You’re Not Broken. The Model Is.
This isn’t about bad people or lazy support. It’s about a broken system disguised as convenience.
“As long as the help desk is fast and friendly, we’re good.”
No, you’re not. You’re just surviving, and the [costs are stacking up]: morale, trust, momentum.
The Myth of Fast and Friendly
“Fast and friendly” is the lowest possible bar for IT support. And it’s being sold to you as a differentiator. Because that’s the line you’ll hear from a dozen PE-backed MSPs chasing growth with freshly hired engineers and sales reps reading from the same script.
They scale quickly, make big promises, and show up strong… for the first 12 months. But by month 24?
• Turnover starts
• Response times creep
• The people you liked are gone
• Your tickets get recycled
And you start asking questions like:
“Do they even know what our business does anymore?”
The worst part? When it starts to bleed into your business.
You won’t notice the damage all at once. It’ll show up when your best engineer quits. When the board asks for your thoughts on long-term tech strategy… and all you can think is, don’t get hacked. When you get blindsided by an audit or breach — and your MSP says, “We didn’t see it coming either.”
Burnout Isn’t an IT Problem. It’s a Design Problem.
We’ve seen it firsthand. A client came to us after a year of firefighting:
• Systems crashing
• Leadership turnover
• IT morale in the tank
• End users giving up on support altogether
They even issued an RFP out of pure frustration. But instead of walking away, we rebuilt the model from the ground up:
• Embedded dedicated IT staff on-site
• Offloaded backend ops and vendor chaos
• Introduced co-managed planning sessions
• Deliver 5-year tech forecasts with full visibility
The result?
They stopped seeing IT as “the thing that breaks.”
They started seeing it as a business advantage.
Fast Isn’t the Goal. Invisible Is.
Here’s what that looks like in real numbers. One JMARK client submitted 62 tickets in April. In the same period, our automation systems resolved 167 issues before anyone noticed. That’s:
- 9,912 hours of productivity saved annually
- At $35/hour, that’s $346,920/year in recovered time
- Even if only 80% would’ve become actual tickets, that’s still $277,536 saved
And that’s just one client.
Now ask yourself: What is your MSP doing while your team waits on hold?
Outsourced IT vs. Embedded IT
The biggest misconception in IT leadership? Thinking the goal is better outsourcing. It’s not.
Outsourced
| Feature | Included |
|---|---|
| Aligns IT with business goals | No |
| Co-authors your growth roadmap | No |
| Solves root causes, not just symptoms | No |
| Provides foresight, not just alerts | No |
| Feels like an irreplaceable partner | No |
Embedded
| Feature | Included |
|---|---|
| Aligns IT with business goals | Yes |
| Co-authors your growth roadmap | Yes |
| Solves root causes, not just symptoms | Yes |
| Provides foresight, not just alerts | Yes |
| Feels like an irreplaceable partner | Yes |
|
Overview
|
Outsourced
|
Embedded
|
|---|---|---|
|
Aligns IT with business goals |
No
|
Yes
|
|
Co-authors your growth roadmap |
No
|
Yes
|
|
Solves root causes, not just symptoms |
No
|
Yes
|
|
Provides foresight, not just alerts |
No
|
Yes
|
|
Feels like an irreplaceable partner |
No
|
Yes
|
But What About…?
“We don’t have the budget.” “Change sounds disruptive.”
“This sounds like overkill for us.”
What is your peace of mind and time back to genuinely focus on growing your company worth to you? Because you’re already paying — in downtime, trust erosion, and team turnover.
Yes, embedded IT feels expensive… until you compare it to what break-fix is costing you every week.
The truth is most companies hope to get a different provider for the same price, but the same price tags lead to the same problems — just techs with different badges.
That’s when you realize you didn’t move forward. You just moved sideways.
The Real Cost
Take something as basic as a password reset. Without the right systems and documentation in place, that one request can take 4 to 6 hours to resolve.
Here’s how that breaks down:
- Employee hourly rate $34/hour
- Downtime per ticket 4 hours
- Tickets per month80
- Monthly productivity loss $34 x 4 hours x 80 tickets = $11,200
- Annualized cost of poor IT $134,400 per year
That’s six figures a year — gone. Not from a breach. Not from hardware failure. From avoidable delays caused by weak support.
The Hidden Tradeoff
Lateral moves like this create a false belief. You think you’re choosing between fast support and long-term planning. Because that’s how you’ve been trained to think. Because you can’t possibly have both, right?
But what you’re really choosing is:
• A system that reacts vs. one that anticipates
• A provider who fixes symptoms vs. one who eliminates causes
You don’t have to pick speed or strategy. You just need a partner who can deliver both.
You’re the Architect — Not the Firefighter.
CIOs aren’t just tech managers anymore. You’re cultural anchors, risk mitigators, and strategic architects. But you can’t lead if you’re stuck defending vendors you didn’t choose and patching systems you didn’t approve.
Your MSP should:
• Eliminate repeat issues
• Forecast risk and spending
• Translate IT into strategic growth
• Be embedded in conversations before problems surface
If they’re not doing that? You don’t have a partner.
You have a liability.
The Metric That Matters: Fewer Tickets.
Most MSPs still track “speed to respond.” We track something different: How many problems never reached your desk. That’s meant employing a dedicated proactive health team for the last 12+ years. Their job? Write custom code and scripts daily to spot and fix system issues before users ever feel them. The results?
- Analyzing 2 billion data points per year across all clients
- Identifying patterns and problems across industries, not just within one business
- Saving our clients 2,952,203 hours of lost productivity in 2024 alone
- Resulting in $103,327,105 saved — purely through proactive automation
Because that’s what real maturity looks like — a system that works before it breaks.
Ready to See Where You Stand?
Take our MSP Maturity Map Quiz — a 2-minute diagnostic to help you:
Pinpoint the true maturity of your current IT relationship Spot blind spots that are quietly costing you Shift from reactive chaos to proactive clarity
Outsourcing is over. But the next generation of IT? It’s not just faster. It’s not just proactive. It’s embedded.
Let's Talk.