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Welcome to this SPECIAL edition of the show, Episode 269, of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green.
This week I’ve got the last of my special episodes for you, where you’ll discover how my guest grew his MSP to 450 clients, 35 staff and $7m revenue.
Featured guest: Steve McNamara is the visionary founder and CEO of DTC, Inc., an MSP that has been a cornerstone of IT support for over 25 years. Established in 1999, DTC began as a small operation focused on serving the dental community, quickly evolving into one of the largest dental IT support companies in the Mid-Atlantic region. Under Steve’s leadership, the company has expanded its reach beyond Maryland to include clients in Virginia, Delaware, and Pennsylvania, now boasting over 450 clients and a dedicated team of more than 35 employees.
Steve built DTC from the ground up with his first hire, Scott Leister, who now serves as the DevSecOps engineer. Steve has remained committed to the core mission of making IT work for clients through innovative solutions and meaningful connections. His philosophy of “doing the next right thing” has guided the company through various challenges, ensuring that client needs are always prioritised.
DTC has a strong emphasis on values and culture. Steve believes in hiring individuals who align with the company’s core values rather than merely filling roles. This commitment to culture is reflected in initiatives such as hiring a Chief Flourishing Officer and conducting quarterly skill-building sessions and all-hands meetings, where every team member has a voice. This focus on values not only attracts talent but also fosters a loyal and engaged workforce.
How would you like to own an MSP doing $7 million a year where you personally do none of the tech work? There’s nothing more motivating than hearing how other MSP owners have built up their business. And in this week’s special episode, you are going to discover how this guy grew to 450 clients, 35 staff, and $7 million revenue. What I think you’ll love is his unique approach to his people and how he’s kept the quality of the tech work really high without having to do any of it himself.
Hi, I’m Steve McNamara. I’m the CEO and founder of DTC Inc. We are an MSP here in the Maryland DC, Northern Virginia region of the United States. We’ve been incorporated for a little over 25 years now and serving primarily into the healthcare and dental space, but now moving into the CMMC space as well. And that’s the very short, skinny version of who we are.
I love it. Thank you so much for joining us on the podcast, Steve. I think my favourite episodes of this podcast over the last five years or so have been when we’ve had real MSPs on who have shared their stories of how they did it. So you’ve been going, I think you said more than a quarter of the century, what was it that made you start your first business or start this business in the first place?
Well, we had a 2 year old son and my wife told me to get a bleeping job.
Were you working in it before?
Part-time, I actually, I had a health food store in rural county in Maryland and it was failing, but I was more interested in the natural food industry and alternative healthcare than I was tech. I did tech on the side to try to pay the bills and my wife was tired of us not having enough money to pay the bills and to eat. So that’s why she told me to get a real job.
I love it. And obviously 25 years on, you’re still here doing tech and you haven’t gone back to natural foods unless that’s some kind of side hustle. So paint the scene for us. We’re talking I guess end of the nineties early noughties. What was the tech like then and was it a break fix shop that you started or was it something different?
Yeah, it was a break fix. I mean, the guy that I was doing some subcontracting work for, he did some work in the dental space for a young lady that sold dental practice management software. So we did a fair amount of dental offices and she was leaving the industry and that company was looking for a salesperson and I had a background in sales from my early twenties. That career ended due to addiction issues. So I was in recovery for addiction and didn’t want to go back into the financial planning world and the tech world was calling my name. It wasn’t really where I wanted to go, but those were the doors that were opening for me. So that’s ultimately where I landed.
Now I think at this point it would be really good to set some context of what you’ve achieved in the last 25 years. So that was you back then, one man band by the sounds of it, starting out in tech, not wanting to be in tech, which is really interesting. Where are you today in terms of the size of the business, just so we can understand how far you’ve come on that journey?
Sure, so we will pass 7 million in revenue this year sitting at roughly 37 employees. I don’t sell anything anymore. I don’t fix anything anymore. I spend most of my time now either mentoring some of the younger leaders in the company or a big part of what our growth looks like moving forward into the future. So most of my time here now is either implanting the future or developing talent and helping the younger generation find their way into the next phase of what we’re doing.
Okay. So here’s an interesting question. You started this business because you had to rather than that you really wanted to from what you’ve said. And yet 25 years on, you’ve got a substantial enterprise and anyone who’s been in business for more than 10 minutes knows that growing a business is hard. It doesn’t happen by accident. It’s something that you really have to keep pushing to do. So was there a point at which your desire to grow the business changed or were you just constantly trying to get yourself away from having to do the work or what was it that led to the big growth in the business?
It was never running away from the work. I come from a blue collar background, so the work part of it never really phased me a whole lot. Having a young family, obviously financial independence was a big deal. My wife was in the arts, so she had a ballet school. And if there’s anything about ballet schools, you know they don’t make very much money. That’s more of a work of pleasure than it is of any kind of financial reward. And what started to happen is I started to find that I was enjoying the wins, what I called Santa Claus moments. And the Santa Claus moments for me was when I could walk into an office and take them from paper and chemicals to a completely digital office and how excited they were to have made this huge quantum leap in their business. And I was really at the heart of how that was happening, and I found that I really enjoyed that part of it.
And that’s really what started to drive that. I met some really good people along the way who were running successful enterprises in the same vertical in the dental space, who were kind enough to share a lot of information with me about business, about how to run a business, about how to get out of the way, how to hire people. I had a lot of good mentors along the way that were willing to share. And it’s one of the things we still continue to do here now. We mix that up with other CEOs where I’m on regular calls with other CEOs of MSPs and we leave it all open. We share everything that we’re doing because none of us really see each other as a threat or competition. It’s more a matter of like, Hey, don’t go do that because that’s a train wreck, or look at this piece of software because this is really valuable and it’s good for your clients. So that’s really what happened, Paul, is I fell in love with something I didn’t really want to do.
Yeah, yeah, I love that. And you’re right, I think the Channel is one of the few, a tiny number of sectors where you’ll have direct competitors collaborating with each other and it’s a common thing amongst MSPs, which is a really cool thing to see. I’ve worked in other sectors in the past and you do not get that in many other sectors. So was there a point at which you sort of realised, actually we’re onto something here. The business is growing, I’m enjoying taking the money home, I’m enjoying those Santa Claus moments, and was there a point at which you said, actually, let’s see if we can get beyond a million dollars or $2 million, or is it simply a case that you’ve just continued to grow organically and here we are sitting talking near the end of 2024 and you’re sat on that 7 million?
Yeah, it’s a combination of the two. So organically we were growing, I think I was probably three, four years as a solo single man shop. And I hired my first employee who actually is still here with me today. He’s one of my senior people. And we started to expand in little bits and pieces. The work kept coming and I kept finding good people to join the team. And the other thing that I found along the way was is that specifically to this guy Scott, who started with me at the very beginning, if I didn’t start giving him other challenging things to do, I was going to lose him. So one of the things that I learned quickly was if I didn’t want attrition, I had to continue to grow.
I had to give people roles to work into and different things to do because nobody wants to fix printers and scanners their whole life.
If that person exists, I think we’d be fighting over them. You’ve got to give people places to go, so you have to continue to grow your company or you’re constantly going to be hiring new people and retraining and retraining and retraining.
So the growth became a little bit more of a forced component of it. And the other part was that the tech part I was good at, not great, I was good. What I was trained in was sales. So for me, selling was the easy part, which I know in a lot of MSPs is a challenge. So it was easy for me to sell. So I was selling and I started being able to hire better technical people way better than me. And I slowly and gradually moved out of the whole technical side of it. I understood it, I knew what we were doing, but I wasn’t the guy coming in there fixing your server anymore. That wasn’t happening. My job was to bring in the business and make sure that the jobs were completed well, and I think that was a very fortunate piece for us.
It was. And I think you must talk to a lot of MSPs and you must see people sat on a couple of million turnover revenue and they’re still the technical person, so they’re trying to be the salesperson and they’re also the third level technician and the overall strategist. So do you think that was one of the main reasons that the fact that you got away from delivery through the process, do you think that’s one of the main reasons that the business has continued to grow and is continued to be successful?
Absolutely, absolutely. Because my focus became how do we keep bringing in new business, bringing in new clients, selling more work, giving my people who’ve been here for a while, places to go to continue to grow. I will tell you right now, I think probably 50% of my company is 10 years plus or longer with the company. That’s a big number and we just continue to find ways to make it work.
The other thing that we did, Paul, right out of the gate, and we still continue to do this today, is family first was always our motto. If you had a family issue, it didn’t matter what else was going on. We were like, if we lose a client because you took care of your family, so be it. It’s not what we want, but our families ultimately is why we come to work every day. We all come to get paid, but to take care of our families. And I think that culture gets thrown around a whole lot today, and I think it’s misunderstood more than understood, but clearly here it’s been something that’s been at the heart of everything that we’ve done since day one.
And just to give you a quick piece of that, my youngest child is special needs minute by minute care. So he always has to have somebody with him. And when he was really sick when he was five and a half my team, I wasn’t around a whole lot. I was at the hospital more than I was working, and my whole team kept coming to work and doing the job every day. And a lot of those people are still here. So it wasn’t just me saying family first and helping them, it was them rewarding that back.
So there’s always been this engagement here in our company where your individual life matters and I’ve given it and I’ve received it. So it’s a pretty fascinating piece and I think that I would be understating it to say that if I didn’t tell that story as to why I think our growth became it is because I think the people who worked here, they took that out into the field and our clients knew that this was like we were all on the same team. There wasn’t that chasm and gossip and junk that is so easy to have in your organisation.
So would I be correct in saying that some of the themes of what you’ve done with the business over 25 years, perhaps more out of necessity or moving towards things you want and need more than through planning, are you’ve had this insane focus on quality people and putting family first, children first? Which I love because you really don’t get that in many businesses, but also as you say, you focusing more on the sales because that interested you more. Are there other areas where you have operated in a way that perhaps the typical MSP doesn’t operate?
I would say in the last five years, yes. I think that our focus in the last five years has really become more on people and the development of people. Like I said, I think culture gets thrown around a whole lot, but we, we’ve invested pretty heavily. We have something here called a chief flourishing officer whose job is here to help people, I don’t want to say with their lives, but with communication, because internal communication was always a struggle for us. I did a poll one time in an all hands meeting and said, on a scale of one to 10, how do you feel like the communication from the top down is in the organisation? And it was like the average was like a 4.5. I mean, it was devastating to me. I thought I was doing this wonderful job of communicating through the whole company and I wasn’t.
And so what I did is I brought somebody in from the outside to help us foster that communication between teams. So that, and I’ll use, I know Griffin here, he’s in the marketing team and he doesn’t have really a lot to do with the technical team, but he’s in meetings with the technical team because they all need to know each other. They all need to know what’s happening, why what they’re doing matters to this team and that team. And I think in the last five years, that’s been why we’ve been so successful in continuing our growth is that we’ve invested in places that most businesses say, you don’t spend money here, or that’s BS. Empathy is a real word in our organisation.
I would’ve told you 10 years ago, you cannot run a business with kindness because people will walk all over you. What I’ve learned is that if you run a business with kindness, then you lead with that, then you can run that business that way and people will want to work for you. It was a very fascinating thing for me coming out of my generation where that was not how you did things, to seeing this change in the world that happened. It’s real. And we have people showing up at our door that want to work for us that are incredibly high quality people, and I’m listening to people having struggles, finding good help. We’re not having that problem. I consider us really fortunate. So I’m going to continue running this model the way that it is because attracting good people to us. So there’s a long wind answer.
No, no, I think that was a fantastic answer. And what’s really cool is how many people have you got in your team at the moment?
It’s 37 I believe, or 38, something like that. Okay.
And how old are you, Steve, if you don’t mind me asking?
I’ll be 63 in a few months.
A spritely 63. I’m only 50 myself. It is funny, isn’t it? You get to a certain age, and if you’d said to me 20 years ago, 63, I’d have thought, well, that’s old. And now I’m 50. It doesn’t feel so old. It just feels like a few years on. What’s really cool is you’ve got 35, 36 people in your business and you are teaching them how to run a business in a very specific way. Even if they report in to someone who reports into someone who reports into you.
I think you’re right, the word culture gets bandied around. And I had a client years ago, this was before I was in the MSP space, this is when I was doing PR and marketing for anyone, and he sat down and he looked at me and he said, I want you to do some posters for our walls about our culture. His name was Chris and he was an idiot. And I said to him, Chris, I don’t know anything about your company culture. I turn up for an hour a month to talk to you. And he says, well just do some posters on what the culture should be. And I was like, oh my goodness. This guy doesn’t understand that culture isn’t a poster. It’s the way you live. Well, you are doing it, you’re living it right now. But yeah, you are teaching generations of people how to run a business and we could go forward a hundred years when you and I aren’t going to be here. And we see those people and how they’ve run the businesses and their businesses that they’ll have in the future or where they work and how they’ve influenced other people. So I think this is amazing. It’s just amazing.
Let’s look at the marketing. Obviously this podcast is primarily about marketing and business growth. So I would imagine a lot of your growth has come from getting the right people, keeping those right people, and not just through clever retention, but because they genuinely want to stay with you. And I would imagine the clients therefore are treated very well, are looked after because let’s not use the culture word again, but it sounds like the ethos of the business is to do the right thing to treat people with kindness. And of course that’s going to be influenced to the clients, but you need to win new clients as well. So what have you guys done over the last decade that’s worked the best for you in terms of actually attracting new leads and turning them into clients?
So sadly from the marketing side, we for many years did nothing other than we would go to trade shows and we would show up there, get call-ins and leads from our existing clients. I could always gauge the quality of our service by the number of leads that we were getting from referrals. And we grew very organically through that arena. I know nothing about marketing, I don’t understand marketing. And so it was a real lift for me I guess about five or six years ago, I hired an amazing young woman to come into our organisation and help us try to build a social media platform. We had no exposure from a social media standpoint. I mean, we had a Facebook page and we had a LinkedIn page, but there was not any real activity on it. Every once in a while we would throw something out there and we would wonder why nothing ever came back, because we had no plan. And she came in and she got us organised and she helped us start to grow up. She was really more of a graphics designer than a marketing person, but what she did was amazing. She helped us grow up. She helped us start to get some exposure.
But I’ll give you a case in point, about a year ago we realised we had five Google reviews. We’ve been in business for 25 years, and Griff came to me and said, Steve, we have over 500 clients. We have five Google reviews. What does that mean? Because that’s not a world I live in. And so we set some goals and we put the team up to the task. And I think over the course of the year, we’re past 75 now. It’s been amazing. We’re getting traction from it.
I think I’m probably very similar to most MSP owners that we don’t get marketing. We see it as almost like when people say, if you buy a boat, you’re throwing money in the water because all you’re ever going to do is pour money into the boat. I think that’s what marketing looks like to us sometimes. And one of my fears was is I didn’t want to sign on with somebody that I was going to pay 10 or $15,000 a month for them to give me the same thing that they’re giving 50 other MSPs, and we’re all throwing the same stuff up on LinkedIn and Facebook and Instagram and all the things. So I think if I had one piece there, there’s two pieces I would say. One is open your mind. My mind was not open when it came to marketing. And second, get educated. I’ve learned more in the last five years about marketing to the point where I even read a book. I wish I could remember the name of it. You would know it. And the guy did not start out in marketing. He had a pool company.
Oh, They Ask You Answer by Marcus Sheridan. Yeah.
Yes. And so I read Marcus’s book and I remember saying to my wife, I didn’t know any of it. I was blind to all of this and I wished I had done this sooner. So I think that would be the piece, because I don’t want to sit here and say that we’ve made, until this year, I think we’ve had a couple of clients that have found us this year because of our exposure, because of the plan that’s been put in place to continually be in the right places and be seen. And we’re getting traction now, but it’s a long game and I will speak as a business owner and an entrepreneur, we don’t always have the most patience in the world for the long game. And I think it’s a long game. At least that’s been my experience. So I’m excited about where it’s going and again, wished we had started it sooner, but yeah, probably not have much help to your podcast.
Oh no, you’d be surprised. That’s very helpful. It’s very helpful.
Marketing didn’t help us get where we are, but I think it’s going to take us where we’re going.
Yeah, absolutely. And this podcast, we talk about marketing and business growth. It is anything that you can do to get your MSP to improve it and already the way you talk about people, I don’t think we’ve ever had an MSP on talking about their people and the way they run their business and the way that you have. And everyone has a different story, which is insane.
I’ve got two points and then I’m going to ask our final subject, which is going to be about the future of the business and where you want to take it.
So the first one is you say about the long game. A hundred percent right. The challenge for any MSP of any size is selling managed services is a very complex, difficult sale. Even if you package it up really well, even if you sell a standard solution from the point of view of the prospect, the person who’s buying from you, it’s complicated to them. They don’t understand technology. They know it can ruin their business and destroy things if it goes wrong. They need to know you. They need to get to like you, they need to trust you. All of this has got to happen. There’s something called inertia loyalty, which prevents them from moving. They’d rather stay with an MSP that they don’t like because they know them. Is that better the devil, you know thing. And ultimately your goal with all of your marketing is to get the right message in front of the right person at the right time, and that very much is the long game. So I think you’re playing a great game now. It sounds like you’ve mentioned your colleague Griffin, who’s been amazing in setting up this interview. I can always judge the quality of businesses by the communication, and actually Griffin is over communicated and that’s not a bad thing Griffin, I know you’re listening in the background. He’s been brilliant at giving me everything that we need for this, and I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s reflected in your marketing as well, which is brilliant.
You mentioned Marcus Sheridan, and you may not have heard this episode, but I think it was two years ago, Marcus came on to a special episode. I think it was like Christmas 2022 maybe, and it’s our most listened to episode ever. And he came on and spent, I think it was like 40 or 50 minutes taking They Ask You Answer and making it relevant to MSPs because Marcus Sheridan knows MSPs very well. So that’s a good episode to listen to.
And my final question for you is the future. So you said you’re 63. You don’t seem like the kind of guy that would retire to me maybe do different things, but not necessarily do the same things but do different things. But do you have a plan? Do you have a goal? Do you want to stay with the business and keep pushing forward and enjoying yourself, or do you think the business is getting to that stage where it doesn’t need Steve anymore?
Yeah, so where we are with all of that is right now I work about three and a half days a week. I have a lot of commitments with my youngest son and that just wipes me out. I’m 35 years old between my ears, but my body reminds me that I’m 63, so I can’t do all the things that I used to do.
Our next big jaunt right now is vertically. We’re going to be doing CMMC certification and then we are going to be moving into the DOD contractor space. We just hired a COO this year that’s very knowledgeable in that arena. We’ve just brought on a true hunter salesperson that’s knowledgeable in that arena. So we’re very excited about where we’re going with that. Our goal is to grow by a million recurring revenue a year over the next three years and cross that 10 million hump. And I feel like once I can get them there, then they’ll be in good shape to keep running with this and keep a legacy piece.
My wife and I decided probably two, three years ago that selling the business was not where we were going. We were going to transition it internally. Socioeconomically, we did not come from high backgrounds. I’m more of a lower middle class blue collar family. So this is amazing. We’ve had amazing success, we’ve had amazing experience, and we want to give people who wouldn’t typically have that opportunity, an opportunity to continue and have a chance to be a part owner in a business. So the goal is absolutely to transfer it internally, and I’ve got a really great team of people here that we think we’re going to be able to do that with. I probably will work for as long as I can because I don’t see myself not working.
I’d like to have a little bit less responsibility here, and I’ll be pouring more of my time into a 501c3 for special needs adults, finding places to live. That’s actually where my next real passion and venture in life is going. But I like what I do. I like the people I get to work with and I have time to do other things today that I didn’t have before, and that’s a luxury. So I’ve been incredibly blessed, and it’s not the typical succession planning type of a thing which drives my accountant and my attorney crazy that I don’t do things like other people, but I think at the end of the day, they haven’t run away, so it can’t be too bad.
Yeah, no, I love it. I can almost imagine you getting in a time machine and going back to whenever it was 1999 and speaking to your younger self as you were starting break fix shop back in the day and saying, look, buddy, this is where it goes. You’ve just got to buckle down. Just enjoy it. Forget all the other stuff. This is very much the future, very much. Steve, you’ve had a crazy good life. I think your story is amazing. It’s been a joy to hear your story, so thank you so much and you’ve been very generous with your time and with your advice as well, and we’ve certainly heard things there that we’ve never heard before on this podcast.
Just for those MSPs that are listening and want to just reach out to you, maybe I know, ask you some questions, just connect with you, what’s the best way to find you? Would that be on LinkedIn?
Yeah, LinkedIn’s the best place because if I see them there, I can at least track back where they came from. A lot of my emails don’t even make it to my desk anymore. They get filtered out long before they get to me, and if anybody tried to call here, it’s like getting through Fort Knox to find me – the team here is very, very protective of my time. So LinkedIn’s absolutely the best place to go, and then I can see who they are and then I’m happy to chat with people from there.
That’s great. Thank you, Steve. So it’s Steve McNamara on LinkedIn, and of course we will link to your LinkedIn and of course to your business’s website on our show notes. Steve, thank you so much for joining us.
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