Vendasta Makes ‘MSP of the Year’ and ‘CIX Top 10 Growth Companies’ Lists

…would have been able to specialize into certain verticals.

Instead, we’ve kept our product to generalized best-in-class, but now we’re bringing in those verticalized products in our marketplace, so for a time, until our marketplace was ready, we probably lost some business in specific verticals that we could have had.

CF: When did you realize you were a managed service provider, i.e., in the technology channel?

BK: When we’ve been looking at our long-term vision, we always wanted to be able to provide products and services to a set of what we call “cloud brokers” to help solve their customers’ problems. We started in the martech stack, but we’ve always wanted to be in the productivity, protections, operations and connectivity stacks. The business vision has never changed and we’re inching closer to it.

It’s sort of two-fold. Right now, we’re allowing digital agencies to become MSPs, insofar as delivering productivity services like Office 365 and G Suite, but we’re also allowing MSPs to compete in the marketing and advertising space. They have some trust with their customers in that space. We also allow other ISVs and MSPs to integrate into our marketplace. The platform is a foundation of opportunity.

CF: What assumptions did you make about the MSP market that were or were not unfounded?

BK: We assumed that there would be a greater gap in logic, but the space is ripe for transformation. When we reach out, people are reaching back. It’s encouraging to see.

CF: What operational shifts were you required to make in order to support and grow this evolved business model?

BK: As you grow as an organization — and we’ve gone from a small organization in 2010 to 300 people today — we’ve had to make many organizational shifts in terms of organizational structure, so moving from a flat structure to a functional structure to a structure organized around our product base to, now, a structure organized around our customers. That is the shift, having a structure organized around your customers, that allows you to be able to focus on the vertically specific industries. You know the old saying, “You ship your work structure”? We, by focusing on the customer, are able to accommodate the differences in the MSP.

The MSP world is a complicated one, and the sales cycle is different. There are a lot of differences, so that’s how we’ve managed to do it — by being able to focus around the customer.

CF: Any other juicy details you’d like to share?

BK: There are a lot of MSPs in North America, and most of them are smaller — fewer than 10 employees — and they’re struggling to make the margins work for their company. I think Forrester said that over half of them are looking to get out.” With the platform that we’re trying to build, we’d be able to serve those MSPs and make their lives fun again.

Today’s SMB needs a full set of solutions, and in order to do the full solution, you have…