![]() ![]() Every time some, generally bad, change was made, it was usually prefaced with something about how this is what their peer group told them or what some bigger MSP does. I had a pretty good relationship with one of the owners, so he told me a lot of the behind the scenes stuff. If you want to run your MSP as a profit center for the owners by underpaying employees and creating a horrible culture, you'll get what you want in the end, but at what expense? If your employees are leaving you at rates of 25-40% per year, you can say you have the "best culture" all you want, but that is objectively false, as you wouldn't have a turnover problem if that was the case. Once they started doing that, the turnover rate increased, but I still think it would be ~20% on the high end. In other words, force your most expensive people out so you can replace them for cheaper/newer people with less experience. One big MSP convinced them that it was better to let your top people quit and move on to promote internally, and it wasn't practical to have really good long term employees who just clogged the pipeline for others trying to move up the ladder. Specifically, limiting raises, making promotions harder, refusing to really built out certain teams, etc. But that also was due, IMHO, to the company starting to adopt these policies they learned from "peer groups". Still, I would say we might have had 10% turnover even in our worst year.Įventually turnover started getting higher. But going from ~15 employees to ~50, that was a bit to be expected. Over the years, our turnover definitely increased. It started out as a great place, but as we grew, so did the complications. I think one person in five or so years quit for family reasons. They had the same group of people that started, no one had left, and they had added more people along the way. The MSP I used to work for had basically a 0% turnover when I first started many years ago. If you have excellent service, the clients (and therefore the revenue) will come.Ī business is only as strong as the team itself. If you take care of your team, they will provide excellent service. In reality, businesses thrive by putting employees first, service second, and clients/revenue third. Of course, it's easy to say all of this without knowing the specifics, but I do think MSP culture as a whole tends to put the client first and the team second (if not third). Either way, if a business can't pay an employee a wage that enables them to not just live, but thrive, in their environment, the business will ultimately be doomed to fail through talent loss. Sometimes, the clients literally can't pay more. Sometimes, the owner doesn't want to have the "you have to pay more" conversation with a client. While he may have been telling the truth, as a MSP owner you need to constantly be looking for ways to increase the top line revenue, especially when the cost of wages and benefits are trending strongly upward. I've seen people take lateral moves, or even take a step downward, for a company where they feel more valued and more respected, and feel they have a greater likelihood in sharing in the fruits of their labor. Like the employees are all working their butts off, the company is earning record profits, and the extra money just goes into the owners' pockets, while the people doing the work don't get pay raises or bonuses from the record profits. However, I've worked a couple of places where the real point of frustration was more about the feeling of being taken advantage of. if you get paid $100k you'll leave for a place that pays $110k for example. A lot of people will think about these things merely in terms of absolute dollar amounts, e.g. I feel like this might help employee satisfaction more than people might think. Anything above that goes to salaries and benefits. We have opened the books and limit firm profitability to a certain percentage. We are focused on growing as the best solution to this problem. This creates the problem that its hard to get promoted since no-one leaves. ![]() We have opened the books and limit firm profitability to a certain percentage.We fire customers that will not adopt our advice - engineers should not be forced to band-aid systems that clients won't let us build correctly in the first place.We fire customers that are not professional. ![]()
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