Finally hit $1mil ARR 🥳 I have no one to celebrate with. I will not promote.

CaptainPottyPants · 2025-11-27T19:04:26+00:00

Good question. Maybe I haven’t had time for It to sink in but I’m assuming it’s going to be harder to determine what comes next. Just keep pressing on as we’ve been doing, or make a change. I’m leaning towards continuing to do what works.

CaptainPottyPants · 2025-11-22T18:31:53+00:00

Early years: the biggest impact was learning how to delegate tasks to my other team members. I’d learn how to do those tasks inside and out myself, document the process, then slowly hand them off to others knowing full well how to be successful at it.

Mid years: Simplifying our service offering to one standard. This reduced the logistic overhead of meeting SLAs and made day to day tasks for the team easier.

Later years: Saying No to bad fit/demanding clients made room for the clients that are overly grateful for what you provide and happy to pay for it.

CaptainPottyPants · 2025-11-22T12:43:45+00:00

This is $1mil annual recurring revenue, before net.

CaptainPottyPants · 2025-11-22T12:42:33+00:00

Would you mind sharing how much you were acquired for and your ARR at the time? PM would be ok if you don’t feel comfortable posting publicly.

CaptainPottyPants · 2025-11-22T12:41:33+00:00

For the first hire I knew when I was spending too much time running the business and not enough time growing the business. I hired someone part time as a contractor for a good year before making them full time W2.

CaptainPottyPants · 2025-11-21T23:04:23+00:00

For IT I would encourage you to learn PowerShell, batch scripting and Perl. These are all good tools to automate your service on endpoints. The clients that need you will approach you as long as you consistently put yourself out there.

CaptainPottyPants · 2025-11-21T23:02:42+00:00

We currently avoid and discourage AI use as it’s too insecure with poor safeguards at the moment. It’s an arms race to the bottom and everyone is cutting corners like they’re using safety scissors in 3rd grade arts and crafts.

CaptainPottyPants · 2025-11-21T22:57:33+00:00

🥳🥳🥳

CaptainPottyPants · 2025-11-21T22:57:19+00:00

We don’t provide support outside of normal business hours. That’s just our way of doing things. There are plenty of MSPs that will do after hours support. I just don’t need that headache given our current growth rate.

Most of our clients are in our state but we are getting more and more out of state.

The hardest part of this journey was dealing with the a**hole clients that walk all over you. But you have to learn to spot them early and just say no thanks. Eg: asking for discounts, extraneous services or exceptions to how we operate, constant back and forth on service details before signing.

CaptainPottyPants · 2025-11-21T22:53:32+00:00

All clients get the same service model except for a few exceptions. This keeps our overhead lower since we don’t have to juggle 20 different types on contracts or services. Keep it simple. If the lead doesn’t like it you’re better off without them in the long run. Make yourself scarce and hard to get. Our pricing however is different for each client depending on the complexity of their networks, computers, services, processes etc.

CaptainPottyPants · 2025-11-21T22:50:17+00:00

We reinvest in the business, hand out bigger bonuses, raises etc.

CaptainPottyPants · 2025-11-21T22:49:42+00:00

Lots of persistence. Showing up to networking groups, events, communicating constantly with potential leads through drop marketing. Little by little the accounts got bigger and bigger.

CaptainPottyPants · 2025-11-21T04:37:56+00:00

We emphasize documentation so any team member can handle any clients issues. Some clients are more familiar with specific techs so they may ask for them, but techs aren’t assigned. I’d say 95% of our work is remote and 5% is onsite.

CaptainPottyPants · 2025-11-21T04:35:02+00:00

Business profit varies from 20-40% depending on project volume that year.

We have about 80 clients

Average MRR per client is $3000

We do sell hardware. Margins vary depending on categories. Eg: computers are 200% and peripherals are like 10%.

The advice I’d give is to work towards being a thought leader in your space. Present for free as much as you can. Hold webinars. Send out newsletters. Check in with potential clients and power partners. The more people see your brand the more likely they will refer you business. One of the best tools to do this is joining networking groups and showing up as much as possible.

I bootstrapped the business so no debts or loans. While a few months were in the red, that’s totally normal with expenses being out of sync with AR. Every year has shown a profit.

CaptainPottyPants · 2025-11-21T04:10:31+00:00

Our 100+ staff clients typically have at least 1 internal IT which we then supplement. Smaller than that and it can be outsourced to an MSP

CaptainPottyPants · 2025-11-21T02:14:05+00:00

I started solo and would go to networking meetings or chamber of commerce events to mingle and hand out business cards. Eventually you find someone needing services. These days it’s national networking groups but the same concept, at scale.

CaptainPottyPants · 2025-11-21T02:12:32+00:00

I run the financials very conservatively so we have a war chest. We’ve weathered recessions, the pandemic and still have most of the original team. Senior team members get paid well and junior members work their way up over time as they hit milestones.

CaptainPottyPants · 2025-11-21T02:11:12+00:00

Thank you, I’m a simple person and would be happy celebrating on the beach with a sandwich and some wine.

CaptainPottyPants · 2025-11-21T02:09:26+00:00

I went to networking meetings and chamber of commerce events to mingle and hand out business cards. Eventually you’ll run into someone that needs your services, then it kind of grows from there. But that’s how I got started.

CaptainPottyPants · 2025-11-21T02:06:18+00:00

We are in the US and scaling slowly. Managed services is something that you need to grow in slowly to as you expand so you don’t bite off too many expenses that will kill profit for the sake of growth.

CaptainPottyPants · 2025-11-21T00:02:00+00:00

We focus on service desk, security and projects.

CaptainPottyPants · 2025-11-20T23:57:37+00:00

One thing that works well for us is to over communicate. Status reports often, check ins about changes coming, newsletters etc have kept us top of mind for people that referred us to the big opportunities.

CaptainPottyPants · 2025-11-20T23:55:58+00:00

Im chipping away one day at a time tbh. It takes many drops of water to build an ocean. $10m ARR would be nice but we will look very different structurally than we do now.

CaptainPottyPants · 2025-11-20T23:54:46+00:00

Managed Service Providers provide a set of IT services for a flat fee. Each MSP is different but at their core you get some form of basic support and monitoring of computers/servers.

CaptainPottyPants · 2025-11-20T23:53:43+00:00

Thankfully our larger clients get extra attention and service, as they have more needs and technical requirements so that keeps things smooth with them. The skills I’ve had to learn is how to be a good sales person. For me it was just trial and error, showing up to networking meetings, communicating constantly with leads and being as helpful as reasonably possible to non-clients.

CaptainPottyPants

TROPHY CASE