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this post was submitted on 02 Nov 2024
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This makes me want to call up the former CTO of the MSP I worked for who disagreed with me when I said TP-Link and other consumer hardware was a risk we shouldn't let our customers take and tell him that he's a miserable drunk who destroyed a company by taking a role he had no business in.
Well post the call recording on LinkedIn if you do
Only if he shows me that he wasn't destroying the company, but building networks to leverage crises into profit.
Which, it would seem, is what he and the rest of the C-suite team did.
They bought out the old owners and signed up a bunch of new customers that we didn't understand how to work with (new industries with different requirements, we were very specialized toward a few professions and our staff's knowledge and skills reflected that). They also brought in fresh, inexperienced people to manage the clients, so we didn't really get very good on-boarding results and didn't generate good documentation for the help desk to work off of. Right off the bat we did a bad job for these new customers and it took us a long time to do it, while our long-time customers had their wait times go up by an unacceptable amount.
My team was running at their limits, but I was not allowed to let up at all because we needed to get the tickets down. 9 hours days were the minimum, 9.5-10 were the norm. We hadn't hired any new people when we added the new clients and the new clients generated tickets at 1.75x the of rate existing clients, and they were still signed up more. After months of begging, they hired two people for Tier-3 positions without testing them technically. They were both from corp call centers and had previously read scripts with troubleshooting steps on them. Neither had ever logged into a router. This is where I quit.
Within four months of my departure (and a few others at my level around the same time, we had all had enough) the company had lost 30% of their clients, two of which were huge 250-person entities that were cash cows for biling. Four months later the owner-operators sold the whole thing to another company, getting high level jobs, equity and cash out of it. As far as I know they're all still working for the bigger company. Even if they lost money buying and selling, chances are they're on top in the long run.
Wow gross. Glad you got out, I doubt many of your colleagues did well from the buyout.
One of the benefits of having a number of middle managers leave is a few of the folks in the trenches get a chance to move up. Two of my team members were there in management through 2023, which is a number of years after everything went down. I don't know what their compensation looks like, but I know they must have gotten a 15% bump at the least jumping up during the exodus. They were the last two from the staff still at the company.