Should an MSP manage the same stack for every client?

Short answer

Yes, as close to identical as the MSP can manage. A standard stack makes the service easy to explain, easy to sell, easy to train, and faster to fix, because a technician who knows what normal looks like can spot what is different. Bright Bear Technology Solutions, which Nathan Phinney co-founded in January 2010, managed the same five services for every client and trained every technician to deploy them the same way. Most MSPs Phinney asked said their answer was different for everyone. Chapter 4 of CTRL ALT SURVIVE, Dabbawalas, explains the approach, and Chapter 8, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, covers automation, and this guide’s view is that a uniform stack makes that work easier.

What Phinney learned doing it

Bright Bear named its standard after itself. The acronym BEARS stood for backup, endpoint security, remote access, remote maintenance (meaning patch management), and spam filtering. If Phinney asked anyone in the company which services Bright Bear managed, they recited it. Technicians and managers turned it into a verb: a new laptop on the test bench either had or had not been “BEARSed” yet.

Backup came first in the acronym. A Backblaze case study on Bright Bear is headed “We start with backup,” and quotes Phinney:

“For a managed service provider, a good backup makes everything less stressful.”

Phinney would occasionally ask other MSPs what they managed, and the usual answer was that it was a little different for everyone. In Chapter 4, Dabbawalas, he counts Bright Bear’s alternative as one of the secrets of its success: “Our answer was the same for everyone, at least as similar as we could possibly manage.”

The standard extended to people. Every technician learned to program and install Bright Bear’s firewall, build and configure a phone system, and set up backup, endpoint security, and the management agent on a device, and they were all trained to do it the same way. Every employee, technical or not, had a first-day goal of knowing how to answer the phone and create a ticket in the PSA, so that if hundreds of calls arrived at once, which happened once or twice in ten years, anyone could talk to clients and document the request for follow-up.

Phinney compares the payoff to how banks train tellers: they handle real money all day, so a counterfeit bill feels wrong the moment they touch it. Uniform deployments did the same for Bright Bear. Everyone knew the standard configuration worked, so troubleshooting became a matter of spotting the variable. What is different about this setup from every other client that is running well?

The standard also reached the smallest accounts. In Chapter 7, Focus, Phinney notes that small clients received the same firewall that had passed an annual penetration test and protected billions of dollars of transactions on public and private networks, in the book’s words, whether or not they ever knew it. In Chapter 6, The Price Is Right, firewalls stop being an optional line item and come with the managed service.

Standardizing and automation

Bright Bear had a top-performing technician named Alfred P. Inglesby, whose initials spell API. Alfred was a set of conditional rules wired to the monitoring system. When a disk was nearly full, Alfred had the agent run a cleanup script; if the script worked, Alfred noted the ticket and closed it, and if it did not, he handed it to a human. Phinney points out that this is logic rather than intelligence.

Chapter 8, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, gives the rule for automating. Before automating anything, Phinney writes, lock down the manual process, run it enough times to anticipate the exceptions, decide how each exception will be handled, automate in isolated stages, and test heavily. This guide’s view is that a uniform stack makes that locking down easier; the book itself makes the argument about the manual process.

Why the people part matters

Most of Chapter 4 is about people, and it is the reason the standard held. Phinney named the chapter for Mumbai’s lunchbox carriers, who deliver with near-perfect reliability largely because they know their work matters. Bright Bear put posters around the office describing what its clients did with technology, from building jets to putting people in wheelchairs, so that technicians understood whom the standard served. When a key person left around 2018, Phinney promoted everyone, made each person accountable for part of operations, and the team stepped up. Some of his best hires came from outside IT, including a butcher, a paramedic, and a copier repairman who became the technicians’ supervisor.

In the book

Chapter 4, Dabbawalas, covers BEARS, the first-day goals, the uniform training, and the people practices behind them. Chapter 8, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, covers automation, including Alfred P. Inglesby and the steps Phinney insists on before anything runs unattended.

Sources

• CTRL ALT SURVIVE, Chapter 4, Dabbawalas, and Chapter 8, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, with references to Chapter 6, The Price Is Right, and Chapter 7, Focus
• Backblaze, “Backblaze for Business simplifies data backup billing and management” (Bright Bear case study): original at Backblaze and this site’s page