modem.
My business partner and I co-founded Superior IT Solutions Inc. in 1999. No investors, no clients, no office. A concrete block garage, PC repair, and a cable modem.
We were running hosted Microsoft Exchange out of that garage, on that cable modem, before anyone would have called it a cloud service. It worked until it didn't, and then we learned why.
2000s
Getting out of break/fix.
First real location was 1,500 square feet. We grew it to 3,300, divided the space, and subleased the other half. Having tenants in the building turned out to be a business: we started selling them internet access, hosted VoIP, whatever made sense. We were one of the first local hosted VoIP providers in the area.
Somewhere in there we stopped doing residential and break/fix entirely and committed to managed services and enterprise consulting. That was the decision that actually changed the business.
2008
Building infrastructure because we needed it.
We moved into hosted services on a 1.2 Mbps SDSL connection, which felt like a lot at the time. Added cabinets, battery backup, a generator, and built a micro data center out of necessity before anyone called it that. Became early fiber metro ethernet customers through FDN, starting around 10 Mbps when that felt enormous.
We got involved in the early development of Colo 5, a 125,000-square-foot data center. Later exited that.
2012
Our own data center.
We bought our own 4,500-square-foot facility cheap, subleased space so the mortgage paid for itself, and ran the same playbook again — selling tenants internet, VoIP, hosted Exchange and more.
We built it with redundant power, redundant cooling, and a diverse-entry dark fiber ring connecting to multiple carriers and regional data centers. Ten racks in the primary facility, plus a rack at a second site for replication and disaster recovery on the same ring.
Over twelve years operating that data center we had under four hours of unplanned outage and under eight hours of planned. Through three hurricanes.
24 years
What the business actually looked like.
Across the run we consistently supported around 60 managed-services customers and roughly 1,200 endpoints. Colocation, hosted backup, web hosting, hosted VoIP, hosted Exchange. We sold infrastructure wholesale to other MSPs too.
Zero virus, malware, or ransomware outbreaks in that entire period. That was not luck, and it was not one product. It was boring decisions made consistently.
Our stack was a pragmatic mix of commercial software, open source, and things we wrote ourselves. We focused relentlessly on standardization, efficiency and operational discipline — doing what most MSPs say they will do but rarely execute consistently. That is where the margin came from.
2023
Sold it.
We sold the business in 2023. I stayed on with the new company for a short period, then moved on.
Then I did something useful for this conversation: I worked with and for other MSPs. That is where the pattern got obvious.
WHAT 24 YEARS ACTUALLY TEACHES YOU
The patterns only get obvious in hindsight.
We made expensive mistakes and some very good calls. Over 24 years of building, breaking and fixing things — in the data center, in client relationships, in pricing, in hiring — the shape of both becomes hard to miss.
The expensive mistakes had a shape.
Too much complexity. Too many exceptions. Pricing that didn't reflect reality. Decisions made under pressure instead of by design. Every costly lesson we had traced back to one of those four.
The good calls were usually subtraction.
Almost every decision I would repeat involved simplifying something that had quietly gotten out of hand, or ending something we should have ended a year earlier.
Most MSPs are not short of customers.
After the sale, working with other MSPs, I kept seeing the same thing: the problem is rarely a lack of clients. It's inefficiency, solution sprawl, tunnel vision, and weak internal feedback loops. The answer offered is almost always more tools, more vendors, or more sales.
The best information is already inside the business.
Employees and customers will tell you exactly what is broken if anyone asks them properly. Most owners never do, and then buy a dashboard instead.
A profitable MSP is easier to manage. An easier MSP to manage is less stressful to run. Most owners already know what's wrong — they just haven't had the time, or the outside perspective, to do anything about it.
"You should manage your MSP.
Your MSP should not manage you."
Too many MSPs are trapped — overworked, undermargin, reacting to everything instead of running anything. That's not bad luck. It's the result of decisions that compound over time: the wrong clients, the wrong pricing, the wrong complexity.
Most of it is fixable. But it takes someone willing to look at the actual numbers and operations — not just the symptoms.
EXPERIENCE
What I bring to the table.
There's no wall of client logos here, and I'm not going to borrow anyone else's. What I have is having done the job.
Running the business
- Owning and operating an MSP for 24 years
- Pricing and agreement structure
- Client profitability and segmentation
- Vendor negotiation and vendor management
- Hiring, staffing and technician management
- Building an MSP and eventually selling it
Running the service
- Help desk and technical support operations
- Service delivery and escalation design
- Documentation and process standardisation
- Operational metrics that actually mean something
- Client relationships, including the difficult ones
Running the technology
- Datacenter design and operations
- Networking, fiber and carrier infrastructure
- Cybersecurity strategy and stack selection
- Backup and disaster recovery
- Hosting and virtualization
- Software development and automation
WHY MSP REBOOT
I've run the business you're running.
I'm not a consultant who read a book about MSPs. I ran one for 24 years and wore every hat doing it. Marketing, sales, technical, customer relations, R&D. I know what it's like to be stretched across all of it at once, to make decisions with incomplete information, and to live with the results either way.
I built MSP Reboot to help MSPs become more efficient and to give back practical resources — without the vendor shilling and pay-to-play advice that dominates most MSP spaces. That's also why the free resources are genuinely free and why I'll tell you when the answer is to change nothing.
I can help you confirm what you already suspect are your shortcomings — or point you toward things you haven't thought to look at yet. The goal either way: a more profitable MSP, a cleaner operation, and a lot less of your life spent fighting fires.
Since selling the MSP I have kept building software: free open-source tools for MSPs, commercial products, and hosted services. All of it is listed in the products and services directory. The engineering write-ups, including how this website was built, are on MyAppDone, my development practice.