The day I sat down with the real financials at Aligned Tek, I had to read the numbers twice.
I stepped into the president’s role in 2022, believing I was taking over a $1.2 million MSP. From the outside, it looked like a house that needed a fresh coat of paint. What I found was foundation failure. Clients had been promised fully managed services at break-fix prices. Trucks were rolling every day for problems that should have been handled remotely. Billing irregularities had quietly inflated revenue by more than 30% for years, just enough to keep anyone from looking too hard at the truth.
When we pulled back the walls, EBITDA was negative $446,000. Our average endpoint price was $22. For that entire first year, we were break-fix, broken and broke. I had two options – patch the surface and hope for the best or tear it down to the foundation and rebuild it the right way.
I chose the harder path. Three years later, I stood on the TMT stage and accepted the Better Your Best trophy. What happened in between is the part worth telling
Kirby Watson, President, Aligned Tek
We Did Not Need A Growth Plan. We Needed A Reality Check.
Before we could grow, we had to get honest.
In 2023, we joined Technology Marketing Toolkit. We went through Rapid Implementation Workshop and moved quickly into Producers Club. For the first time, we had a framework, and we followed it like our business depended on it, because it did.
We launched the Aspirin campaign, targeting medical and dental practices with 15 or more employees and $2 million or more in annual revenue. We built a Shock-And-Awe box that looked like a first-aid kit. We deployed monthly newsletters, automated Drip Tips through TMT’s Marketing Automation Platform (MAP) and rebuilt our website with testimonials, free guides and conversion tools. We went from zero testimonials to 10 quality written reviews and five-star Google ratings.
The marketing was working. But the business underneath was still cracked. Great marketing layered on a broken operation does not fix the business. It accelerates the chaos. You close new clients and struggle to serve them. You hit revenue milestones that never show up in your bank account. We had to fix the foundation.
We Cut Our Daily Open Ticket Count From 275 To 40
In 2024, our daily open ticket average was 275 to 300 when we started the real operational rebuild. That number was not a symptom of being busy. It was proof that the wrong people were handling the wrong problems at the wrong time, and nobody had a system to stop them.
We migrated to a modern PSA, overhauled an antiquated accounting system and built custom integrations that forced our sales, service delivery, invoicing and receivables to finally speak the same language. We fixed the underlying processes (the plumbing). Then we designed a new escalation model that assigned tickets to the right technician, ensuring they were handling the appropriate complexity level. Our daily open ticket count dropped to 35 to 40.
The new PSA also revealed something uncomfortable: visibility into utilization rates (how much our team’s capacity was being used), making it clear we had more staff than our operation could justify. By the end of 2024, we reduced our team by three people. Real people. Real consequences. No way to make it feel clean. But you cannot grow a business by protecting it from the truth.
We Fired Our Worst Clients And Made More Money
We decided to remove misaligned accounts, not as a last resort but as a strategy. Our operational visibility showed us exactly what it cost to serve each account. Some of our highest-revenue clients were destroying our margins, burning out our team and consuming capacity we needed for better-fit businesses.
So, we let them go. We replaced them with sophisticated clients: businesses that valued technical security and operational efficiency, that signed long-term contracts because they saw us as a strategic partner rather than a commodity vendor. Our average endpoint price went from $22 to $100. We cut $100,000 in expenses, broke equipment sales records for three months in a row and achieved 100%+ ticket closure rates. We ended the year with 20 fewer clients and nearly $30,000 more in MRR.
The lesson: Volume is not value. Growth does not always come from more. It comes from the systems that hold the weight.
The Little Marketing Engine That Could…Even When Everything Else Was On Fire
Most MSPs treat marketing like a campaign tool. Something you turn on when business is slow and turn off when you get busy. We treated it like a house’s electrical system. It had to run constantly and invisibly for everything else to function.
Using MAP alongside TruMethods and the TMT framework, we built a multi-touch nurture system that consistently and automatically kept our brand in front of prospects. The mindset shift that changed everything: stop chasing deals and let trust compound.
Here is what that looked like in practice:
Our old faithful is the Aspirin campaign. It keeps us in front of decision-makers consistently, without waiting for referrals. By the time a prospect’s pain becomes urgent, we are not a cold introduction. We are the familiar, trusted option that has been showing up all along.
We deployed 40 Shock-And-Awe boxes in 2025. We have two versions: one targeting health care and one focused on cybersecurity for all other industries. Each box includes a snack, a mouse pad, a 1-to-4 USB hub extender and other marketing materials. Each box created a reaction. Prospects used words like “impressive” and “professional” before we ever sat down with them. Instead of opening conversations by overcoming skepticism, we entered as the standard.
We rebuilt our website using Robin’s proven framework, transforming it from a digital brochure into an active member of our sales team. It speaks directly to business risks, filters for right-fit clients and qualifies prospects before we ever pick up the phone.
The Closer Look campaign challenged business owners to take an honest look at what they were paying for IT and what they were actually receiving. It produced five first-time appointments and one new flagship client representing $9,088 in MRR and $327,168 in total contract value.
Our best long-game investment: a targeted letter to 150 CFOs across Alabama focused on financial risk, compliance exposure and the true cost of a cyber event. No closed sale yet. But 25 CFOs are now enrolled in our Weekly Tech Tips nurture stream. We are not chasing transactions. We are building trust with the people who ultimately own the risk.
Our peer group, Ready To Rumble, kept us accountable even when results were slow. Showing up every single month, whether it felt productive or not, is what made what happened next possible.
12 New Clients. $33,000 In New MRR. $1 Million In Contract Value. All While Adding A Second Story To “The House.”
On July 1, 2025, we acquired an MSP in Richmond, Virginia, that was nearly twice our size. Multiple peers told us not to do it.
We did it anyway. But only because of the foundation TMT had helped us build over the previous 2.5 years. Acquisition without structure is not growth. It is weight.
We implemented EOS in April 2025, and it changed everything. Consistent operating language, formalized Right People, Right Seats (RPRS) and the ability to make decisions on logic, not emotion. (RPRS places people who share your core values into roles they understand, want and can perform. This boosted productivity and aligned our team.) The acquired company carried 26 years of history we respected. Integration demanded hard calls. EOS kept us objective. And while all of that unfolded, the marketing engine ran itself. We closed 12 new clients, generating $33,000 in new MRR and just over $1 million in total contract value. Every deal reflected our standard: right-fit clients, right pricing and long-term partnerships. Not heroics. Systems.
110% Revenue Growth. $186,000 More In Net Profit. But That’s Not What I’m Most Proud Of.
By the end of 2025, gross revenue grew from $1,776,811 to $3,754,752, a 110% increase. Net profit rose by $186,000. Monthly recurring revenue under contract jumped 187%. First-time appointments increased by 57%. We closed the year with 146 clients, fewer than we once had, but generating a higher MRR per account than at any point in our company’s history.
What I am most proud of is not on that list. It is the fact that the same business that was bleeding $446,000 a year is now profitable, growing and built to scale to $20 million. That transformation did not happen by accident. It happened because we were willing to face the truth and rebuild on it.
The Part Nobody Talks About When They Hand You The Trophy
I was in the audience at TMT Boot Camp not long ago, watching Better Your Best finalists onstage, thinking: That could be me someday. This year, I was named a finalist. Then I won.
Standing on that stage as TMT’s Better Your Best winner, I thought about the version of myself staring at foundation failure in 2022, operating in survival mode with no blueprint. I wanted to tell him: The structure is coming. And once you have it, everything changes.
Before structure, we had hope. After structure, we had predictability.
TMT did not just give us marketing. It gave us the blueprint. The foundation, the electrical, the plumbing and the confidence to add a second story while the work was still underway. We are a $3.7 million MSP now, with a real pipeline, a scalable operation and a clear path to $10 million in five years and $20 million in ten.
I chose the hard way. It paid dividends I couldn’t have earned any other way.
