MSP 501 Exec of the Year: CompuVision Systems’ David Bridges

CompuVision Systems took action to prevent the spread of COVID-19 weeks ahead of the rest of the industry in Canada. That was largely thanks to the foresight of its president, David Bridges. He knew COVID-19 would be more serious than many of the so-called experts described it at the time.

His quick response earned him the 2020 MSP 501 Special Award for Executive of the Year. These award-winning MSPs demonstrate a willingness to take risks and a deep familiarity with the MSP market. Those are two characteristics that are critical to channel businesses looking to stay ahead of the curve.

CompuVision Systems is No. 254 on the 2020 MSP 501 list.

Bridges joined CompuVision Systems in 2008. He worked his way up from service delivery manager to vice president of operations, and from COO to president. The company has clients across Canada and the United States.

CompuVision’s David Bridges

“I’m here to enable others’ success in whatever way I can do that, whether that’s leadership and coaching, or training or helping to solve problems or providing resources, whatever people need to solve their challenges,” Bridges said.

Early Pandemic Knowledge

Bridges was able to gauge to seriousness of COVID-19 through networking with various peer groups.

“And it just so happened that I had some friends that operated facilities in China and I was getting some early reports on things that were happening over there,” he said. “And also, luckily, I have a background in biology and mathematics. So I was able to get some really great information via friends and peer groups, and then I was able to understand that information and realize, oh, hey, this thing is real.”

When seeing a massive shift to work from home in Asia and then Europe, Bridges began thinking about what this would mean for his company and its clients. He pushed CompuVision Systems’ executive team to take COVID-19 seriously from the beginning. That allowed the company to set up a pandemic team in early March and be prepared for more significant measures like switching to remote work.

“We thought, OK, our clients are going to need to do that,” he said. “And if our clients are going to need to do that, we better be ahead of them. I don’t want to be moving to work from home in the midst of our own changes when our clients need us. So that’s really what made us put our team together, planning out early on what does a move like that look like for us? When should we do it by? How does it need to be organized? What type of communication do we need?”

CompuVision Systems moved to working from home before its clients began asking for help with remote working. It transferred about 5,000 of its clients’ employees to working from home within the first week of the pandemic response.

The MSP had an 86% rise in support ticket volume. It also had twice the amount of service desk calls and more than 13,000 service tickets.

Tough Transition

The pandemic has had a substantial impact on CompuVision Systems, Bridges said. Working remotely has been difficult for everyone.

“You don’t get the office connection that they usually get,” he said. “It’s a little more difficult to build that digitally. But also our clients, everybody is very reliant on technology and even more so when needing to work remotely. So our service volumes spiked just as every other service provider would have seen materially in the first in the first few weeks. And then trailing off to even today, we are operating at higher volumes than than we normally would see for for the typical client load.”

CompuVision Systems’ managed services business has grown amid the pandemic, so it’s been hiring a lot of people, Bridges said. And it’s signed new customers.

“While there’s been disruption in the business, we’ve also been fortunate to experience some good growth,” he said.

Some clients were better prepared than …