You’ve probably said it yourself at some point, ‘our people are our biggest asset’
The problem is, most MSPs don’t run their business like that sentence is actually true.
We sat down with Daryl Fuller and Tommy Pell from ITVET and talked about how they went from a tiny glass office with 10 people to a 120+ strong, award‑winning MSP by putting people at the centre of everything.
No hype. No fake culture. Just simple, clear things like hiring for attitude, putting people in the right seats, trusting them to do the work, and building habits that make staff want to stay, grow, and even come back after they leave.
This blog turns that conversation into a story you can see yourself in, with steps you can actually use in your own MSP.
Contents:
FREE Download: People‑First Team Toolkit for MSP Owners
Why people culture is your real MSP advantage
From the outside, your MSP probably looks a lot like everyone else’s.
You use similar tools. You work with the same vendors. Your website says you ‘care about your clients’ business’.
So why should a client pick you instead of the other guys?
Daryl only really understood the answer to that after years of running ITVET. When he started, he was an engineer through and through. His value, in his mind, was that he could fix anything. But over time, he realised that almost anyone can buy the same tools, copy the same processes, and compete on price. That’s not where the real edge is.
The real difference is your people.
It’s the voice that answers the phone when something breaks. It’s the engineer who turns up on site when there’s a crisis. It’s the account manager who talks to a client like a human being instead of a ticket number. It’s what your team does when you’re not in the room.
You see it in the tiny moments:
- The tech who quietly stays late to finish a job because they want to do right by the client.
- The colleague who jumps on Teams to help someone solve a tricky issue without being asked.
- The manager who gives honest feedback in private but backs their team in public.
You don’t get any of that from a slogan on the wall. You get it from how you choose, lead and look after people every day.
What ‘people-first’ really means day to day
‘People first’ is a nice phrase. It sounds good in a values deck or an all‑hands meeting.
In practice though, ‘people first’ often gets watered down to pizza on a Friday and maybe a team night out once every quarter.
For Daryl, it means something much more serious. When he says “putting people first is paramount”, he’s not talking about snacks. He’s talking about running the business in a way where people aren’t an afterthought, they’re the starting point.
In simple terms, it looks like this:
- You care what each person is actually good at, not just what’s written in their job title.
- You help them grow those strengths instead of spending all your time pointing out weak spots.
- You make sure they have the tools and support to do their job well.
- You explain why things are changing, instead of dropping a new system on them with a one‑line email.
- “I genuinely care about every single person in the organisation. I want them to do well. I want to make sure they’re in the right seat and they’ve got the tools to do the job.”
It does not mean saying yes to everything. You will still say no to some holiday requests. You will still push back on pay rises that don’t match the value someone is bringing. You will still have hard conversations about performance.
The difference is the way you do it. People‑first means your team can feel you’re on their side, even when you can’t always give them what they want.
Put players in the right seats
Imagine you run a football team and you decide to put your best striker in goal and your best defender up front. Then you shout at them every week because you keep losing games.
That’s what a lot of MSP owners do with their staff.
You take the friendly, people‑loving person and put them in a cramped first‑line role where they never really get to build relationships. You take the quiet, deep‑thinking problem‑solver and push them into client meetings because they’ve been there the longest. Then you wonder why everyone looks tired and a bit fed up.
One of the big things Daryl and Tommy have done well is putting people in the right seats on the pitch.
- “You’ve got to find out what this person is really good at, where they’re going to flourish, and what you can do to help them get there.”
They watch what people do when they’re at their best. They notice who gets energy from talking to clients and who gets energy from solving hard technical problems. They notice who naturally starts to organise others or tidy up messy processes without being asked.
Then they match jobs to those strengths.
At ITVET, a lot of their senior leadership didn’t start out in the roles they’re in now. They moved through different departments until they found the work that made the most sense for them.
Service desk staff became managers. Young people who came in just to ‘help out’ on work experience ended up in operations roles. The point is, they kept moving people until it felt right.
You can do the same by sketching out a few simple paths:
- Service desk → senior engineer → operations lead
- Admin → project co‑ordinator → project manager
- Tech → advisor / vCIO‑type role
The most powerful bit is the conversation. When you say to someone, ‘I can see you’d be really good at this, do you want to try it?’ you’re telling them you see more in them than just their current job. People remember that.
When you get this right, the whole business feels lighter. People have more energy. They stay longer because they can see a future with you. And clients feel the difference, because they’re dealing with people who actually enjoy the work they’re doing.
Trust your team and get out of their way
Trust is one of those words that gets thrown around a lot.
You might tell yourself you trust your team. But if you still jump into every critical ticket, sit on every major incident call, and go straight to front‑line staff when you’re unhappy instead of speaking to their manager, your actions are saying something else.
Daryl admits he spent years like that. Even when the company had grown to over a hundred people, he found himself pulled back into P1 calls and day‑to‑day drama. It took him a long time to learn how to step back.
He had to set a new rule for himself:
- “I have to trust the team. I’m paying people to do this job. My job is to give them what they need and then get out of the way.”
Tommy’s view as a leader is simple too: the people underneath you should know more than you about their area. If they don’t, something is wrong. You can’t grow a business if every decision has to come back to you.
There are a few practical things that make this easier.
First, you need to be clear about what good looks like. A lot of owners interfere because they cannot see, in a simple way, whether an area is on track. There’s no job description, no basic scoreboard, no regular check‑in. All they have is a feeling that something might be off, so they dive in.
Second, you need to agree who owns what. If you have a service manager, let them own response times, client satisfaction and coaching their team. If you have someone in operations, let them own tools, processes and reporting. If you have a sales lead, let them own the pipeline.
When you skip them and go straight to the people they manage, you cut them off at the knees.
Third, you need to stay calm during the chaos and fix things afterwards. When something goes wrong, let the team handle it. Once the dust has settled, call people together and ask them: What worked? What didn’t? What would we do differently next time? That’s how they learn.
Daryl tells a story about a coffee shop manager who stood in the middle of his team shouting what needed to happen, even though everyone already knew their jobs. The manager thought he was being useful. He was just getting in the way.
If you don’t want to be that person in your MSP, you have to choose a different role for yourself.
Set the standard. Give people what they need. Stay close enough to help, but far enough away that they can actually do the job you hired them to do.
Hire for attitude, not just experience
Most MSP job ads read like a shopping list of tools and years of experience.
Must know how to use this RMM.
Must have three years doing that.
Must already have worked in an MSP exactly like ours.
Then owners are shocked when they end up with technically strong people who don’t fit the culture, don’t really care about clients, and don’t stick around.
Daryl learned this the hard way. After thousands of CVs and interviews, he realised that hiring just for technical skill was a trap. The number‑one thing they started looking for was attitude.
- “We’ve never, ever employed someone based on their technical ability or their qualifications. None of it really matters. It’s attitude we’re looking for.”
They wanted people who:
- Tell the truth when things go wrong.
- Take ownership instead of blaming others.
- Stay calm with difficult customers.
One of the best signals for this was past work in places like retail and hospitality. If someone had spent a couple of years serving angry shoppers or tired diners on a Saturday afternoon, they had already learned more about dealing with humans under pressure than most courses will ever teach.
This doesn’t mean skills don’t matter. Of course they do. But they can be taught. Attitude is much harder to change.
You can start with a very simple filter: before you write down a single tool in your job ad, write down three behaviours you must see in this role. Then, in the interview, stop asking ‘have you used this?’ and start asking ‘tell me about a time this happened, what did you do?’
It also helps to remember the interview is a two‑way conversation. At ITVET, that first call is more of a chat than a formal grilling. They want the candidate to get a feel for the business and decide if it’s right for them too. People who pick you on purpose tend to stay longer than people who feel like they had no other option.
The final piece is what happens after you say yes. A clear first 30, 60 and 90 days gives new staff a fair shot. They know what on track looks like. They know who to go to for help. They don’t spend weeks feeling useless because no one took the time to show them how things actually work.
When you hire this way, you get people who fit your values, learn fast, and make clients feel safe.
Grow your own talent from schools to senior leaders
If your only plan for finding good people is to keep offering more money for senior techs, you’ll always feel like there’s a shortage.
Daryl and Tommy took a different route. They decided to grow a lot of their own talent.
They built links with local schools and colleges. They brought in work‑experience students. They offered apprenticeships. They were willing to give a chance to people who didn’t have the perfect background but clearly had the right attitude.
One of their current operations directors, Josh, started with them as a teenager on work experience. His first jobs were basic. Making drinks. Sitting in on calls. Helping here and there.
Tommy remembers it clearly:
- “Josh came through that work experience scheme. He was just doing bits and pieces, seeing customers, helping out, doing the teas and stuff like that. Now he’s a director of operations for the business and it’s incredible.”
Over time, with support and real responsibility, he grew into one of the key leaders in the business.
This doesn’t happen by accident. You need to make it normal in your MSP to have juniors coming through. You need simple, clear paths where someone can start at the very bottom and see a way up, like:
Work experience → apprentice → junior tech → senior tech → team lead
You also need to write down the basics. A lot of juniors fail, not because they don’t care, but because no one ever shows them the simple stuff: how to answer the phone, how to log a ticket correctly, what good sounds like when they talk to a client. If you write this down and make it part of onboarding, you give them a real chance.
That doesn’t mean you only hire juniors. Daryl is very honest about that. Big deals drop at odd times. A client phones with a huge opportunity and suddenly you need more experienced heads, fast. So, they do both. They keep a small bench of juniors coming through, and when they know demand is going to jump, they invest in senior hires too.
Over time, this mix gives you something very powerful: home‑grown leaders who know your culture inside out, and fresh hires from outside who bring new ideas. You are no longer completely at the mercy of the market every time you need another engineer. You’ve built a pipeline for your own people.
Build a place people don’t want to leave
Great pay and shiny tools will get people through the door.
But they won’t keep them.
What made the real difference at ITVET was building a place people didn’t want to walk away from in the first place.
One of the clearest signals of that is what they did with HR. They didn’t just hire someone to do contracts and policies and call it a day. They rebranded the whole function to Wellbeing and HR on purpose. It was a simple way of saying, ‘We care about how you’re doing as a person, not just what’s written in your contract.’
That thinking shows up in the way they talk to staff. Regular check‑ins start with ‘How are you?’ before ‘How many tickets have you done?’ The numbers still matter, but they aren’t the only thing that matters.
They also worked hard to create real community, especially because a lot of their people work remotely. In Microsoft Teams, they set up channels for motorsport, cooking, gardening, music and more. None of this is forced. People share photos from races, favourite recipes, progress in the garden. Sometimes they organise go‑karting nights or trips to shows. The company doesn’t have to plan every detail. The staff take ownership because it feels like theirs.
Daryl loves that side of it:
- “These things don’t take a lot of energy or effort. You can build something that’s self‑perpetuating - people believe in it, they run the clubs and the forum themselves.”
Then there’s Coffee Roulette. Once a month, anyone who opts in gets paired with someone else in the business for a 15‑minute online coffee. Two people who might never normally talk suddenly get a chance to swap stories about their weekend, their family, or their hobbies. For a largely remote team, those small pockets of real conversation matter.
On top of that, they put time and energy into charity and community work. Teams go out to paint community centres, raise money, or help local groups. It’s not about PR photos. It’s about giving people a chance to feel proud of what they’re part of.
From the outside, some owners only see costs here. Clubs? Coffee chats? Charity days? That’s time they could be logging tickets. But that’s short‑sighted. When people feel looked after, and feel part of something they care about, they do more for clients without being asked. They stay when other offers come in. Some even leave, see what other workplaces are like, and then come back.
ITVET didn’t just hope this was working. They put it to the test. They entered the Great Place to Work programme and asked every single person in the company to answer honestly.
98% said it was a great place to work. That’s not a slogan. That’s evidence.
Make time for people, not just tickets
Every MSP owner you talk to is busy.
The question is, busy doing what?
If your whole week is eaten by tickets, quotes and emergencies, and you never seem to find time to sit with your people, you’re building a shaky foundation.
Daryl learned that if he only ever picked the urgent work, the important work with people never happened. He had to flip his thinking and treat time with staff as ‘must do’, not ‘if there’s time left over.’
Tommy is blunt about it too. When owners say, ‘I don’t have time for one‑to‑ones, I’m too busy’, his answer is simple: you have to make time. Not because it’s nice, but because it’s the only way to build a team that can carry the load with you.
If you always pick tickets over people, here’s what happens:
- Your best people leave, because they feel unseen and unheard.
- The ones who stay stop telling you the truth, because every time they raise an issue you brush it off.
- Clients start to feel the cracks, because tired, unsupported staff can only pretend for so long.
You don’t fix this with a culture day once a year. You fix it by blocking time in your calendar every single week where you are not allowed to do client work.
Maybe it’s Wednesday mornings. Maybe it’s Friday afternoons. In that time, you sit down with key staff for proper one‑to‑ones. You grab a coffee with someone new. You check in with that shy engineer who never speaks up on calls and ask them how things are going.
The questions don’t need to be clever. What’s going well? What’s getting in your way? If you were me for a week, what would you change first? are more than enough. The important bit is that you listen and then do something with at least one of the answers.
You can add to that by creating spaces where staff talk to each other without you in the room, like a staff forum. At ITVET, the teammate forum meets, gathers ideas and concerns, and then shares them with leadership. That’s how you find out what’s really going on before it blows up.
This is long‑term work. You won’t see the full benefit in a week. But over time, you’ll notice fewer surprises, fewer sudden resignations, and more people quietly going the extra mile for clients and for each other.
You can squeeze every minute of billable work out of people, or you can build a team that wants to go to bat for you when things get hard. It’s very difficult to have both if you refuse to make time for the second one.
FREE Download: People‑First Team Toolkit for MSP Owners
-
Turn People Problems Into a Clear Plan
Get a simple, step‑by‑step framework to tighten roles, expectations and habits so your team know what 'good' looks like and you stop firefighting the same issues. -
Build a Place Your Best People Don’t Want to Leave
Steal low‑cost rituals like wellbeing check‑ins, clubs, Coffee Roulette and “people blocks” in your diary so staff feel seen, supported, and happy to go the extra mile for clients. -
Get More From Every Recording, Not More Work
Learn how to turn one recording into multiple clips, posts and emails, and build a light rhythm that keeps leads coming in without taking over your week.
scaleUP Podcast: Listen to the Full Episode
This blog pulls out just a slice of what Daryl and Tommy shared about people, culture and leadership.
Hearing it in their own words hits differently, especially when they talk about:
- Starting as hands‑on engineers and learning to become leaders
- Feeling like a dad to 50 kids as the team grew
- Letting great people leave to chase their dreams… and welcoming them back later
- Rebranding HR to Wellbeing and winning Great Place to Work awards
- Balancing remote, hybrid and in‑office work while keeping everyone connected
Listen to the full episode of the scaleUP podcast with Daryl and Tommy from ITVET and pick one idea to put into practice in your MSP this week.
