Live from the ATLIS 2026 Annual Conference, the hosting team is joined by Alex Inman and Tom Wildman to analyze the evolving role of Managed Service Providers (MSPs) in independent schools. The conversation addresses the rise of fractional staffing, shifting IT reporting structures under CFOs, and the absolute necessity of cultural alignment when outsourcing school technology services.

• Knowing Technologies
• Educational Collaborators

Paul, welcome to Talking Technology with Atlas,

the show that plugs you into the important topics and trends for

technology leaders all through a unique independent school lens.

We'll hear stories from technology directors and other

special guests from the independent school community,

and provide you with focused learning and deep dive topics.

And now, please welcome your host, Christina Llewellyn.

Hello, everyone, and welcome back to

Talking Technology with Atlas. I'm Christina Llewellyn, the

President and CEO of the Association of Technology

Leaders in Independent Schools,

and I'm Bill Stites, the Director of

Technology at Montclair Kimberly Academy in Montclair, New

Jersey,

and I'm Hiram Cuevas, the Director of

Information Systems and Academic Technology at St. Christopher

School in Richmond, Virginia.

Gentlemen, today is a very emotional day

for a lot of reasons. There were lots of tears and goodbyes,

happy tears this morning at our general session. We just came

off of the luncheon here at the Atlas 2026 annual conference,

where we celebrated our Pillar Award winners, our Aspire Award

winners, our Atlas Leadership Institute graduates, and now we

sit on the stage here in Columbus together, and this, my

friends, is the last podcast recording with me, unless you

decide to have me back on as a guest in the future, which I

will not shut the door to, but right now, as the co-host with

my best East Bill and Hiram, I think this is

it. Are you co-host Emeritus as well? So,

yeah,

title going on to that as well.

I think I mean, I could decide right now,

according to Jamie Britto, because Jamie basically told me

last night at the reception that everyone in independent schools

who don't really want to go away, they just name themselves

Emeritus, and so Jamie Britto said that I could just be Atlas

Emeritus, so maybe I should be co-host Emeritus. What do you

think works?

I think it works, and he does that.

Guys, it was such a pleasure. I just want to

say how much I love you both. We were together in New York City

for the nine event, just a couple weeks ago, the AI event

hosted by nine, and we went to a steakhouse, and it was a

delightful evening that I will treasure forever. I just love

you guys so much. I was

glad we got that time.

Me too.

Very nice. We needed that.

We raised a glass. We had an ice cream

sundae. It was awesome. So we are here again at the Atlas

Annual Conference, and you know, a lot of times we speak with our

keynote speakers and carry on the themes and extensions of

what we hear in the general session, so that we can take it

out to our broader listening audience. But we have a topic

that we've been meaning to come back to for some time, and so we

thought, why the heck not do it live in Columbus? So we are

going to talk today about managed service providers. This

is something that's been on our list, our editorial list, for

some time, and Atlas gets a ton of questions about it. To be

honest, I think schools are trying to figure out where to

fall on the spectrum of everything in house, nothing in

house. How does that work? To whom does this report? So, since

we had you guys here, we're welcoming Tom Wildman and Alex

Inman to our live stage to talk to us about this. Thank you,

guys, for being here.

Thanks

for having us, and to be part of your last podcast.

What an honor. I may not cry, but inside I'm sad.

You know what, me too. I have to say, so

thank you, guys, for doing this. I know that the conference is a

busy time, and you could be out enjoying time with your

colleagues, so thank you for having this conversation with

us. Let me start by giving each of you a moment to just

introduce yourselves and why you're here on the stage with us

in the context of talking about MSPs.

So, I'm Tom Wildman, I'm the founder of

Knowing Technologies, and we started in the direction of

being an MSP when we were supporting technically multiple

schools, and really, we at that point we were doing pretty much

whatever project work on site support, but we found that the

need for extended services was growing, and we are entirely

independent school driven. So, all of our customers in kind of

schools are very focused. We've got educators that work on

staff, and so we knew that we had to be integrated more in the

world of the school and the school's vertical, and we had to

have a unique alignment with each one of our school's

mission, and how they were trying to use technology to

accomplish instructional philosophies that made sense to

them in a manner that made sense to them, and so we evolved that

service, and while we are an MSP, for sure, and I think if

you look for MSPs, you'll find our company in Independent

School World, but we call ourselves actually a TSP, a

technology solution provider, sometimes technology strategy

provider, and we're

interesting,

we do that because we want to indicate that we're

actually embedded with that school.

Okay, we'll come back to that for sure. But

Alex, let's give you a second.

Yeah, sure. So my name is Alex Inman. I'm the

chief solutions officer for Pacific One Source, which is

actually a company that owns three different ed tech

companies, one of which is educational collaborators. I

founded, and we've been an Atlas sponsor and supporter for all of

the years that Atlas has existed, and but I sold that

company to Pacific One Source because. They own a reseller,

but also, and what we call educational MSP, an EMSP, and

that way we were able to provide more of a comprehensive solution

to our education clients. All three companies all only serve

the K-12 space.

Awesome. So, Bill and Hiram, let me just ask

you guys, before we get deep into this, we've had MSP

conversation on our list for a while. Do you guys get a lot of

calls about this? Is it something that you wrestle with

a lot? Do colleagues call you and say, are you using an MSP?

Do you, what do you know about it? I mean, we get a lot of

calls at Atlas, and I basically tell them to call you guys.

Yeah, no, at MK, we've been using MSPs for a

while, and it was interesting, because we'd been working with

one company for quite a while, over 15 years, and had an

ongoing relationship with them for quite a while, but I'd never

really put it in the MSP type category. I don't know why I

never thought of it that way, because at the time I think we

were doing so much in house, we had the staff, we were doing,

managing our own things, and it was at a point where there

wasn't as much complexity, there wasn't as much being added onto

our plates at the way they are now, so it was more of a

relational aspect. It wasn't in what I considered managed

services. I joke around, I would refer to him as my console yeti,

going to the Godfather reference, there, you know, and

I still kind of use them in that way, but what has happened over

the years is that as more has gotten added on to what we do,

whether that's security, whether that's access control, whether

that's phone systems, all the different things, our ability to

focus and to really have knowledge in one particular area

has become much more difficult to sustain, not to mention

finding the people that know enough about all of these

things, and that skill level, and bringing them in, and we've

talked about this time and time again, bringing them into

schools becomes much more difficult. So the role of the

MSP is one for us where we've turned and we said, listen, we

don't have any more of the capital, the human capital, the

capital time to really invest in this, and we need to look to it

and then outsource that. So, yes, we're using them now more

than we have in the past, but they've been part of the fabric

of who we are for quite a while

now. I'm going to go to Hiram, and then

I'm going to ask you gentlemen to respond to what you're

hearing from them in terms of is this why clients call you. So

Hiram, what about you?

We use an MSP as well, and they evolve and change

over how your own organization changes. See, I think what's

really helpful for our audience to recognize is that our

schools, K 12 independent schools, come in so many

different flavors that sometimes it makes really good sense to

use a an MSP. When you look at Bill's example, where he was

saying it's hard to find somebody with a specific skill

set, not only do you find them, but then you have to keep on

educating them, which is even more difficult because that

landscape changes on a dime, and all of a sudden, what they're

supposed to be doing in house, they're now have to go to school

to get the new cert in place, so that they can continue to do the

job that they're doing. This industry has just changed so

much for tech directors that we are relying on them more and

more, because we need those specialized services.

The point that I want to make, though, is what

you mentioned, and I think the two of you can actually jump on

and touch on is that we may get somebody in that knows the one

product that we're doing, but they're supporting our one

instance of that. They may get that cert, you know, I've gotten

certs in all sorts of different things, but if I don't use it,

it doesn't get applied, and you lose that knowledge, so even if

you get somebody in, you need problems coming at you, and if

you don't have this part, you're never really kind of continuing

to learn. So that's one of the values that we saw when we let

that go.

Ed, to add to that, Bill, I think what's going

to be really important here, YouTube actually addressed this,

is it's helpful to have an MSP who has a gold standard with

Microsoft or Cisco or Google? Because I can't get on the phone

and call these people when I have a problem, but my managed

service provider can do it on our behalf, because our

constituents think that we can call Microsoft and Google on the

fly and say, 'Hey, can you get this done? It doesn't work that

way.

So, now you've heard from your I did

this on purpose, customers, what they're wrestling, what they're

dealing with. Now I want to give you guys a chance to respond.

I'm sure that you hear what you just heard a lot, so speak to

that.

We indeed hear the growing complexity, Bill, to

your point, the growing complexity makes it complicated,

and so even teams that were comfortable and appreciated

doing more in-house are just needing more support, and along

with sort of our EMSP, we use fractional staffing as much to

describe what we're doing, that's right, because it allows

us to kind of slide right into the literacy that you need and

just to fill that gap. Right, so for our clients we have some

that are just doing that smaller piece that is more unique to the

needs of that school, particularly with schools your

size and budget, but with the smaller schools they need almost

everything, if not everything. Their technology department was

a full-time employee who was doing part-time teaching, and

then in part time they were doing everything else in the

school. There's not a human on this planet that can actually do

everything that a school needs, and so we can come in, but they

can barely afford an entire FTE.

Yeah, that's right. It's unreasonable to expect that

they'd be able to do that.

That's exactly

like mid-sized schools, 500 to 1000 or 1200

students.

That's right,

you know, they may have one or two people on staff,

but they won't be able to hire the bits of expertise that's

exactly why, and that is why an MSP is quite valuable if they

know that skill quite well, and they know how it's being applied

in independent schools, and independent schools are

different, they just have unique ways of applying technology, and

they need people that can understand and communicate with

them about what that technology is doing. Yep, so what we see is

the need for MSPs is growing, the need for deep skills within

the MSPs is growing, the need to be able to provide those

accurately and quickly on a fractional basis to client needs

is the future,

and that's where I want to peel back the

onion just a little bit, because the idea is having an MSP that

understands specifically the nuances of what is a very

complicated ecosystem in an independent school with

technology, because I think that we often hear about schools that

go find the local provider for some kind of fractional support,

right, and then that's problematic. Or an MSP that

supports associations or corporate may not understand the

nuances of independent schools. So, tell me, what makes it

unique to be an MSP serving an independent school?

Okay. Teachers, like

teachers,

bring somebody from the outside world in, from an

MSP that serves Dennis' office or lawyer's office, they are

right. Guess what, your new world is now supporting

educators. So, go have your first conversation with

educators, and tell them that you'll get back to their problem

in an hour and a half or two hours when they've got 30 sets

of eyeballs staring at them. That doesn't fly. So, there has

to be extreme sensitivity to what actually is the

instructional process, and know their priorities on responding

to that. I 100% agree with what you said. The only part that I

would add is the community, so when you're serving small and

medium businesses,

you're usually working with just those people

within that company and on their internal stuff, but so much of

technology in an independent school is community based,

right? And so the number of constituents that you deal with,

even beyond the teachers, which is a huge one, and understanding

them and how that works and how that ultimately impacts the

mission and vision of the school, it's just different than

it is in small, medium business space, and so that learning

curve just takes so much longer, and I once heard on a panel with

the CIO of the German International Airport and the

director of device management for Peugeot Citron, the auto

manufacturer, and all these questions were coming to me

instead of those other guys, and at the end of it, I was like, I

almost felt embarrassed. I said, I'm sorry, I didn't mean to take

up so much oxygen. Why do you think all these questions went

to me, and they said, because your job is hard, ours is easy.

They said everything that we do has a very defined start-stop

existence. Everything that you do is almost limitless, the

creativity of students, the needs and expectations of

teachers and parents, all of that stuff is hard. It's hard,

and so if they want to know how technology really works, they

need it in the most complicated environment possible, and even

some of the biggest companies in the world recognize that

schools,

yeah, independent schools have a tendency to see

the providers as part of them, they're forming relationships

with people, and so they don't like MSPs that move people in

and out, they look more at transactional or commoditization

of the human, and you can't deliver service to an

independent school if you're not willing to commit that staff to

that relationship, and they have to be good at it. So, if you're

looking for skills, you can't say, 'All right, what is your

MCSC certification or your security certification? Okay,

check, check, check, that works. It's okay, let's watch you form

a relationship. Yeah, let's watch you get involved with

somebody who's emotionally concerned at the moment and be

empathic.

Yeah, one of our on-site technicians, after his

first month, he was employee of the month at the school. Yes,

yeah, and he didn't work for the school technically, right? And a

small thing is our techs don't wear their company shirt, they

wear the shirts of the school, and we buy stuff at the school

store for the folks, because we want to immediately communicate

we're part of that community. Yeah,

that's right. And it's sometimes hard to do, it's

hard to tell an employee who is at a school or at two schools

almost the entire time. Time, remember, you work for Knowing

Technologies, you don't work for the school, and then you can't

have that conversation with the school too. It's like, no, no,

she's part of us, right, right, right, don't let her go. Right,

we had one employee who left in the support role, and she left

to take a job at the Disney Corporation, just had this great

opportunity, and so we were very happy for her, and the school

where she was assigned had a huge going away reception, two

of them a luncheon, and then a dinner, and a reception

afterwards. And then they saw her out making an arch when she

left campus.

Did they make her emeritus?

You know, we don't throw that word around as

cavalierly as Jamie Bruto does.

All right,

when we say it, we mean it. Got it.

So, just for a full disclosure, both Hiram and I

have worked with Alex for years through EC on the educational

collaborator side. Yep, yep, and some of the best things that

have come from those experiences that we've had is we're able to

go in, we're able to, not from the managed services

perspective, but we've been able to go in, do audits, get to know

the schools, be able to have sometimes the conversations that

the people at the schools have been trying to have, but until

they bring in that outside voice, you know, they really

haven't been able to have, or wouldn't be willing to have, or

it's until they invest the money into it in a different way that

it raises to a certain level, and then you have those

conversations, and you can get those things said and done that

really I think bring a high degree of value and a real guide

to the schools in terms of what they need to do next, and that's

largely the role that Hiram and I have played in the work that

we've done, but now you're able to go in and you're able to

actually

support that ongoing communication.

So, how does that look now for you when you are

starting that relationship with the school, like we would spend

months on, you know, an audit doing all that type of work, so

that we had this foundational thing for a report that we would

then turn over.

We do the same thing, we start with a full

assessment, so we understand all right here are all the pitfalls,

and we have 600 some odd measurement points in the

assessment program, and here are the pitfalls, here are the risk

behaviors, here the risky system. So we understand fully

where the work is going to be, and produce a similar report

that says, all right, prioritization wise, here's risk

management plan, it could lay out for three years, and that's

the plan of action for us, while we're also supporting the

school, or we're also doing administration-driven projects,

or growth projects, or construction projects, so all of

those things have to feed into the service, and they look at us

as like a sandbar that breaks the waves, so they don't have to

bear the brunt of the rough seas that they're in with technology,

and because we do so many schools, our assessments are

really good. Any school could build their own assessment, but

it would get better when they did it the second time, and even

better when they did it the 40th time. Sure, so that we do them

all the time makes that assessment package so very

valuable to the school, because it illuminates their path

forward and gives them so much understanding, and it makes

their budgets credible, and makes their conversations with

boards credible, because it's been thoughtfully assembled, and

that's a real value that we provide.

I'm sure you do that assessment for all of your MSP

contracts, or all your ongoing contracts.

Do you

do it for schools that are not on your contract?

We do. Yeah,

okay. And Bill, kind of to your question, and your

point, the reality is the depth of the audit that educational

collaborators does, that you guys have participated in, it's

usually for schools who have most, if not all, of the

capacity that they need in house, beyond project work, and

so some of that is cost, some of that is size, some of that is

market analysis, and all that kind of stuff, and then when we

do an MSP, they're usually coming to us, not because they

need an audit, and they know that they needed on it, they

know that they just don't have the people to deliver what is

necessary, and so we do an audit with them once we've signed that

contract with them, shape it up, and then it's the same team that

are sort of moving it forward, and so they're different brands,

which I just kind of want to.. we're a complicated company when

it comes to names. We have way too many,

but we

have a few,

and so Edutech Group, out of just north of here

in Cleveland, Ohio, and they work nationally, but that's

where they're headquartered. That's our Educational MSP

Group. And then Educational Collaborators does more on the

project side, and so there's a little difference. Now,

obviously, there are times where that project feeds into the need

for an MSP, and there are times where the MSP may say we need a

deeper kind of analysis, but only at a project level, and

that's of course where the folks like you guys, who are just

insanely amazing, bring a third-party degree of Uber

expertise that is exceptionally well grounded in the needs of

the customers, and we had 140 collaborators, right, so we can

be pretty granular in terms of picking and choosing the teams,

but that's our project work, and it's a little bit different than

how we do our MSP,

so let me ask you guys a question, because

one of the things that we like to try to do with this podcast

is. Is to allow technology leaders of all stripes at all

size schools and all demographic schools to feel seen and feel

heard, and so can you start by let's speak in the negative,

what would identify a bad MSP relationship, and of course this

is not you guys, it's not your companies at all, but I'm sure

you hear plenty from your clients, so I want the folks

listening to this podcast to know, like, if they've got a meh

feeling about their MSP, where does that come from? What does

that look like?

I gave you one, and it's important if they're

swapping out people and they really want the customer to see

that their service is a commodity, that's a red flag

that will never stop, and there could be an indication that

they're not paying their people the way they should. It could

mean a lot of things, but that's a big red flag. We were talking

about organizations or assessment. I think if they

don't come in with some kind of enforced structure of

understanding how are they going to see what the needs are at the

school, that's another red flag. They should give you a clear

idea of what their path going forward with that school is

going to be, if they're not clear with pricing structures,

that's another concern.

Upselling would be a big flag.

If upselling is done as upselling, that's

concerned. I mean, we sell projects, but we do it against

the roadmap that we build, and the roadmap is entirely a risk,

largely, mostly a risk-driven roadmap, but an MSP is saying,

"Oh, you know what? This firewall is six years old, so

you need to replace it, and that just comes out of the blue, and

it's not on the roadmap. That means that that company is not

really well organized. We do see that. I think that if you're

servicing legal offices, not to pick on them, it's just a common

MSP characterization trope, maybe, but if you're servicing

legal offices and they don't really have people that are

going and want to talk about their technology strategy, they

may not have that necessarily, and so they're going to be a

little bit more attuned to, oh yeah, you just need to buy this

simple $30,000 device, we'll just go do it, whereas schools,

they have to be more thoughtful about that plan,

that stuff. How

I have a question for both of you. You've

mentioned the importance of relationships, but how about

trends? What are the current trends you're seeing in schools

in terms of the needs? Similar schools, some are saying, "Oh,

this school only has five people, why do we need nine?

Right? Yeah,

because you can speak to the wide variety of

independent schools that are out there.

Yeah, I was just in a meeting where they were saying

that some of the membership, Atlas membership, were talking

about some of the top three things that they were concerned

about, you named, which are AI, cybersecurity, and staffing. And

I'd be shocked if Tom isn't seeing the exact same things.

Decentralization of purchasing is a trend that's

happening that's causing an issue for us, like an

advancement office may say we just bought this new

shadow tech,

yeah, shadow tech, that's right, yeah, and that's a

trend, I mean, that can obviously be stopped, but it is

something that affects our relationship with the school,

and also the school's relationship with technology,

you know, they should have an internal person who's seen as

their expert that can help them consultatively before it comes

to an MSP, when they're buying products like that, but the big

thing, staffing, cyber security, AI, those are great

opportunities for us going forward, and schools just simply

will not be able to keep up with the unique staffing need,

there'll be so many pinpoint skill sets that just have to be

brought in for little increments of time,

there's one trend that I didn't hear on that list

that I'm observing, and it's starting to hit our

conversations on the MSP side, educational MSP side, with our

customers, and that is the reporting structure and staffing

structure of the IT team, if they have one. The pendulum has

been swinging for a while away from the tech director reporting

to the head towards more of the CFO. I am feeling that

accelerating, and what it's doing is it's fixing the role of

the IT team and the MSP to be a little more on the pipes and

wires side of what's going on and creating a little more

distance between the technology and the classroom experience for

the school organizations like Tom's and ours really understand

and can see and help the client see where that gap is starting

to get too large and when you're talking about things like AI and

the speed with which it is moving, if you don't pay

attention to that before that gap gets too large, it starts to

become very problematic and very expensive for schools, and so I

think organizations like ours are uniquely suited to see that

sort of creep that's happening in schools that I actually think

deserves a lot more attention,

if we see that we often call out or see that

there's a maybe a need for some skills development and more

strategic thinking or conversations with school

leaders about the instructional value of technology and the

instructional character of technology at that school and I

think at that tech leader if it's an IT leader there's often

chat. Technologies there, and understanding that they didn't

come in the classroom, they don't have a significant

professional orientation to instruction, necessarily, but

when we see schools who are led by directors of instructional

technology, or even CTO, for the few schools that do that, but if

you have a director of instructional technology, there

is somebody who is actually a great cultural bridge between

what technology should be doing in meeting their vision of how

it's going to be used at the school, and then constantly,

when it comes down to us, how we're going to implement that

vision, then we're now moved more into the executive

functioning, or the delivery of that vision, rather than dealing

with the gap that Alex is seeing developing, but yeah, that's a

sign

I know that the answer is always it depends.

When we talk about independence,

we won't say that to whatever

you're not allowed to say it depends, but

I'm curious. Roughly speaking, where is that line? What tech

skills do you need in house, and what tech skills are more easily

outsourced. I think that that's something that our own

technology people are struggling to have those conversations with

their leadership, because it might seem appealing to get the

W-2 turned into a 1099

Yeah,

but

it could be short-sighted sometimes. It depends on the

MSP, like, where is that line?

I look at the entire set of skills or roles,

let's say roles that's kind of reading into the list of things

have to be accomplished as being on a continuum, and one of the

continuum are roles that are entirely cultural, like they

have to have a strong cultural tie into the school, and those

are kind of out of reach of most MSP, but they do have to exist

in a school, it's really the translation between what the

school wants to do with instruction and technology. On

the other end is transactional work, and those transactional

tasks are very easily identified, you know, help desk

tickets, network support projects, but between there are

things like instructional plans, or risk management plans, or

helping the school to ensure that they're driving the roadmap

towards completion, and at some schools those are largely

cultural roles. At other schools, those are really more

transactional, because a roadmap is already respected and it's

developed. So, you got a strong roadmap and you have someone

with strong vision, you can move a lot of things off to qualified

MSP if you don't have an idea of why technology, that's going to

be an expensive problem,

and most of the schools that need an

organization like Tom's or ours need help in figuring out that

question, the why of technology, and so I guess I would say

pretty much everything that a technology department needs can

be delivered by a high-quality K-12 MSP, whether you're a

technology MSP or an educational MSP, or whatever letter we want

to throw in front of managed services, it can be, but the

bigger difference is, does the person need to be on site or not

on site, and COVID kind of created a new vision for what

can happen in high quality that's not on site versus what

can happen, you know, like help desk, those kinds of things, you

got to be there, you just got to be there, but that can be done

really well through an in-house person or an out of house

person, but you kind of got to be there, but some of the data

work, some of the curriculum planning work, some of the

leadership work can sometimes even be done better by somebody

who's not in the school because of the stack and other duties as

assigned that happen when you're in school versus when you're a

contract,

so you mentioned earlier a fractional FTE tease

that out a little bit in terms of how that might work in that

situation,

so actually in most of the schools where we are the

entire technology department, the tech director is almost

always a fractional tech director and managing and

working with multiple schools because that budgeting vision,

that curricular connection, that let's look at the strategic

plan, and how could technology feed that plan that perhaps

wasn't envisioned when that strat plan was created in the

first place, that could be done, that's a high level skill that

takes somebody who has been a tech director for a long time,

probably in a couple different kinds of schools who really has

that understanding of how systems work across schools,

that's a rare, powerful, incredible skill. But you don't

need somebody who's doing it full time at that small school,

it's somebody who's probably been doing it full time for

multiple years, but not at that school. So we can contract that

kind of piece out, so that's a fractional skill set that you

need, whereas, like the help desk, most of our folks have

helped us that's at least three days a week, if not five days a

week. Yeah, and they're there, and that's really more of a

full, not full-time equivalent, it's a full-time employee, it's

just that it's contracted out, but database. Skills is another

one where you can probably slide in and do things more

fractionally. Network management used to be something that needed

to be full time, not anymore. Almost nobody needs that. Put

the network monitor. We've got a network operations

center, that's right. Yeah,

put the stuff on there, it's on there. We know

about the problem before you even saw it, it's solved.

I cringe sometimes when I see independent schools

posting positions for

network manager. Oh, I

got nice.

Same here.

I mean, you really mean something else, I guess. Or

that's the title that you're giving to some of the job that's

staff different. Yeah, which is, by the way, it's also something

that's happening with tools.

So I had a network manager, he's now my assistant

director, because most of that network management stuff had

come off and gone to our MSP, the people that we've outsourced

to, they're not on site, they will come on site when they need

to. We replaced all of our switches and all of our APs, and

we needed a wireless survey done, so they sent people on

site to do that. They sent people who were from the company

itself, but there seems to be like a secondary service level

where there are people that service MSPs to be boots on the

ground for

smart hands organization,

exactly like you can hire one of them to come on,

they'll work with you, they're not directly working for the

MSP, but they know the product line and they can be those

people to get that localized help, so to your point, like the

fractional stuff again, fractional CTO, those things,

those can all be remote, so it's really a staffing question. You

mentioned your main office for the MSP is here in Ohio. Well,

if you're staffing a school in Texas, if you're staffing a

school in Seattle, if you're staffing a school in Maine,

where and how are you finding those people that need to be the

boots on the ground, are you moving them to those locations,

or are you doing regionalized searches for somebody to hire?

And what's that process like for you? Because it's hard enough

for us to hire locally for that job when we're advertising for

it. How are you attracting, retaining, and getting those

people in to do that type of work

for us, that's not particularly complicated. Those

are easier roles to hire, and the pool of qualified candidates

is deep. Where we get into a challenge sometimes, one is

bringing them somewhere where the work is being done by

adults, and they can see how do you create the personality they

can understand what is their role? What are their

relationships with the customer? And then we have to train those

people on how to form relationships, and that's kind

of the harder part of all of this stuff. So, getting the body

is fine, training them to be cultural emissaries of how

knowing technology is to deliver services, and understanding that

you're also half culturally aligned with the school, that's

a bit of a challenge. Where we also have some growth is in

account management. We haven't really talked about that, like

who really owns the overview of the relationship that the MSP

has with the school, because it's not really a sales role,

it's not really a technical role, it's somebody that really

should understand what's happening at that school. What's

the heart of the technology program at that school? It can't

be a transactional role, but it has to be someone that works for

us that actually understands the history and the personalities

that are unique to that school, or a lot of things will be

complicated.

You know, I mentioned that we have an

alphabet of company names, right, and so we have a large

reseller, and we also have a large technology services and

implementation team. They've certified for all of the low

voltage cabling, they're certified for installs and

electrical and all that kind of stuff. So our company in

California is the smart hands for some of our competitors,

like CDW or Bloom, right, and so we do that. They also have

people all over the country, and we've built this large network

of people, so we know exactly who we can go to for that smart

hand stuff, for the people who are going to be kind of, as Tom

was talking about, the people who are going to work in the

school. The nice part is this is where educational collaborators

has really helped out Edutech, because we have such a large

network of really talented people across the country, and

it gives us the ability to help find talented people who are

going to be those onsite help desk technicians that are going

to stay there, because the people who are going to be part

of your day to day, they need to have that cultural connection,

the people who are going to install on the weekend or

evening, while you guys are gone, they can be forever.

I want to push back on one of those things there,

because one of the things you said that's an easy hire to

make, it's higher we struggle with, and the reason I say that

is you're you're looking to hire somebody at a price that for

them to come into work at our school, like I'm outside

Manhattan. One of the biggest problems that we have is the

cost of living outside of Manhattan through the roof. So,

trying to attract talent to work in a school at the rates a

school can pay,

a challenge

to live in that area is incredibly difficult,

yet alone convincing them when they've got the New York City

market right there, where they can make more to come in. So the

question is, if you're making that hire, how are you placing

yourself to be able to make it affordable for the school? You

mentioned going from the W to the 1099 it makes sense for the

school because they're not paying all the benefits packages

and all those things, but how are you balancing that out?

Because if I can't hire them, I'm just.. well,

we, yeah, we have, I have a couple things that are

coming to mind. We do a lot of work in Silicon Valley, and so

the pool of candidates that we interview are going to go to an

interview at Google after that, or somewhere else. So we have to

pay market, that's often out of the reach of school. There is

another thing that is not just salary, but it's the opportunity

those people have. Often, when you get hired at a role, a

technology role in a school, there's not a whole lot of

headroom for growth, but in a company like ours, there's a lot

of it. Like, you can move up to anything. There are specialties

that you can work into, and so it's a far more appealing to a

candidate to take a job at an MSP serving schools, and would

be out of school, but some people really love that school

vibe, and you could find those people, and they're willing to

wear multiple hats, and they're willing to do events for

fundraisers on the weekends, because they love that school,

and you will find those people, but they're rare.

We have a beautiful advantage in the space, so I

agree with everything Tom said, and we have that same thing,

where there's a lot of room, and our MSP is absolutely our

fastest growing part of the business, so there's been a lot

of opportunity for people to move up, so we get a lot of

young talent, which is less expensive, and they'll stay with

us because of the opportunities to grow up, but the other part

is a lot of those network management higher end positions

where you have to have those skills. They live in Cleveland,

Ohio, and Cleveland is a lot less expensive than Silicon

Valley or Montclair. It's a night and day, and admittedly,

we are very cost competitive on the coasts, because the most

expensive skill sets in our organization don't cost us the

same thing as they would if we hired them out of our

headquarters in Simi Valley, just north of LA. So, the fact

that that MSP is headquartered in Cleveland is incredibly

beneficial to us. Now, when it comes to, like, if we need to

hire the help desk on site person,

we

have to pay market competitive prices, and that

that is what it is, and even when you're talking about

something like smart hands, where they're still coming in on

a project, the prevailing wage requirements and laws in

California are very, very different than what they are in

Missouri, and so it's going to cost a lot less to get that done

in Missouri than it is in California.

Does that factor into your talks with the schools

when you're negotiating rates in terms of what you're going to

do, if they're asking for that, or is that okay?

But it's not a hard conversation, because, because,

like you said, they

buy those themselves. I mean, they know

that Mark,

yeah. And that's

right,

yeah.

You know, I don't want schools to think, oh, I can

go to an MSP that's located in Ohio, they're going to pay Ohio

rates to live in Montclair. It's just not going to happen,

right?

You've got to ask the school,

that is exactly understand we can for some

services, but not for

others.

So, yeah, yeah, anything that's going to be

remote, anything that's going to work out, anything that might be

fractional, anything that might be like partial boots on the

ground, you know, occasional, that's definitely where I think

that can work.

So, before we run out of time together, I

want to ask, if a school is listening to this. What makes

for a good MSP? Like, what should they look for? How do

they suss it out and make sure that they're partnering with

somebody who is well versed in the things that we've talked

about? If a school doesn't have experience working with this

kind of partnership, what's your advice to them?

If that provider does not understand what an

independent school is trying to do, and what they're about. I

don't think that it's a very viable candidate. That

relationship will break down, because schools form

relationships with their providers. It's not just

transactional. There's another thing that is interesting about

a school. That school may, an independent school may see this,

like, okay, well, How do I go about convincing my leadership

that I want to have a relationship with an MSP, and

what is the right time? Often we see that there's not an

opportunity to do that if it's a structural pivot. There's not an

opportunity to do that until something has changed at the

school. There's some leadership change, or there needs to be a

leadership change, and that invites rethinking of staffing,

and that's a good opportunity to consider how an MSP can actually

fit in with the staff that's being replaced to take that

opportunity and make sure that there will be no break in the

continuity of services and that as best can happen the

personality of technology delivery will match what it was

before.

That's great. I agree with all of that, real

quick, one of the things that we found in my role, where I'm now

kind of working with all of the different parts of our company,

I wanted to spend some time really understanding our MSP

customers better, and I spent a lot of time with all of our

longest term MSP customers, and it's funny, the founder of our

MSP, our educational MSP, does not like the two. Term MSP,

yeah, right,

because our organizations, yours and mine,

are very different than those traditional MSPs, but what we

found was that most of the customers that have been with

them the longest had actually worked with an MSP, and so we

were trying to stay away from that language, and we realized,

no, no, we need to lean into that and say we understand that

you have worked with outside organizations, and you didn't

like them, and that's why you wanted to stay away from MSPs,

and but you really wanted to understand that, but that bad

experience with your previous MSP is what gave you the context

to understand what you didn't like. Once you understand what

you didn't like, it's easier to understand what it is that

you're seeking, and how we are trying to help new customers who

have not worked with an MSP before, is everything that Tom

said. And then understand, we kind of guide them through a

conversation of help us understand your culture, what

makes things tick operationally at your school, and when they

start to identify that for themselves, they're creating

space for us to help them understand that sometimes people

who really get them that aren't from their school can really

provide that to them inside their school.

We were asked recently to pitch our services

to a large school, and I presented our deck, and a board

member was on that pitch, and I stood over here's the value

proposition that we have to the school, here's how we work with

educators, and here's how we work with the leadership, and

here's how we help you with the processes, the complicated

process of like managing registrar data or any data

management process, and understand how we manage those

high-risk situations, and at the end of it, the board member

said, You know, I understand that, but you needed to give me

a price per device. This is not.. this should have been the

first sentence out of your mouth. I could have saved us

the hour. Yeah,

well, I really appreciate, gentlemen,

that you pop down to do this with us today. Because I think

that this is a conversation that has a lot of layers. I think

it's something that we could certainly come back to, and it

sounds like there's some thought leadership here that we can kind

of punch up a little bit at list, because a lot of schools

are looking for this kind of help as things get more

complicated, like we talk about all the time on the podcast, it

may be that this type of supplemental resource could help

someone.

We would love to talk

to.. we appreciate y'all. Thank you.

Thank you very much. And before we sign off, I just want to say

my final goodbye to all of our listeners at Talking Technology

with Atlas. This project has been a labor of love, and I want

to thank our team at Atlas, our staff at Atlas, for keeping this

thing going. I know they're gonna keep it rolling in my

absence. Gentlemen, it's been a pleasure to share the stage with

you, and of course, all of our weekly phone calls and coffee

dates that we do. This podcast now that we're not recording

doesn't mean we need to stop the weekly coffee date, so we can

have our dates anyway, right?

Look forward to absolutely

all right. Thank you, guys.

This has been Talking Technology with Atlas,

produced by the Association of Technology Leaders in

Independent Schools. For more information about Atlas and

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Thank.