When Wayne Hunter sees a gap, he moves to close it—with precision. That mindset, sharpened during his years serving aboard nuclear submarines, has guided him throughout his career as founder and CEO of AvTek Solutions, a managed service provider and compliance services firm based in Allen, Texas.
Now, Hunter is turning that same process-driven discipline toward helping other MSPs with the launch of AvTek’s new Compliance Ready Program—a turnkey offering that enables providers to deliver compliance-as-a-service without building a compliance team from scratch.
Launched at DattoCon earlier this month, the channel program is already gaining traction with MSPs who want to meet growing client demand for cybersecurity compliance while adding a new stream of recurring revenue, Hunter says.
From Internal Solution to Channel Offering
AvTek’s foray into compliance began three years ago, when momentum was building around cyber insurance and the need to be compliant with their requirements. Hunter says his background on nuclear submarines in the U.S. Navy and the importance of process and procedure translated easily to compliance. “To me, compliance was easy to do because it’s a set of rules. It’s not an arbitrary thing.”
At the same time, Hunter saw his own banking clients, which are highly regulated, struggling with lack of guidance around requirements. Compliance auditors would identify issues, he explains, but not how to fix them. “And then after, if they put things in place they really didn’t know, did they actually fix it and is it compliant? They don’t know unless they pay for another audit or wait a year for the next audit. And so folks started talking to me about how can we solve this problem?”
It was a gap Hunter knew he could fill, and that thinking evolved into AvTek’s compliance-as-a-service model, where certified CISOs, CISSPs, and cyber analysts continuously assess a client’s environment, align it to regulatory frameworks, and keep documentation up to date—ensuring clients are “audit ready” year-round.
AvTek’s compliance-as-a-service program supports the alphabet soup of regulatory requirements and frameworks—NIST, CIS, FTC Safeguards Rule, and more—but Hunter says they chose to refer CMMC requests to other providers. “I went through training on [CMMC] and the reason I did it was to understand what was happening in the DoD, because coming out of the military, what happens in the government sooner or later comes to the open market. It’s just the way it works.”
However, he chose to focus on the needs of his target market, banking, and all the firms that work with banks such as legal and accounting.
Building the Compliance Ready Program
Soon, other MSPs began reaching out to Hunter for help. Many had invested in compliance tools but quickly discovered that tools only solve part of the problem.
“The tools only do 20% of the work,” Hunter says. “Most of compliance is human—people analyzing information, writing documentation, updating documentation, validating documentation, validating all this with vendors and everything else.”
Hunter says it was “time to generate my own channel program.” AvTek’s new Compliance Ready Program for MSPs offers two ways to bring compliance services to market:
- White-label partnership: MSPs can rebrand the program as their own and let AvTek’s certified team serve as their behind-the-scenes compliance department.
- Referral partnership: If clients prefer an independent third party, AvTek handles the work directly but still pays the MSP recurring referral revenue for the life of the contract.
Hunter adds, “Then all the work that needs to be remediated or new tools put in place or managed services that need to be put in place, we push all that to the MSP so they can grow their business.”
Built to Scale and Ready to Grow Fast
Hunter invested heavily in personnel and infrastructure before launching the channel program so they can ramp up quickly.
“The tools [are] the easy part around compliance. It’s the people. That’s the hard part, [finding] someone that loves documentation, that loves doing hours of analysis and comparison, [keeping up] with all the changes in state, federal, local, industry … and understand how it’s affecting compliance, how it’s changing frameworks.”
Hunter’s submarine experience also influenced how AvTek structured its internal compliance operations, with a strict “wall” between his managed services staff and compliance staff. It’s all about chain of evidence, something he also learned during his military service on submarines. “How you compartmentalize and do the right things is you set your process and procedure, prove what the rules are, and make sure you follow them.”.
The compliance department, he says, “has no administrative access to anything. Technically, they can’t even deploy their own tools. The IT team has to deploy the tools because we cannot have any administrative access that allows them to even look like they could remediate or manipulate the information. Just the same way the IT team has no administrative access to any of the compliance tools and can’t manipulate it there either. So we put that wall there to prove the chain of evidence. I can prove who had access to it.”
Helping MSPs Win the Compliance Game
For Hunter, the Compliance Ready Program is about more than selling a service—it’s about empowering peers.
“We’re here to help you,” says Hunter. “Let us be the ones that can help you grow business. We want to try to help the other MSPs out there that are struggling with this, give them a way [to] not only grow their IT business, but they can also take part in the actual compliance side and make unrecognized revenues from there. So that’s our goal.”
