How MSPs Can Profit from Hiring Underqualified Candidates

… realize profits from your investment and reduce turnover from high-risk employees who know they always have other job options aside from what you’re offering them today.

Ramping Up for the Long Term

In professional services, your people are your product. But trying to solely rely on hiring Michael Jordan-level talent to deliver MSP services instead of relying on sound, effective procedures can put your company’s stability at risk. If you’re solely relying on the quality of your individuals to deliver your IT services, you’re not setting up your MSP to scale for the long term. The long-term play for an MSP requires redundant processes, protocols and a quality of service standard so that clients receive the same quality of support no matter who they interact with on your team.

Since most of the trouble tickets your technicians are working aren’t issues no one has ever seen before, an MSP should be able to rely on the team, not the individual, to figure it out. That’s why we escalate. A team can follow a defined construct of processes that a company’s management team has created to turn inputs and outputs into happy clients. But if your MSP relies on rogue all-stars to deliver your work, it’s going to be much harder to influence any standard of service delivery when that quality is mandated by opinion and not processes. Best to be the ghost in the machine and manage the processes that manage the people.

Successful MSPs are incredibly organized and process oriented. If you’re a college basketball fan like me, I’m always reminded of how Mike Krzyzewski leads his Duke Blue Devils to be a nationally ranked basketball team every year as being a stellar example for how effective the right structure and training can be to the cultivation of a successful team. One of his most memorable quotes, “To me, teamwork is the beauty of our sport, where you have five acting as one,” speaks to a team’s ability to be great because they think as one and act as one.

While you don’t need to build an entire team of Michael Jordan-level talent to be a successful MSP, you can still benefit from Jordan’s advice: “Talent wins games, but teamwork and intelligence wins championship.”

John Davenjay is the CEO of staffing agency Bowman Williams. John founded the company in 2009 after running operations and sales for a managed service and VoIP provider based in Washington, D.C. His firsthand experience of sourcing and hiring MSP employees led to the creation of a staffing firm exclusively focused on helping the MSP industry eliminate the common bottleneck of hiring MSP talent. Forbes ranked Bowman Williams #137 in the Best Recruiting Firms in America in 2018 and the firm is a staffing partner for over 300 MSPs around the country. Reach Davenjay on Twitter: @bowmanwilliams.