Two decades scaling IT companies. Most of it in the seat you're in now.

I didn't plan on any of this. I was the neighborhood kid who fixed everyone's computers, and the parents I helped started asking me to fix their business computers too. By the time I finished high school I had a consulting business, a tie, and a habit of getting pulled out of class to go fix the school's network.

Then I landed at Long View Systems, one of Canada's largest private consulting firms, where I consulted at Canadian Natural Resources, WestJet, and Shell. That's where I moved from the technical side into operations, and found I liked it more than I expected. Operations turned out to be a lot like systems administration, same diagnostic instinct, except the problems are people instead of machines. It was my crash-course MBA in scaling a business without breaking the culture that made it work.

Bell Canada came next. They'd acquired a western division that was bleeding money, and I led the turnaround that put it back in the black.

Then Fully Managed, the MSP where IT Glue was born. Two companies had just merged, with all the technical debt, culture debt, and client debt that comes with it. We went on a tear: tripled revenue, doubled headcount, grew gross margin by double digits, and cut employee turnover at the same time. The company later sold to TELUS for $137 million.

Through all of this experience, I recognized that what I was doing had no secret sauce. The wins were repeatable systems applied to the same handful of problems every growing technology company hits. As I started going to industry events and peer groups, I realized the things I considered good business practice were like magic to other MSP owners.

The MSP industry is full of technical talent and almost completely devoid of management infrastructure.

Owners who built companies on technical skill suddenly have 15, 25, 40 people and no idea how to manage them. Service managers promoted from the helpdesk with zero training. KPIs that nobody tracks. Delegation that looks like abdication. Teams that are "busy" all day but can't tell you what they accomplished.

So I went back to my consulting roots, this time one-to-many. For more than a decade I've worked alongside MSP owners and operations leaders as a kind of fractional COO: the systems, tools, and frameworks to run the business well, and the coaching to make the people running it more confident and independent. I've helped MSPs like WBM grow their managed services from around $5 million to north of $20 million.

Today that work takes a few forms: hands-on 1:1 consulting, weekly group coaching inside Opsleader, courses that have trained over 1,350 MSP professionals, and a podcast and newsletter that reach thousands of operators every week.