Astute Technology Management grew into one of the world’s most successful MSPs largely due to its founder’s ability to adapt.

Astute president and partner Eric Madden, a software engineer by education, turned into an accidental entrepreneur after he was laid off from his first job out of college at CompuServe. Madden started a company with friends and raised venture capital, then eventually started a company called i9 Advantage that created employee verification software. After selling i9 to Equifax in 2011, Madden started Astute in Dublin, Ohio, and built it rapidly by serving the fastest growing businesses in central Ohio.

Astute, No. 246 on the 2025 MSP 501, has averaged 38% year-over-year growth over the past five years and jumped 124 places from the 2024 MSP 501. Much of Astute’s business is in Columbus, about 20 minutes outside Dublin.

“We live off the land in Central Ohio,” Madden said. “We're really a professional services city. There's no large waterway, so you don't get a lot of industry like you would in other cities like New York, where you pull up boats. There’s nowhere to do that here, so we have a lot of professional services.

“But the city has been growing, and that really has led to construction. So we work a lot in the AEC market -- architecture, engineering, construction -- and that is a result of our city. While growth has either been stagnant or declining in most of the Midwest, Columbus has seen growth over the last 10 years. So we've had the benefit of working in that market to help grow our organization.”

Eric Madden

Columbus has also seen great growth in manufacturing, so Astute has also chased that market.

“I'm not a very smart man, but I can do some easy numbers,” Madden said. “Seventy percent of the new office space is around manufacturing. So we got into manufacturing, right? The city is putting money in it, so we should focus on it too, right?”

Madden said Astute completely manages IT for small companies and also offers co-managed services to fill in gaps for clients with small IT teams. Astute has a dedicated sales manager, perhaps unusual for a company with around 30 people. It also has a client success team that meets with customers every month.

Madden turned over most of the technology duties to his cousin, Astute VP of services Kane Tabor, to concentrate on sales.

“I think we've done a really good job of establishing kind of a sales team that's a little bit beyond its years,” he said. “That's kind of my focus in the organization and we've tried to make it make a strong presence for inbound leads. I've always been a big fan of trying to meet a customer at the time when they have a need. A long time ago we realized referrals weren't going to get the growth that we try to average. In the last 24 months, we've been creating an outbound sales organization, which is probably a little bit unique. We have two people that do cold calling and one person that does proposals and attempts to close deals. Our goal is to double the company every three years.”

Three Pillars of Success

Madden and Tabor determined the key to that growth is to be strong in three areas.

“Obviously, service is one,” he said. “You can't suck at service. You probably just really need to be better than the next guy, but you need to be able to do that internally. And I realized we have to have high level functional competency in sales for us to grow at the rate we want to grow. And then the third one is one that sometimes surprises people. If you've been in the industry a while, it probably doesn't, but it is staffing or recruiting. We decided we were going to have to have an internal staffing and recruiting function. We hired like an HR generalist, which none of my peers really had at that size. I said ‘if someone leaves, I need to be able to replace that person, and I need to be able to get them operating as soon as possible.’”

Like other IT companies, Astute is determining how to best use AI. It developed a Microsoft Copilot tool called AI Readiness that helps clients assess where AI can help them. Astute is also working with one customer to develop agents to help with its unique business processes.

“We want to help them analyze data to discover trends that they just couldn't uncover right on their own,” Madden said.

'Not Going to Replace Good Employees'

One thing Madden doesn’t want to use AI for is to replace employees.

“I think employees get scared that AI may replace their jobs,” he said “And I'm of the opinion that it's hard to get good employees. You’re not going to replace good employees, right? I've always believed when talent is available, you hire and you figure out something for them to do. When you hire good people, you always win.

“The scenario that scares me the most is where we have to start replacing staff with AI, because it's the only way to financially compete. I'll be disappointed if that's where it heads. It’s always been about the people and always will be. We don’t want to take away what we feel is our competitive advantage, which is our staff.”