Passion to Profit: Scaling an MSP with Dan Kitchen, CEO of Razorblue Group

Ever wondered how to turn your passion for technology into a successful business? Join us for a captivating conversation with Dan Kitchen, CEO of Razorblue Group, as he walks us through his journey of growing a Managed Service Provider (MSP) and overcoming the challenges that came with it. From scaling the business to making strategic acquisitions and outgrowing team members, Dan's story is a testament to passion, determination, and thriving success in the tech industry.

In this episode, we dive into the complexities of bringing people along on the journey, making a good impression with new customers, and navigating the world of finance and HR. Discover how Dan and his team leveraged their technical expertise to b make two acquisitions and expand their geographic presence. Plus, learn the ins and outs of onboarding new customers, managing a diverse range of devices and operating systems, and providing top-notch managed services. Don't miss this opportunity to gain valuable insights from Dan Kitchen and the Razorblue Group's remarkable story!

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'Now that's it: Stories of MSP Success,' dives into the journeys of some of the trailblazers in our industry to find out how they used their passion for technology to help turn Managed Services into the thriving sector it is today.

Every episode is packed with the valuable insights, practical strategies, and inspiring anecdotes that lead our guests to the transformative moment when they knew….. Now, that's it.

This podcast provides educational information about issues that may be relevant to information technology service providers.

Nothing in the podcast should be construed as any recommendation or endorsement by N-able, or as legal or any other advice.

The views expressed by guests are their own and their appearance on the podcast does not imply an endorsement of them or any entity they represent.

Views and opinions expressed by N-able employees are those of the employees and do not necessarily reflect the view of N-able or its officers and directors.

The podcast may also contain forward-looking statements regarding future product plans, functionality, or development efforts that should not be interpreted as a commitment from N-able related to any deliverables or timeframe.

All content is based on information available at the time of recording, and N-able has no obligation to update any forward-looking statements.

Transcript

Dan Kitchen: 0:20

2015 we were probably doing like one mill rev. We were maybe 10, 15 people and a bit of a change direction coming up on now. That's it so I went from being tech director to running the business.

Pete Roythorne: 0:30

Dan kitchen, ceo of razor blue group, talks about the challenges of starting an MSP.

Dan Kitchen: 0:35

You've grown up with these people and they've grown up and they've worked with you and they've supported you along that journey. You sort of feel like gotta bring them along the journey, even if it's not the right thing to do and how successfully scaling their business has opened them up to new opportunities. We've been able to bid for business that if we were still a more regional player even if we've been a bigger regional player we we wouldn't have been able to win.

Pete Roythorne: 0:55

Welcome to now that's it. Stories of MSP success, where we dive into the journeys of some of the trailblazers in our industry to find out how they use their passion for technology to help turn managed services into the thriving sector it is today.

Chris Massey: 1:11

Dan, really appreciate you being here talking to us. Why don't you just start out, tell us a little bit about your background and maybe you know how you got started?

Dan Kitchen: 1:20

and as a managed service provider, yeah sure so my backgrounds tech, so I was always interested it from a young age. I was doing a lot of web hosting business when I was younger so I had some servers out in New York and was building a web hosting business, sort of quickly realized web hosting is not great margin, it's a bit of a race to the bottom. And then that's when I started to get into the consulting space.

Dan Kitchen: 1:46

You know managed services wasn't really a thing then, this was like sort of 2007, 2008, sure, and I met another guy who was sort of on that managed services journey to, you know, building what would become MSPs. We joined our businesses together and we started to hire some people and I was still technical people, pure technical at that point. I'd done the. You know, we, we were selling cloud. What was cloud before the cloud existed? you know, some servers in a data center and yeah, that's. I think we're doing that. So I built that. We became an ISP. So I built the ISP core network, you know, got us our IP addresses and all that sort of stuff and our, our AS number and did the transit appeared in those other things. So that was, that was like my world and it just it grew from there.

Dan Kitchen: 2:33

Really, i think our growth was fairly static. You know, we got to 2015 you're probably doing like one mill rev rev news, something like that. We were maybe 10 15 people at that point and then we had a bit of a change direction. So Chris, who was my business partner at the time, he wanted to be doing something a bit different. He didn't want to grow as quite as aggressively as I did. So we went our separate ways. I bought his share of the business out and he, he went off to do something else, and then I had to do all sorts of stuff that I had not really had too much experience with at this point. So I went from being tech director to being running the business. So it was, you know, finance, hr, all these different things.

Chris Massey: 3:18

Well, and that was interesting talk a little bit about that. I mean number one. I heard two big things there. You were sort of the guy, the tech guy for a long time, and then there was a point where you had to take a step out of that and be more of a? alright, i'm gonna run at least the tech side of the company, but not be the guy that's actually fixing things so that was a big maturity right, a big step, and then another one here.

Chris Massey: 3:42

You know a while later where you're the guy right. I mean you're sort of taking over, so talk about you from a professional perspective. I mean, you know what were you going through, what were you thinking through in those two sort of big jumps.

Dan Kitchen: 3:56

I guess I was. Just I took it in my stride. Yeah, i didn't really know. You know I didn't really know what I didn't know at that point, sure, and it was a case of just, you know, learning about all this stuff. I mean, the the you know the company buyout thing was new to me in terms of, you know, share-purchased agreements and all that sort of stuff. You know, the finance stuff was relatively new to me and trying to get my head around that and having to understand you know how a profit and loss and a balance sheet all tied together and and those sort of things. But a lot self-taught, yeah, with some advice from people around me. But yeah, yeah, awesome talk about.

Chris Massey: 4:31

You know, as as the company grew, you know you merged two companies, but you've done some more M&A since then, haven't you?

Dan Kitchen: 4:38

yeah, yeah, we've done in in more recent years we've done another two deals that's great so.

Dan Kitchen: 4:43

So yeah, we did an acquisition in Manchester and then we did one in Scotland. That was about 18 months ago, so these are all sort of in the last four or five years and the ambition with that was we wanted to grow geographically and actually that's worked really well for us because it's It's given us more of a national platform and through having that more national platform We've been able to bid for business that if we were still a more regional player Even if we've been a bigger regional player, we we wouldn't have been able to win.

Chris Massey: 5:13

So that's great You talk a little bit about when you were going through those M&A. You had some involvement with the growth strategist and then N-able folks. Can you talk a little bit about what that was like and how they helped?

Dan Kitchen: 5:24

Yeah, i mean they were great. They gave us some, some advice on on how to, on how to grow and how other MSPs had done it. Really, i think one of the things that you lack in the in the market places, everybody's very Every place their cards very close to their chest in terms of you know How they've got there and how they've achieved and what worked and what didn't work, and actually The unable folks have been really great at sort of sharing that knowledge From from experience they've got from from other N-able partners.

Chris Massey: 5:54

That's great, dan. Let's talk about. You know it. Obviously, as you've grown the company, there's obviously been some challenges around along the way and you shared some. You know from your professional career, moving into different roles. But what are some of the other things that that the company is maybe run into from a from a challenge perspective, and how did you overcome some of those?

Dan Kitchen: 6:12

I think when you're growing quite aggressively, you you can Outgrow people and I think that's a bit of a challenge. You know, you might have someone who was, who was doing a great job when you 10, 15, 20 users you know 20, 20 employees, i suppose but then when you get to 100, when you get to 150, then maybe not the right person for that job job anymore. They're the right person of the business, right, but doing something different. And I think That's quite a big challenge because obviously you know, particularly when you've grown a business from nothing to where it is, you've grown up with these people and they've grown up and they've worked with you and they've supported you along that journey. So you know, you, you you've sort of feel, you know, you sort of feel like you've got, you've got to got to bring them along the journey, even if it's not the right thing to do right, that's great.

Chris Massey: 7:00

I can relate to that from my past experiences. You know Folks that had been with us since the beginning that might have been doing professional services and trying to move them over into managed services And and getting them in that train of thought. You know this is different. This is good for you, but you know they've been doing something else for a really long time, so so I can relate to that for sure that I agree That's a. That's a big challenge, so let's talk a little bit about so we call this. This is a podcast that we call you know, now that's it, and and really the the. The question that I want to ask you now is When was the point in and the career in your career here, and especially the point and and razor blue, where you said you know, now that's it. We've figured it out Like. This is we're doing the right thing, we're creating the right offering where we have the right partners. What was that point?

Dan Kitchen: 7:47

I think there's probably multiple different points, but it's I don't know. Sometimes you know it can be good and you walk into. You know you walk into the business and you go. You know, yeah, we've got a 24 seven operation center. It's working, it's running. You know we're we're chewing through. You know 6700 ticket today. The sales team are bringing in opportunities, things that I didn't know about. You know The finance team are doing what they need to do. The professional services team are pulling off huge projects and you know I don't really know much about them. That's the sort of thing I think you go Yeah, the machine is, the machine is working.

Chris Massey: 8:21

Yep the machine you built that has continued to evolve and get better at it's working Well. that's great, That's a that's a good example.

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Chris Massey: 9:55

So let's talk a little bit about, maybe, prospecting, and really the key piece is when you acquire a new client, a new customer, what's that like for you guys, and how do you build that trust with this new business so that they understand that they're in the right hands?

Dan Kitchen: 10:13

You've got to impress them from day one. I think that's really important. Our onboarding process is pretty robust in terms of all the steps that we go through And as soon as we get in there, we want to deliver a strategy with them in terms of what they need to do, what they need to invest in, how they need to improve their tech landscape. But I think you earn that trust in probably that first 90 days And if you fail, then that customer is not going to stay with you for very long. You've got to make it work very, very smoothly And that's everybody's responsibility in our organization. That's from finance to open a new account, from the onboarding team, from project management to account management. So we have two different teams, for we have sales and we have account management And there's a handover that's got to happen between that. All those teams have got to do a really, really good job to impress that customer.

Chris Massey: 11:09

Yeah, that's great. I remember that as well. It's making that impression and setting expectations early too, i think, is really key when you're building that trust. Customer service is obviously important to all MSPs, and so I just wanted to sort of hear from you, from a Razer Blue perspective, how do you treat customer service, what are the things you look at and how do you ensure you're delivering that level of customer service to the client?

Dan Kitchen: 11:34

We've done a few things. We live by net promoter score, so we send ours out religiously. We put a lot of work into simplifying that so that we get a lot of feedback. We get sort of like a 40% response rate to feedback we sent out, which is really really good, and we've got a dedicated customer success team. So they are there purely not to do anything with account management, just to make customers happy, and that works well, because we can look at issues from a totally agnostic point of view and go right, what do we need to do to make this better? I think that they're probably the two key things I would say.

Chris Massey: 12:14

That's a great, really good examples. Let's talk about evolution. So what's sort of you know, how has the business evolved over the years and what types of different clients have you taken on, or different technical levels or technologies? Just how has the evolution evolved?

Dan Kitchen: 12:34

I think, sort of skills wise, we've had to develop a lot of new skills. Obviously, cloud technologies are moving way faster than any of us know. Sure, Microsoft decided to add new features and the clients found out about them the same time that we do. So that evolution is huge and I suppose it's quite difficult going from having skill sets in a particular area to that sort of broad spectrum. So if you take someone who's, i guess, what you call like an infrastructure engineer, maybe like five years ago they knew everything about everything. But now you've got specialisms, you know. you've got cloud specialisms, you've got security specialisms, infrastructure, network, end user compute. These are all different skill sets and although we've got some people who are multi-skilled, you don't tend to find people who've got all these same skills in one person. So that's very, very rare, because there's just so much to know and that's a challenge to resource for and recruit for that sort of thing.

Chris Massey: 13:34

Speaking of that, how have you guys found talent in the industry and how have you kept talent?

Dan Kitchen: 13:41

I think to keep talent you've got to be good to work for and that's something we put a lot of effort into. You know, working for an MSP is not easy and I don't think there's any MSP job out there where you can walk into somewhere and, you know, walk in at nine, leave at five and everything's great. It's hard work, but I think you've got to build a community spirit and when you're working late on projects and that sort of thing, the team we've got to be on board with that and they've got to be. You know, they've got to be brought in to the cause and celebrate the achievements when they complete. So that's probably a good take.

Dan Kitchen: 14:21

On the retention side, in terms of recruitment, it's still very difficult and I think it's probably got a lot to do with the fact that there's a lot of the competition and other partners out, other partners of yours out there that are investing very heavily in their own staff because they want to retain them too. So that's a difficulty. We have built our own academy which has helped us build new talent in the sort of end user compute, service, desk first line part of the world and then hopefully they do develop into second line and then start specializing in particular areas. Post that, but it's still a challenge because we need skill more quickly than it's available.

Chris Massey: 15:06

I always say that an MSP technician is a special breed of human. I can count the number of Christmas Eve's and New Year's Eve's and on calls over dinner that I had to leave, and so you know. I'm glad that not only you obviously recognize that, but that you appreciate that when those types of things happen and I would agree, when MSPs that do again recognize and appreciate and reward that sort of extra level of attention to detail and commitment, they're going to stay for a long time.

Dan Kitchen: 15:40

So we've done quite a lot around that and it's because of our size and scale now that we've gone from having on call teams to having dedicated teams in a lot of areas that now work shifts 24-7. So it has given people a bit more of their work-life balance back. There's still areas that it's quite difficult to do that for because there are certain infrastructure specialisms and network specialisms that things only happen one day of 365. So it doesn't make sense to have somebody sat there doing nothing for the rest of those days. But I think that certainly helped alleviate some of those pressures.

Chris Massey: 16:17

That's great. Well, talk a little bit about the future. What's sort of next for Razor Blue and what's the direction that the company's headed? and more M&A or more organic growth? a little bit of both. What's it look like?

Dan Kitchen: 16:30

Probably a little bit of both, because we're privately owned and we're not privately backed. We haven't got a ticking clock that we've got to work towards. So we'll invest and reinvest and probably continue that organic growth journey. We've also got some M&A we want to do. We've got particular target areas where we're looking for other acquisitions, but we're not in a rush to do any deals. It needs to be the right deal for everybody.

Dan Kitchen: 16:57

And then I think It's really interesting because you speak to the bank and they'll say you know, we want to see the five-year plan And we're going. We can't give you five-year plan because because tech is moving so fast right now, it it's completely pointless. I think you know the advances in AI is we've been talking about here are Unbelievable and where we've got in probably less than a year From you know where we were a year ago. Is is in say. So I Think we've got to watch the space very carefully, we've got to get on board with it And we've got to get the best use of the tech in the right ways. But I certainly couldn't tell you where we'll be in three years time. It's, it's gonna be interesting, i think it's great, dan.

Chris Massey: 17:41

It was a real pleasure. I really appreciate you being here and I wish you and razor blue a ton of luck in the future and best wishes, and thank you just so very much for being here.

Pete Roythorne: 17:51

Thanks so much for having me To receive updates about future episodes. Be sure to subscribe to our podcast on YouTube or your preferred podcast platform and Follow N-able on linkedin. We appreciate your support and encourage you to leave a rating or review, as it helps us reach more Listeners who can benefit from the wealth of knowledge shared on this show. Remember, success is not a destination. It's a journey, and by immersing yourself in the stories of those who have walked the path before you, you'll gain the tools, inspiration and confidence to achieve your own triumphs. Stay tuned for more exciting episodes of now That's it stories of MSP success.

Pete Roythorne: 18:35

This podcast provides educational information about issues that may be relevant to information technology service providers. Nothing in the podcast should be construed as any recommendation or endorsement by N-able, or as legal or any other advice. The views expressed by guests are their own and their appearance on the podcast does not imply an endorsement of them or any entity. They represent views and opinions expressed by N-able employees are those of the employees and do not necessarily reflect the view of N-able or its Officers and directors. This podcast may also contain forward-looking statements regarding future product plans, functionality or developmental efforts. That should not be interpreted as a commitment from N-able related to any deliverables or time frame. All content is based on information available at the time of recording, and N-able has no obligation to update any forward-looking statements.