Ahmed Mahmood started MSP Ocean Solutions in 2011 as a one-stop solution for all of a customer’s IT needs rather than focusing on a specific area. Ocean, located in the Northern Virginia suburbs of Washington DC, clocked in at No. 244 on the 2025 MSP 501 list.

Mahmood will speak on a keynote panel “How Leading MSPs Grow Their Business” Sept. 17 at the MSP Summit in Orlando, Fla. I recently spoke with him about how he started and grew Ocean Solutions into an elite MSP.

We discussed his strategies for starting and staffing the MSP, how he targeted the right customers and Ocean’s strategy for incorporating artificial intelligence into his clients’ workflows.

How did you come to start Ocean Solutions?

Mahmood: Prior to starting Ocean Solutions, I operated another MSP as a partner. What I found lacking in the approach and the services was that a lot of MSPs are focusing on a certain level of expertise. Some MSPs will say, "Oh, we don't want to work with Google." And some will say, "We don't want to work with Mac," and some "We don't want to deal with web. We don't want to deal with cyber."Ahmed Mahmood

So the plan was to establish Ocean Solutions, basically to get businesses out of that vendor fatigue situation where they have to work with so many people to address their technology needs, and just have Ocean Solutions become your one-stop shop for addressing your technologies.

What were the challenges of starting that type of MSP?

Mahmood: We had to shop differently for our technical team. We're not just looking for desktop engineers or help desk. We had to look for more seasoned, more jack-of-all-trades, more advanced engineers. Not a lot of MSPs would look for people with PhDs. We've got a bunch of people with PhDs on our staff, a lot with Masters. We have people who can wear multiple hats, can talk different languages, can speak to different levels of skill sets. That allowed us to reach out and serve clients that are outside traditional lines for MSPs.

What types of clients did you go after?

Mahmood: We started serving a lot of businesses with existing CTOs and CIOs, and IT directors and a bunch of internal teams, and we started operating as the next-level tier of that. What that did for us is open up customers with 700, 800, 1,000-plus users, where the traditional sweet spot for most MSPs is 20 to 200 users. So that allowed us rapid growth.

So when you started, it sounds like you wanted people who could do a lot of different things. Were there challenges staffing in the beginning? Maybe there are still challenges staffing, but it sounds like you couldn't just add a couple of people who specialize in cyber or another area. You had to have a pretty good breadth of expertise to get you off the ground.

Mahmood: I did not have to get private equity money or investors' money. It was a bootstrap business that I built myself. I was that jack-of-all-trades. I was that tech. I was that accounting person. I was that sales person. And I did have that expertise working in the industry for a long time. I’m a former educator, I taught Microsoft and Cisco and CompTIA and all that kind of stuff for years at George Mason University.

So I had the technical expertise when I started, and given that, and coming from the MSP world, I had some people to staff the beginning. Those were my employees in the past, that I've trained, that I've mentored. I had students that I taught at George Mason, that I knew were bright and jack-of-all-trades that I was able to bring in.

And then as I depleted that group of individuals, I started going after a different approach for hiring. We started bringing in good people -- not good techs, but people that fit our culture. So we started looking for people with three to five years of experience, and we started tasking them with what they're comfortable with, and we let them learn on our dime. We send them to boot camps and get them compliance certifications. We just started investing in culture-fit, smart people to expand our team, and they're getting to that level where they can handle advanced things.

What's your total head count?

Mahmood: We’re at 14 full-time, and we have five contractors that handle certain technical aspects.

You provide services for around 1,000 Mac devices, about one-quarter of the devices you support. What industry are they in?

Mahmood: Marketing, political campaigns, developers. What got us to grow on the Mac side is that the complexity of managing Mac networks is a little bit more involved than the traditional Windows that everybody is familiar with. So we have a good reputation in the Apple community. All of the Apple stores in the DC metro area trust the Ocean Solutions team to manage Macs. If a business owner or any business manager walks into any Apple store in the DC metro area and says, ‘Hey, we want a business to work with to manage our Macs,’ they'll send them to Ocean Solutions.

So where are you seeing your big growth now?

Mahmood: Most is towards AI — from AI agents to data analysis applications, search functionality, things that are related to AI products. Clients are investing in it. Aside from just buying a Copilot or ChatGPT license, they want actual applications.

Also, a lot of cybersecurity—penetration testing as a service, vulnerability remediations, tabletop discussions, incident response planning, disaster recovery planning and training, that nature of work.

What are your clients doing with AI?

Mahmood: I had one of my larger customers—one of the top 10 nonprofits in the world—come to me and say, “Our CEO wants to invest in AI. What can we do?” That's exactly what I tell people not to do—just asking how to spend money on AI. Our approach is department by department. Define the challenges. What are we doing manually? What do we wish we had access to?

So we're seeing a lot of clients investing this way. For example, we had a customer that used to hire an army of clerks in the summer and give them access to cases from courts all over the country to analyze documents and provide reporting. It was an entire summer project. Instead, we implemented different AI solutions like Anthropic, Claude, and ChatGPT to chunk this data, analyze it, and extract the human aspects. Now they can run this process in about two weeks using AWS VMs with minimal manpower. These are the kinds of things we've been seeing big money spent on.

What types of companies are you adding as customers?

Mahmood: If you would have asked me about new logo growth until December of last year, I would have said nonprofit was our largest growing industry. But with all the shakeups that happened with USAID, nonprofit has slowed down in terms of signups.

Now we're seeing growth in the medical industry. We see a lot of medical offices investing now. They used to rely on break-fix guys because of budget constraints. But as these medical offices get hit by ransomware, they realize it's really not possible for them to keep doing business that way. So we're starting to see medical offices that previously told us we were too expensive coming back saying, “Hey, can we talk?”

We're also seeing media and marketing growth. We support a couple of the largest newspapers in the country and two out of the top 100 websites in the country. We basically handle some of these more mission-critical, high-target businesses. We see attacks that could be state-sponsored—serious threats that require sophisticated layers of security to keep these clients functional against distributed denial of service attacks and things of that nature. These are areas where we're seeing expansion.

Do a lot of small businesses tell you that you’re too expensive?

Mahmood: Ocean Solutions has a uniquely negotiated price. We don't have two different prices for two different customers. Everyone gets exactly the same rates for the services. The only variance is basically that some require compliance, some don't. We base engagement on the staff size, but we don't have different rates. We don’t have discounts or special rates.

From day one we said everybody pays the same. If we're not the right solution for you, I'm sure others can serve you at your budget, but we've calculated our costs very thoroughly so we can serve you properly.