Some of you may know The Utility Company as the franchise MSP organization based in Ottawa, Canada. The brainchild of Mark Scott, former CEO and co-founder of N-able Technologies, The Utility Company (TUC) has been charting a new path in the managed services space for a number of years now and is about to take yet another new course that I felt would be interesting to examine.
First, the idea of a franchise MSP model has never really taken hold in our industry. There are a few reasons for this but until TUC came along, there had never been an enforced, standardized service delivery model for a franchisee to follow. Most franchise operations dealt with territories and branding but never offered a true, centrally delivered managed services process that could scale everytime a new franchisee came on board. TUC has had this for a few years now. How do we know this? TUC opened themselves up to a MSPAlliance certification and audit and we verified it ourselves.
But, they didn't stop there. Franchisees are certainly welcome to join up but TUC has also developed a unique approach to getting non-technical investors into the managed services profession. Through their MSPXchange, TUC has created a mechanism for VARs and IT service providers to enter managed services by either franchising their existing operations or selling their company to an investor. This has never been done before in our industry. From what I'm hearing, a number of investors have already made acquisitions and investments utilzing the MSPXchange and more are lining up.
I've also heard that TUC is working on a major M&A deal of their own that could catapult them into the next level of managed services organizations. TUC is a good MSP. But, what they've accomplished by merging traditional managed services, with franchise offerings, with investor and M&A opportunities, is truly unique. It offers a blended approach for IT companies to get into or expand their managed services that avoids the "one size fits all" approach taken by so many before. We will keep you posted as we hear more about TUC in the near future.
