Michael George, former CEO of RMM provider Continuum, which ConnectWise acquired in 2019, is taking the helm at Syncro following the abrupt departure last week of CEO Emily Glass. George was most recently CEO at Invicti, an application security company he joined in 2021.
Prior to the ConnectWise acquisition, George had been tapped by Zenith Technology in 2011 to lead its new RMM business, Zenith RMM, which was owned by PE firm Summit Partners. Zenith RMM then rebranded to Continuum and George went on to lead the company through a period of growth, including pioneering outsource services for MSPs.
George’s noncompete agreement with ConnectWise ended in October 2023, four years after the acquisition. He says the board at Syncro approached him around that time, “to see if I couldn’t help supercharge some of the innovation.” Syncro is owned by PE firm Mainsail; four of the senior executives there came from Summit, so they looked to George again. “The whole Q4 of ’23 I got pretty intimately involved,” George says. He formally joined the board in January.
“At the time she [Glass] made the decision to step out, I was asked by the board to step in and become the CEO,” he says.
Asked if Glass was asked to leave, George says, “I think she [Glass] was challenged in what really was needed for the company going forward and perhaps came to that conclusion around the same time the board had been contemplating what to do with the business next. So, I think it’s fair to say that those two things kind of came together at about the same time. It appears abrupt and that might be more because of the way she made her announcement [on LinkedIn].”
He added, “I would describe it as a mutual separation.”
First Order Of Business – From ‘Plumbing’ To Innovation
George says Syncro’s announcement of its product roadmap is just “weeks away,” and will be focused on innovation. “From an investment perspective, over the last year and a half, a lot of work was done investing in ‘plumbing,’ moving from Heroku [cloud platform] into an AWS environment, doing a lot of things that were to modernize the underlying infrastructure and the platform.” However, he says, “I think the investments that were made are super helpful for the long-term benefit of the business but did little to benefit the short-term aspects of our [MSP] partners’ day-to-day lives.”
First order of business, he says, is to “have the market feel universally that we have a spectacular RMM and an equally spectacular PSA.” That effort will start with “just getting a lot of the basics to work much better than they do today.”
Next, says George, they will focus on scaling the product. Syncro is easy for small and early-stage MSPs to use and onboard customers, he says, but “it didn’t have enough feature richness to allow somebody to scale with it.”
Expanding The Platform
Asked if he plans to add more solutions to the platform, George says, “We will be a full platform for those who want to just come here to Syncro and get all of the major features that they need to run their business, but at the same time we won’t feature gate.”
George explains, “The two things that the company gets universally great accolades for, one, is scripting. Our PowerShell scripting is second to none and we do give people a level of automation that rivals or is best in market as anybody could have. And number two is our APIs we’ve invested pretty heavily in and publicly publishing APIs and making them really strong and rich … and we will continue to invest in those two areas.”
The platform buildout will be a combination of organic development and acquisition, he says. “We will go and find the most optimal way to get the best product offering in each category that we can. Some of that will be built because …. we are scaling our engineering team significantly. We’ll increase our capacity to develop, but we also do have financial capacity to acquire.”
Expect some senior leadership announcements soon too, he says. “I have no prohibition [noncompete] on who I can hire, so we are going to be announcing some very significant additions to my executive team,” he says. “There will be names that you know.”
