IT By Design’s New Platform Emphasizes Employee Culture

IT by Design CEO Sunny Kaila and his wife CRO Kam Kaila aim to solve MSPs’ talent issues with Team GPS, which will assist in engaging with employees and how to move forward in the new normal of hybrid work.

IT By Design launched a new software platform, Team GPS, that centralizes employee engagement and performance management for MSPs looking to promote a people-centric culture in the workplace.

The tool brings together everything from individual performance to the company’s vision and strategy to performance management.

“It gives MSPs a tool to have the education for leadership, how to lead people well and how to be a people-centric organization,” Sunny Kaila (pictured left), founder and CEO of master MSP IT By Design, told CRN.

Finding great techs and retaining great techs is one of the biggest challenges right now, he added.

To help with the culture side of the workplace, IT by Design offers an MSP a “community of practice” in which education pillars are offered as well as leadership solutions.

“We are a people company,” Kaila said. “We are solving MSPs’ talent issues. The main thing that we are seeing with MSPs is that they are having a hard time leading that talent on the culture side … the people-centric side. They’re very tech-centric, not people-centric.”

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Kaila, along with his wife Kam Kaila (pictured right), president and CRO of the company, started IT By Design as an MSP. As an MSP, Sunny couldn’t find what he was looking for in a 24-hour Network Operation Center service so he decided to create his own. Once partners started asking to use his service, he knew he could charge for it, “and that’s when the master MSP was born.”

To prevent conflict, the service is now only sold through the channel. The company has more than 600 employees and is based in Jersey City, N.J., with offices in India and the Philippines.

With so many MSP employees not returning to the office, Team GPS (which stands for goal, performance and strategy) will assist in engaging with employees and how to move forward in the new normal of hybrid work.

Kam said when it comes to hiring, finding someone who fits into the company’s culture is more important than finding someone with the right talents.

“Culture, hands down every day of the week,” she told CRN. “We can teach people how to install a Windows server. We can teach people how to configure a firewall. We cannot teach people to be good human beings, and we can’t teach people how to have the value system that is important to us as an organization.”

She said finding people that align with a company’s value system and understand what makes a company tick is much more important.

“We believe in lifelong learning,” she told CRN. “If you don’t have the right value system, it doesn’t matter how technical you are. Hiring for values trumps technical abilities any day of the week.”

IT By Design isn’t just preaching values, it’s practicing it too.

“We have happy core values,” Kam said, explaining that her company embodies humility and accountability.

“Our final one is it is your community,” she said. “We want people to feel that it’s your community and you’re leading it. We were intentional about adding the ‘your’ community into it, because it’s this sense of owning something and being a part of something that is so integral to us. It’s being a part of something bigger.”

IT by Design’s focus is to also educate and share knowledge with its MSPs. Through its Build IT University, which is an online educational platform with tools and template, and a Build IT Live event each summer, its sole focus is to bring MSPs together to educate.

“If we don‘t educate our people, our communities won’t grow,” Kam said.

IT By Design has partnered with Datto to fund 30 scholarships for people in the MSP space to learn and grow their talents, according to the couple.

“GPS is going to be a mic drop,” Kam said. “I’‘s going to change things in this channel. It’s going to make people think about people. It’s going to make them prioritize their people.

“We‘re being intentional about paying it forward and providing education and thought leadership and that next layer of leadership that is so needed in our channel,” she added.