I got into IT after developing a system (known as Star Jockey) when I was a morning show host at a country radio station in 2002. The system, which allowed DJs to prerecord talk tracks and share them between sister stations over the Internet, caught the attention of a local IT company owner in 2003, who invited me to work for him. In 2005, when the IT company closed, one of the clients didn’t want to lose my support so we launched Tigerhawk Technologies together as a side project.
In 2017, I bought out my business partner for $10,000 when the company was generating $150,000 annually. In 2022, I expanded, opening a second office in Quincy, Illinois, and grew revenue to over $600,000. But I hit a ceiling. After reading the book The E-Myth Revisited, I discovered that the reason the business wasn’t growing was that it relied too much on me. I was the bottleneck! After a year and a half of working to get processes in place so the day-to-day operations didn’t involve me, I knew I was ready to scale.
We were a 100% break-fix operation with no direct MSP competition within a 90-mile radius, so I began priming the business to convert to an MSP. However, I faced significant cash-flow challenges. We were struggling every month. If my break-fix clients paid within 60 days, I would barely make payroll by month’s end. With monthly expenses of approximately $22,000 for rent, utilities and payroll, I was constantly juggling finances and pushing back payments. Sometimes, I delayed paying myself three to four extra days to ensure sufficient funds. There was no long-term reliability, so I enrolled in TMT’s Rapid Implementation Workshop (RIW) in September 2024 to help with the conversion.
RIW Instantly Ended My Payment-Chasing Stress And Added 15 MSP Clients
Everything is moving in the right direction now, and it didn’t take two years. We spent years and years righting the ship, and then we unleashed TMT and things moved extremely fast. Switching to the TMT methods made a massive difference to our cash flow. I can now cover all operating expenses and handle my monthly payroll with ease. I no longer need to delay my own compensation. By mid-month, I have sufficient funds to cover everything. Plus, with the reliability of monthly recurring revenue (MRR), I sleep better knowing we are financially stable.
How My Financial Situation Dramatically Improved Within 60 Days
Our revenue grew from $624,000 to $790,000, a 27% increase. We added 15 MSP clients and $22,500 in MRR.
My company’s rapid transformation came from:
- Converting Break-Fix Clients To An MSP Model. When I went to the RIW, I only had one MSP client. I just signed my 16th MSP client to our Tigerhawk Complete MSP plan.
- Bold Pricing Strategy. We strategically shed problematic clients while increasing profitability after discovering I was undercharging for our services. Following advice from Will Noble, I increased my break-fix rates by 22.7% and eliminated my nonprofit discount, which resulted in a 50% increase in rates. I sent a letter to all my nonprofits four days after RIW, explaining the reality of the situation and how we needed to align with the state of the industry. This made a big difference for us by forcing two small, annoying clients to leave and the remaining clients to pay more for the services they were receiving.
- Establishing Consistent MRR. I rapidly increased MRR from just $6,000 to $28,500. Focusing on MRR and setting targets for adding specific amounts of new MRR each month provides me with greater predictability and stability in my income. Along with more substantial cash flow and a better ability to plan for future growth, it also strengthens my customer relationships by allowing me to service them proactively instead of reactively.
- Vertical Market Domination. I narrowed my focus from 1,400 scattered break-fix clients to a single vertical. With nearly 1,000 residential clients and the remaining 450 businesses, I evaluated our business clients. We already have the four biggest health care nursing facilities in our area, so we decided to own the entire health care vertical. We’ve switched all our marketing to focus completely on health care. Three big health care monopolies in the area operate almost every clinic, except for a few. We plan to target every single one of them. For the first four months, we will heavily target nursing homes. After that, we will target other health care facilities as well.
Pivotal Campaigns That Led To 27% Year-Over-Year Growth
My mindset completely transformed from passive outreach to proactive outreach. Before, my strategy was to hand out my business card and hope and pray that prospects would find it in their beautiful hearts to call me. Now, when I’m talking to people, I don’t really care if they get my business card. I want to know how to get hold of THEM. I’m targeting people intentionally. I’ve changed my thinking from “Everyone knows what I do, and if they need my help, they’ll call me” to “People don’t know what they’re doing. Everyone needs my help, and I must educate them on why they need Tigerhawk services.”
Break-Fix To MSP Campaign: Launching at 2 p.m. on the first day of RIW, I e-mailed clients a link to my schedule with a request for them to book a call with me. By the end of day two, I had 15 appointments booked. I secured an additional 10 appointments the following week.
Technical Business Reviews (TBRs): Of the 25 appointments I booked, I converted 15 clients into MSP contracts, securing 10 three-year contracts and five one-year contracts.
HIPAA Compliancy Checklist Campaign: Three weeks ago, I launched the HIPAA Compliancy Checklist campaign targeting nursing facilities and health care providers. First, I call to connect with the administrator personally. Instead of stopping with the gatekeeper, I press until I speak with the administrator who has the authority to purchase. I let them know there are changes to the HIPAA law and ask if it would be okay for me to send e-mails and the checklist. After I e-mail them a customized HIPAA checklist, they are put into an automated follow-up drip campaign in the TMT marketing automation platform (MAP). This sequence sends tech tips and e-mails encouraging them to book an appointment with me so we can discuss how Tigerhawk can help them with the items on the checklist.
Halloween-Themed Postcard: In October, we did a themed campaign targeting a small group. I strategically selected 25 targeted prospects I was likely to encounter during networking events and sent them a postcard with the headline “Is Your Computer Haunted?” I offered a free network assessment, which generated one successful conversion.
Consistent Proactive Outreach System: Each month, I schedule my entire month of content in one sitting while watching football. The following campaigns are all preformatted and written by TMT, so I basically copy and paste them with minimal modification. It takes me only 90 minutes or less to schedule:
- Blog news (four per month).
- E-mail teasers to clients and prospects that drive people back to my website.
- Established regular social media presence with posts that point to the blog news, tech tips and tech of the week.
- Newsletter.
- Tech tips.
This outreach makes me look highly professional and blows away my competition, which doesn’t do any of this. I am receiving comments from customers such as:
- “I’m receiving these tech tips. They’re brilliant!”
- “I love the tech tips!”
- “I just received my newsletter. Thank you!”
Strategic Networking: Although I’ve been a member of groups for years, I now attack this differently. When attending meetings, I intentionally ask for introductions and no longer assume people know what I do. For example, I was in the Rotary Club and asked if a member knew the person running a nursing facility in the area, and I let him know I was targeting nursing facilities. It turned out the member sits on their board.
Authority Marketing: I’ve become the “go-to tech expert” in my market by regularly booking speaking engagements and appearing on the largest local news station. Every two weeks the TV station interviews me in my office about the latest breach or whatever is going on.
Website Overhaul: TMT advised us on how to get our website up-to-date. We added multiple features that elevated our website hits from around 10 per month to over 100 per week. I always knew there were all these neat things you could do, but I never knew how to do them before. We built a landing page to target the health care vertical. We integrated the website with MAP so that whenever someone registers for an assessment, downloads a report, etc., our CRM tracks those connection points. This also ties into Facebook and Google.
My results speak volumes. My revenue jumped 27% YoY. We added $22,500 MRR, converted 15 break-fix clients to MSP, increased website traffic by 3,900% and established a consistent media presence. By strictly following the TMT process, I’ve transformed my business from a cash-flow nightmare into a predictable profit machine. I now spend only six hours a week on billable work, focusing instead on strategic growth. With my team handling day-to-day operations seamlessly, and a manageable, effective marketing system in place, I have a sustainable, scalable business model that is on track to break the $1 million milestone for the first time in the company’s history.
