In 2020, the global managed services market was worth more than $152 billion . By 2026, that number is projected to increase by 180% to reach more than $274 billion.
There are about 40,000 managed service providers (MSPs) in the U.S., and about 132,000 worldwide. And at least 50% of all small and medium sized businesses use an MSP today. It’s a market that’s on pace to grow 2.5X by 2030.
We can safely say modern work—especially modern remote work— is being driven by managed IT services.
We’re navigating our workdays with complex webs of hardware infrastructure, software systems and cloud-based computing. And to keep these things running smoothly, in addition to getting the technical support and security we all require to work from anywhere, having expert partners in IT services is an ideal way to operate.
But amidst all this rapid growth and change, what does the future of work hold for the MSP businesses themselves? And what about the teams running them?
I spoke with leaders from four different MSP businesses across the United States and one in Ireland. Here’s what they each had to say about how remote work is shaping what they do, how they see remote work flexibility impacting their businesses going forward, and what they predict the future of work will look like for their businesses and others in this space in the coming years.
1. Hiring outside of local
Like most MSPs, BACS Consulting Group made an accelerated move to working remotely in the wake of COVID-19.
“What started as a mere necessity mandated by lockdowns and quarantines has evolved into a permanent situation for most of our staff,” said Jeremy Kushner, CEO.
The business is headquartered in Northern California with additional physical locations in Southern California and Tijuana, Mexico. It has a distributed group of more than 25 employees, 95% of whom worked out of one of its physical offices prior to the pandemic.
Now, two years later, 80% of the team works remotely from their homes. And the few who are still office-based either don’t have appropriate workspaces at their residences or have positions that require regular office presence, he said.
“The transition has made for a very happy staff. They appreciate and enjoy the conveniences of being at home while, at the same time, not having to contend with the daily traffic jams that badly plague all three geographies where we have offices.”
But there’s another big advantage to the business’s new remote work arrangement, said Kushner.
“(It) has afforded us the advantage of being able to hire well-qualified staff from outside our standard geographies."
"Given the challenging hiring environment, this has made for a vastly improved pool of candidates. With better candidates, we can continue to improve the experience we provide to our end users.”
While Kushner and his team have found the headlines about The Great Resignation to be overblown to a certain extent, they admit it can be challenging to find candidates to fill lower-level positions when they’re being very specific about geography.
But when they open up the positions to nationwide applicants? The pool of candidates becomes deeper and richer. And when it comes to onboarding and training these new remote team members, the company has already gone through the process of fine-tuning and streamlining its processes. The move toward remote work made that a necessity.
“We have become much more efficient at getting new employees up-to-speed and, in turn, have created a more user-friendly and enjoyable experience. This has also set us up perfectly for continuing to hire employees remotely.”
BACS has no plans to change its hiring practices, nor its current remote-flexible work model, said Kushner.
“The remote work arrangement for us is here to stay for the foreseeable future. With the happy and comfortable staff this situation has created, we truly believe it has strengthened our team and improved our service offering.”
2. The importance of managing processes
The team at Mainstreet IT Solutions in New Holland, Pennsylvania is finding a hybrid work arrangement to be the most effective work model for its MSP business.
“As a business owner, I personally love being able to see everyone face-to-face,” said Nick Martin, Director of Managed Services. “Yet there are varying circumstances from each employee that may make more sense to provide remote work.”
Mainstreet requires at least a partial on-site per week to maintain communication, he said. Team members have the opportunity to see one another, but also the flexibility to work from home.
“Because of this hybrid work model, we have been learning that how we build processes for work is incredibly important for us to establish and for our employees to fully understand."
There are two broad types of processes Martin described:
- those related to the business’s culture, and
- those related to its operational performance.
“Flexible work schedules have made the line between work-life and home-life very blurry,” he said. “We would prefer to grow a culture that can create a very clear and distinct line for home/work life balance, so having a set work schedule is something we really push for.”
So while Mainstreet’s team members are suggested to work a set schedule to prevent them from overworking, there’s flexibility in terms of what that schedule looks like on an individual level.
In terms of developing standard operating procedures, Martin said they build them out to help deliver and cater to their key performance indicators (KPIs). Mainstreet monitors its KPIs daily through management so it can quickly audit what is and and isn’t working.
“As we look at a hybrid work model, these procedures become even more important to follow,” said Martin. “When staff are in the office, we can visibly see one another and adjust pretty quickly to issues and escalate responses if needed. However, when working from home, the lack of face-to-face interaction could be a potential disruption causing delays in response and escalation times.”
Martin said it’s important for both an MSP’s dispatch team and its technicians to understand the value of the business’s standard operating procedures to ensure all the procedures set in place are diligently followed. This will support a more efficient and effective future of work for the business.
3. MSP team culture challenges
“The shift in work has actually been advantageous to us as an MSP as remote-work technology has become more important for firms,” said Stephen Riddick, VP, Sales and Marketing for CSP, Inc. —an MSP based in Raleigh, North Carolina.
“We had the technology in place to easily adapt to remote work. Thus, it was an easy transition. The biggest challenge is to maintain our culture in a remote setting.”
This was of paramount importance for CSP, said Riddick.
“To keep our tight-knit relationships in place, we tried to be creative and leverage technology to the best of our ability."
"For example, instead of having in-person happy hours, we had virtual happy hours. We did a virtual brewery tour and tasting. In general, we were very deliberate about making sure our engagement remained high.”
The team’s culture has also shifted as the pandemic has progressed, he said. As some initiatives became stale, new ones were introduced. And the business has continued to tweak its processes to ensure it has the best approach possible when it comes to hiring, onboarding and training new members of the team.
While CSP is still operating fully remote, Riddick anticipates the team will move to a hybrid model sometime soon—but never completely back to the office.
“There are multiple reasons why we wouldn’t go back to full-time in-person. First, we found our productivity remained extremely high while in a remote setting. There wasn’t a negative business impact. Next, our corporate culture embraces flexibility and work-life balance that aligns much better with a hybrid approach. Finally, to attract and retain the best people, we can’t be full-time in-person. I believe that would hinder our ability to hire the best and brightest.”
4. Greater flexibility for MSP employees
“The pandemic and resulting global shut down has accelerated many different aspects of the workforce and work environments that would have otherwise taken years to develop,” said Anthony Buonaspina, CEO and Founder of LI Tech Advisors . “MSP/ITSP businesses were not only able to acclimate the fastest to this new work environment, but were also able to assist many other businesses to adapt as well.”
And being adaptable and flexible has created some clear benefits for Buonaspina’s business and his team. LI Tech Advisors began using a hybrid work model two years before the pandemic began. Team members go to the office on a rotating basis and set the schedule for this arrangement themselves.
“We have found that this has allowed for a better work-life balance for our employees,” he said. “I have to say that my employees tend to give 110% all the time and employee productivity is the best it has ever been. [They] really appreciate this flexibility of working remotely, especially with fuel prices soaring.”
And an important point for the business is that the team has been able to service its clients as well as or even better than before, he said. The team has come up with automated ways and new processes and procedures to work effectively while remote, which has made the business more efficient and increased profitability overall.
Buonaspina said productivity is up around 40% and team members are experiencing much less interruption from one another during the workday. Additionally, absenteeism has gone down and retention and loyalty have both improved.
“I see this trend for having, and even increasing, a remote workforce—especially for MSPs—as a win-win scenario."
“I now have two employees that have moved out-of-state that have had a net positive effect on the business with increased productivity. I also see that even though here on Long Island there may be limited talent available to hire, I now can hire from pretty much anywhere and tap into this new “web of talent” and integrate those new employees into our infrastructure and business culture rather easily.”
This also gives the business the flexibility and the opportunity in the future to hire employees in different time-zones to accommodate potential new clients that work outside LI Tech Advisors' normal business hours, he said.
“The bottom line is that the remote workforce is here to stay and any business that does not embrace and lean into this change will find themselves being left behind.”
5. The final push for adoption of the remote team tech stack
Over the pond, Peter Strahan is Director at Lantech IT —a Dublin, Ireland-based MSP business. He chatted with us about how companies have been making the push to adopt a more condusive remote team tech stack over the past couple of years and as we continue to move ahead into the future of work.
“The Pandemic forced businesses to rapidly adopt what was expected to be a short-term work-from-home mandate,” he said. “Many businesses had no option but to leverage existing technology that was never intended to be a primary or permanent platform for remote work.”
After the realization that COVID wasn’t a two, three or even six-month event, businesses began to explore systems and services that could provide a better experience for their remote teams, he said.
“We have seen new and existing clients completely re-evaluate their approach to the working environment. Many new clients came to us as their existing providers were not able to assist them in adopting new technology or leveraging the cloud to replace legacy or traditional on-premise workloads.”
Over the last 18 months, the team at Lantech has seen an intense acceleration in systems like:
- Microsoft Teams
- SharePoint, and
- OneDrive.
This acceleration has driven a confidence and desire for cloud technology, said Strahan. And while the business deployed Teams rapidly in the early months of the pandemic to help support its clients, it’s now seeing the payoff with projects around improved communications to help productivity, adoption of cloud phone systems with Teams enablement, and wholesale Cloud migrations of on-premise applications and servers.
While Lantech has been cloud-first for a number of years, it was a part of the business that was slow to take off at a significant scale, said Strahan. However, the world of remote and hybrid working has transformed that. The business completed more Azure migrations and whole native Azure deployments in the past twelve months than in the previous three years.
“We’re now leading the way for Sage and SAP hosting with Azure Virtual Desktop that enables clients to access better talent and drive productivity,” he said.
“There is a realization post-COVID that businesses must enable their staff to work from anywhere, anytime and remove obstacles that create unnecessary distractions or hurdles to effective productivity. It is this that’s driving investment in technology.”
A more flexible work model for the MSP industry?
While other teams of knowledge workers in other industries look at four-day workweeks, in the MSP space companies are looking at how to build work schedules that align with the needs of their businesses, their customers and their team members.
“In our line of work as managed IT services, we cannot allow 4-day workweeks for our technical roles,” said Mainstreet’s Martin.
“Our customers are operating six days, or sometimes seven days, a week, so we cannot lessen those days to four.”
However, he did say that for non-technical roles, he could see a four-day workweek become a possibility. It hasn’t been a big point of discussion with his internal team at this point though.
CSP’s Riddick spoke similarly:
“I do not anticipate moving to a 4-day workweek. As an MSP, we have to work and be available when our clients are working. We would be one of the last firms to shift to a 4-day week, and only if all other clients had already done so.”
As did LI Tech Advisors’ Buonaspina:
“Due to the nature of our business, we most likely will continue with a 5-day workweek and we tend to only bring on clients that support our structure.”
The point is, there are working hours that need to be covered and clients that need to be supported in the MSP industry. And availability and quick response is no doubt a measure of success in this space.
Whether or not a shortened work week will eventually spread to the MSP industry is yet to be seen. But for now, the future is certainly looking at least more flexible.
A few final words on the future of work for MSPs
Like businesses across every other industry, MSPs have made some big steps when it comes to work flexibility and evolution. And not only are MSP businesses making big changes for themselves and their teams, but also they’re supporting their clients in their efforts to do the same.
The future of work is a continually moving target. But as everything from hiring and culture to operational processes and business requirements shift, it’s the MSP businesses that are embracing these changes that will continue to excel and best-serve their clients. They’ll also continue to be part of this fast-growing industry that’s more relevant to the future of work than ever before.
