The Biggest Challenges 25 MSPs See For Their Business In 2021
We asked MSPs on this year’s MSP 500 list to describe what they expect will be the biggest challenges they face in 2021. Here’s what some of them had to say.
2021 Hurdles
This year began with more uncertainty for businesses than any year going back to the Great Recession, if not further. An ongoing global pandemic—albeit with vaccinations providing hope for a possible end—and an economy struggling to get back on its feet are the early hallmarks of 2021.
As part of the 2021 MSP 500 project, CRN asked MSPs to describe what they see as the biggest challenges they face in 2021.
Many cited the uncertainty surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic and its impact on the economy. Others pointed to the challenge of finding and hiring new employees, especially highly trained IT employees and experienced sales representatives. Providing customers with the IT security they need is a challenge—as is convincing some they need it. And some said standing out in an increasingly crowded MSP market is getting tougher.
Here’s a sampling of the responses that MSPs provided. Some have been edited for clarity.
VirtuIT Systems
Michael Murphy
President
The biggest challenge would have to be fending off public cloud providers as they‘re able to offer deep/cheap solutions to customers. Positioning our value and service while competing with AWS, Azure and the like are always a challenge.
American Digital
Norbert Wojcik Jr.
President, CEO
Getting clients outside their comfort zones. [The company is] having more and more conversations about managed services and managed environments. Many IT executives are open to these discussions but fear loss of control. The biggest challenge is educating them and gaining their trust.
Avitus Technology Services
Cole Halpin
Director
Retention of current clients. Some are still struggling as PPP [Paycheck Protection Program] has dried up and [the company] expects 5 percent to 10 percent of current book-of-business won‘t survive unless something is injected into the economy. We hope to offset this by targeting larger co-managed clients, but the threat is not lost on us.
EpiOn
Don Viar
Managing Partner
Sourcing qualified staff. COVID-19 has shown companies that they can now hire employees to work remotely from anywhere. There is going to be a flattening of the labor market and we are going to have to pay a higher wage than what has traditionally been standard for our region.
iCorp Technologies
Michael Hadley
President, CEO
One of the areas in which we are looking to improve in 2021 is in communicating and educating our clients on the value of [the company’s] services. For many clients, they understand the functionality our services provide, but do not understand the true value of these solutions [for] day-to-day operations. We‘re looking to bridge this gap through improved training and educational sessions and ROI tools such as our RTO calculator (demonstrating the value of backup solutions).
Eplexity
John Clendennen
Co-Founder, CEO
As we continue to grow, the biggest challenge we face is finding and hiring capable cloud resources at every level. From NOC [network operations center] employees to engineers, the talent pool continues to be competitive for locating the best and brightest talent available.
Edafio Technology Partners
Keith Woodruff
CEO
Our challenge and top priority are attracting and retaining top talent and building a more diverse and inclusive workforce. We invest in ongoing professional development and diversity training. We seek university and college career fairs with more diverse identity and affinity groups to find under-represented talent.
Knight Office Solutions
Mitch Huffman
Co-President
Profit Margin. Competition in the SMB market is flooding with low-cost providers.
Iuvo Technologies
Bryon Beilman
President, CEO
We continue to see cheaper, lower-quality MSPs selected over businesses like us—more established, white-glove IT—because of the economy and the understanding of the IT world. IT is still viewed as a cost center with little ROI instead of an integral tool in scaling and growing a successful business.
vCORE Technology Partners
Steve Leavitt
Founder, CEO
The most important challenge for 2021 is to continue to help clients secure their environments in a post-COVID world that is increasingly mobile, remote and has inherent security risks. As we saw with the recent SolarWinds hack, public and private entities continue to face tremendous threats from state actors and cyber-criminals around the world. As a managed services provider, it is critical to our business and to that of our clients to make sure we understand and address these threats through sound policy, up-to-date training and enterprise-class security solutions.
Springboard IT
Elaine Evans
Director
Creating a sense of urgency around security in managed clients and getting them to invest. This is a danger to our clients and us financially and reputationally if something should happen. But with the pandemic, spending is still cautious and having organizations invest in something new can be a challenge. Many people are willing to gamble in areas that they should not be.
2nd Watch
Doug Schneider
CEO
Scale and resources. As more and more enterprises look to outsource their cloud development and management function to focus on higher-level business transformation, we‘re seeing an explosion of opportunities. These appear in the form of cloud optimization, data engineering, application modernization to support cloud native, and security [and] governance. Ensuring we have the correct resources to meet [and] exceed our clients’ expectations is critical to our controlled growth.
Certified Nets
Robyn Howes
President
There are more points of failure than ever before. There are more devices per user that are critical. Our customers’ productivity depends on us troubleshooting home Wi-Fi and home printers and home monitor and home internet connectivity like never before. “Trust in IT” includes all sorts of “elbow grease” for getting creative in providing cables, adapters, customizing spare computers and more.
iVenture Solutions
Gray Mabry
CEO
Talent acquisition. Finding, hiring and retaining employees who fit our culture, have the right technical knowledge and interpersonal skills [is paramount]. We‘re constantly expanding and finding candidates with the right characteristics, which is key to our success internally and with clients.
Allied Technology Group
Matthew Humphries
Managing Partner
The risk of a cyber event, even if that event is not specifically targeting our firm, but we are swept up into a larger event attacking a tool set or vendor we use to deliver our services [is a challenge].
BetterWorld Technology
James Kenefick
Co-Founder, Chairman
With the pandemic, organizations have become increasingly more reluctant to make significant spending or organizational changes. This hesitation will create one of the biggest challenges in terms of educating organizations about why they need a managed IT partner.
YourITgroup
Michael Vu
President
Educating that technology isn‘t just a cost center but can be a tool to drive revenue and profit for clients.
Awecomm
Brent Yax
CEO
Controlling growth. We are steadily increasing gross revenue by approximately 25 percent. As we continue to grow, this pace becomes increasingly difficult to manage operationally. We are working through new models and focusing on process automation to help combat the increasing demand for new employees.
IT By Design
Sunny Kaila
CEO
The continued impact of COVID-19 on small businesses will likely stretch throughout 2021 as many SMBs that weathered the early impact of the pandemic are finding the length of the lockdown and ongoing reduced demand for services such as hospitality, retail, food services and tourism may have a delayed negative impact on the overall economy and their businesses, leaving them vulnerable.
Nerds Support
Scott Richman
Founder, CEO
One of the biggest challenges for Nerds Support will be maintaining company culture in a remote environment. We are going to have to work on more thoughtful collaboration and use remote technologies to enable and improve the employee experience.
Envision Technology Advisors
Todd Knapp
Founder, CEO
Our biggest challenge will be building our managed services customer base. One of the biggest challenges we see from prospects is a reluctance to give a third-party [company] access to, and authority over, internal networks. This is especially true for organizations who have never contracted with a managed services provider before.
We also foresee challenges with prospects looking to switch from one managed service provider to another. With the massive amount of change and costs the business community has faced over the past year, business leaders may be reluctant to introduce change during this still-volatile period.
Infinite IT Solutions
Joe Ussia
CEO
As we offer more services to our customers, their internet connections at home seem to be the biggest bottleneck. With families all at home right now, and children in online school while parents are trying to work online, their single internet connection has clearly become the bottleneck of their ability to achieve their objectives. Making those individuals understand that the problems they are having are because of their ISP is difficult. It is causing trust issues with some customers claiming we are deflecting the blame. We end up spending more cycles than normal to prove our claim, and even then, they don‘t believe it sometimes. Going from a B2B model to a B2C model is really hard.
Lunavi
Shawn Mills
Founder, CEO
Our biggest challenge is to integrate new Agile processes throughout the organization, bringing together our cloud services, managed services and innovation teams under one operation.
Network Solutions & Technology (NST)
William Collins
President
NST feels that our biggest challenge to our business in 2021 is the increasing number of managed services providers over the past year. We feel that the issue is that these new managed services providers are not providing the proper support and security practices. Many new customers that we have worked with over the past 12 months are due to a breach caused by insufficient security practices [and] we are seeing the term ‘MSP’ or ‘managed services provider’ start to get a bad reputation. To overcome this challenge, we are demonstrating to prospects and our existing customers all of the security tools we provide in our offering and their effectiveness.
Ensono
Jeff VonDeylen
CEO
The establishment of new businesses will bring greater demand. The catalyst for this was an acceleration of the need to do things differently—many businesses and business practices that were on the way out were given an extra shove in 2020, making room for new paradigms and new companies. These new companies and new projects will require support, and the skill sets for that support were already in demand and will now be made scarcer. Look for even more significant gaps between skills supply and demand, particularly in cloud and cloud migration capabilities.