As your MSP business grows, your teams throughout the company must adapt. In the beginning, every employee will need to wear several hats and possess a generalist skill set to meet demands with a small team. Then as your business expands, you’ll be able to bring more talent on board and create smaller, specialized roles for your employees.
The real trick to smooth sustained growth is recognizing the right time to shift strategies. While generalists are a key component of early success, they become less helpful as the company grows. Let’s take a look at some helpful tips for structuring your MSP team through the different stages of growth:
Generalists Are a Powerful Resource
As an MSP, it makes sense to hire the cream of the crop. What IT provider wouldn’t benefit from having experts in every service that they offer? Unfortunately, hiring those experts may not be a realistic option for young companies who are just trying to get their foot in the door.
In the early going, generalists are a vital resource that will keep your business afloat and put you in a position to grow. That is why with your first hires, you should seek out employees that have a wide breadth of knowledge that can help fulfill multiple roles. This helps young MSPs to keep their costs down without neglecting the vital services that clients need. Finding a reliable teammate who can go from troubleshooting network issues to answering support tickets, to hopping on a sales call provides flexibility that is a huge help to small teams.
Creating Lanes of Focus
One downside of hiring generalists is that they may not possess the specialized skills needed to make the shift to specialization later on. If your MSP is entering a scaling phase, you should point employees in the direction of a more specialized focus without sacrificing their flexibility. We recommend creating “lanes of focus” which spotlight unique skill sets for each individual employee. This allows them to handle requests that fall into their area of expertise and provides a roadmap for career development, yet they can also help out team members with other tasks.
When you first start your MSP, your engineers will have their hands in many aspects of the business. Their duties may include remote work, field work, help desk work, or project work. As time goes on, you’ll hire both Level I and Level II engineers and split up those duties. Level I engineers may do most of their work remotely, but every now and then may be required in the field. On the flip side, your Level II engineers may spend most of their time in the field, but also may be required to answer calls from the help desk on occasion. This is beneficial to both the company and employees as they gain experience in a variety of tasks but have a defined focus for future training and development.
As your team continues to grow, you should look to limit hiring generalists and instead focus on specialists. Start exploring specialization options for generalists early on in their employment. Over time, you can continue training in those areas and help convert them into a more specialized role.
Team Size and Management Needs
As your teams grow, ensure that you never allow a team to get too big without promoting or hiring a manager. Teams that grow too large without a leader are likely to become disorganized and ineffective. Any team with 6 to 8 team members must have a manager to help guide the team and stay focused.
In the beginning, that manager may have to play the part of both a player and a coach, managing the team and also getting their hands dirty with the day-to-day work. As the team stabilizes, they can transition into a pure management role.
When your MSP reaches the stage of hiring managers, it can be an exciting and nerve-racking time. It's an expensive undertaking, but one that is necessary to facilitate growth. Hiring managers also means a longer, more in-depth hiring process as each manager will play a critical role in the success of your company.
Conclusion
At BrightGauge, we know the growth challenges you face because we also had the same experience while growing our MSP. Navigating the issues that come with that growth can be difficult, especially as policies and strategies change. Missteps in employee management, hiring, and delegation can stifle what would be a healthy growth rate. Rather than find yourself unprepared later in the game, remember the benefits of hiring generalists in your early stages, and then strategically shift toward specialization, and you're sure to succeed in all stages of your business.
Want to continue the conversation on hiring for your organization?
Listen in on our podcast featuring John Davenjay, CEO of the IT Services staffing firm Bowman Williams, for a conversation on finding and keeping the right employees in an MSP.
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