Most MSPs know better than to micromanage their team, but it takes more than that to truly scale. Building a reliable MSP engine that keeps running even with your hands off the wheel takes trust, mentorship, and great people, says Greg Brainerd, owner of Houston, Texas-based MSP Braintek.
Here’s how Brainerd is scaling his business so that if he does decide to sell one day, he already has the building blocks in place and the value built in.
Moving into Mentorship
Transitioning from a hands-on role to a mentor figure is a critical shift every MSP owner must make to scale. In fact, that’s exactly why Brainerd decided to move into mentorship— “I wanted to grow,” he says.
“There’s the growth of the business itself, Brainerd says. “How much capacity do I have in my 8- or 10-hour day? I can only do so much. I don’t know how to do accounting. I don’t know how to do this or that. I’ve got to go find experts that can help me do those things.”
Even in areas he’s skilled in, the time constraint has forced him to step back from active technical work, for example. “I don’t have the time and energy to do all the help desk and server work, sell the business, and manage the [client] relationships,” he says. “I’ve got to really find good people, trust them, coach them, and teach them. That helps me scale to the next level.”
Currently, Brainerd is focusing on building his sales and marketing team so he can delegate that work as well. “It’s critical; I’m still in the infancy of trying to build out the department,” he says. “I have one salesperson, one account manager, and one SDR. I’d love to get to that point [where I’m] managing that team, as opposed to going out there [and selling] with them.
Scaling for the Sale
Building your business like you’re planning to sell it one day is key, says Brainard. That way, you’ll get the most out of your MSP when you do decide to sell. A critical component of this is building a business that can run without you in the driver’s seat.
“If you’re doing all the daily tech work, sales work, and whatever, and you’re not scaling that out, someone would have to be able to fill all of those roles to buy [the business] from you. But if I have a company where the technician and sales portions are taken care of, and I’m guiding and coaching all these different people in my company, I can hand that over to somebody. The machine will continue to work,” Brainerd explains. “Making sure that the business can keep going without me will make it easier to sell in the long term.”
With this eventual sale in mind, Brainerd also joined a group focused on M&A. “They’re coaching and guiding us through different things we need to think about in our business,” Brainerd says. “One of them is getting out of debt; not having any debt is going to be very helpful to making sure that you have good profit numbers, no matter how big or small you are.” Brainerd also advises reinvesting profit back into your business, to continue scaling as you go.
Advice for Other MSPs
For Brainerd, learning how to do the aspects of business ownership that didn’t come naturally made a major difference. “I was very good at doing tech, so I didn’t have any problems with that,” Brainerd says. “My problems were learning the types of roles that fall outside of that—sales, marketing, accounting, people management, and public speaking. Taking the time to focus on learning and getting outside my comfort zone to do those things [helped me grow].”
Another key piece of advice he has for smaller MSPs is to get your messaging down. “One of the things I did early on was go to those networking events where you stand up in front of 100 people and give your one-minute commercial. Trying to find the right messaging to talk about was a struggle. I would tell people that we just fixed computers … then I started getting residential computers to repair,” which was not his target audience, Brainerd explains. “So make sure you have that messaging correct.”
“Find those areas of weakness for yourself and be constantly learning, Brainerd advises. “I’m constantly listening to audiobooks, reading books, and going to seminars to learn things I don’t know. And try things—is it going to work? I don’t know, but we’re going to give it a shot. If it doesn’t work, that’s OK; we pivot and do something else.”
To hear more, including the secrets to Brainerd’s work-life balance, his marketing advice, and the real benefits of hiring an account manager, tune into his full episode on the My First Million podcast here. For more MSP success stories, read how Angie Wittke’s sales pipeline got her MSP past $1.
