MSP Innovator Or Copycat?

By Peter Briden

To innovate or not to innovate, that is the question.

Long term success for any organization requires a culture of endless innovation. Without it, the organization will succumb to the creative destruction forces popularized by Joseph Schumpeter. However, not all innovation is created equally and there are times to innovate and times to be a copycat.

In my IT services company, there came a time in the late 1990's when we saw the IT business as we knew it coming to an end. It was the height of the Y2K era and we were up to our eyeballs in Y2K remediation work with a definitive hard stop. This was back before the managed services (MSP) world was even a twinkle in the eye and most providers made their living on professional services and break-fix support.

It seemed clear to us that after the big Y2K event all the work we were struggling to get done before deadline would instantly vanish and leave a vacuum in its place. We had to figure out a way to make living off of the break-fit work until the normal IT lifecycles passed. We forced ourselves to make time to think about what lies ahead and thoughtfully invest our profits into our future. We were in uncharted territory and had to make most of it up. Fortunately, we did enough of the right things at the right time to be early adopters of the MSP model. We made it up, we were innovators, and it gave us a unique message in the marketplace and a competitive advantage.

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