While your local area can absolutely pose some unique challenges, it’s no excuse not to grow your MSP business. No one knows that better than Will Lee, president of PNC IT, an MSP based in Soldotna, Alaska.
Solving the Talent Drought
Being located in a small market has meant Lee has to get creative to keep bringing in new talent. “Talent is at a premium, to some degree,” Lee says. “There’s not a lot of experience that we can hire, so when we do hire experience, we usually have to bring them from out of state, which is increased cost.” To incentivize promising talent to move to Alaska, PNC pays for moving expenses and offers a variable signing bonus.
Over the last three years, PNC has worked on building out their processes for training and upscaling their employees internally. “It’s a living, breathing, in-progress thing,” says Lee. “We’re constantly trying to improve—better SOPs, better onboarding, and better training methodology,” Lee explains.
PNC uses what Lee calls the journeyman apprentice model to train new employees. “We assign a new employee with an existing employee and give them definitive timelines on how long they can work together, so that there can be shared transfer of knowledge, culture, and workflow,” he says. While it’s still a work in progress, Lee says it has certainly helped training efforts so far.
Additionally, Lee describes the staff as a whole as a “hivemind.” “Everybody can be used as a resource,” he says.
Taking Care of Remote Area Clients
One of the biggest challenges PNC has had to overcome is how to properly care for clients in remote areas. As the biggest state in the U.S.—twice the size of Texas—Alaska poses a unique problem of having both densely populated cities (with plenty of other MSPs to compete with) and vast amounts of land with few residents.
“It’s a logistic challenge,” says Lee. “We need to travel 900 miles to help [some clients]. A lot of people don’t understand that we are already essentially working in a state the size of the contiguous U.S.” Common solutions to this problem, such as outsourcing to local technician companies like Field Nation, also don’t exist in Alaska.
Plus, it’s not like there’s zero competition. “There are [quite a few] MSPs here,” Lee says. “It’s interesting because it’s a really condensed market [in the cities]. But then you start going outside of those areas, and you’ve got the [remote] markets we’re constantly trying to work with.”
PNC overcomes these challenges with great remote services, supported by high-quality tools for this purpose. “We’re using tools that can let the clients be our eyes and hands when needed in emergency situations,” Lee says. “And everything is scheduled. We have a trip we take weekly to go visit our clients; it doesn’t sound like much, but they’re 80 miles away. That’s an hour-and-a-half to two-hour drive, one way. So we go weekly, to make sure things are working properly as we get further and further remote. We work with our clients to make sure we can get to them as regularly as possible, as fits their schedule and their need.”
Advice for Other MSPs
“Do the stuff you don’t really want or like to do,” Lee says. “If you don’t do it today, where are you going to be in three years? You have nothing to lose. You gotta try [the new thing].”
“Just like with anything,” Lee says, “if you want to grow, you have to try new things.”
PNC averages around 14% year-over-year growth, though that number dropped last year due to their recent marketing investment and some staffing changes. This includes both replacing staff members who have left for various reasons and hiring new team members to increase efficiency.
Luckily, PNC has been focused on streamlining their hiring and onboarding process for several years, so they were well prepared for this shift.
PNC’s next major goal is to expand out of Alaska, namely to Hawaii. “There’s a direct flight between Alaska and Hawaii, which makes it real easy,” Lee says. “[We’re looking to] become more national; I don’t know why it’s taken us this long, but I think it’s certainly possible now, with the foundation we’ve built to support [it].”
For more MSP success stories, check out how Quantum Tech’s major restructure paved the way for success.
