Photo (left to right): Peter Kujawa, Jess Bergeron, Paco Lebron, Antwine Jackson.
Like any industry, the future of managed service providers is only as strong as its young leaders.
An MSP Summit panel during last month’s Channel Partners Conference featured three millennial MSP founders who have found early success – Personified Tech’s Jess Bergeron, Enitech’s Antwine Jackson and ProdigyTeks’ Paco Lebron.
The leaders discussed the challenges they faced gaining traction, how they overcame them and gave advice to other MSP leaders. Personified Tech placed No. 5 on the 2025 MSP 501, and Bergeron won a special award as top women-owned MSP. Enitech was No. 363 on the MSP 501 and ProdigyTeks was named an MSP to Watch.
Moderator Peter Kujawa, an industry veteran who is GM of ConnectWise’s Service Leadership and IT Nation, summed up why this Next-Generation MSP panel was put together.
“I get asked all the time, are we seeing a new generation of MSPs coming up?” Kujawa said. “There's a generation that really built this industry over the last 20 or so years, but now that's shifting. I remember going to my first peer meeting, noticing how young everybody seemed to be. And I recently went to an event, and just like I’ve aged a little bit, everyone else seemed to have aged too.”
Jess Bergeron, Personified Tech
The young MSPs on his panel talked about how they found success and why “We’re not your father’s MSP” as Jackson said.
Bergeron said she and co-founder Mike Marotti started Personified Tech to serve markets they had worked in – political campaigns and other non-profit organizations.
“So we built Personified around that, and we knew that we needed to be a really agile team to build the service around that,” she said. “So we focus on Slack support. We do our help desk work through Slack, and we have a 15-minute response time. We built our service around the niche that we serve.”
Lebron said the new generation of MSPs concentrates more on delivering business outcomes than solving technology problems. “I think the next generation of MSP is actually designing business outcomes and delivering that to clients,” he said. “That’s what I'm seeing as the next generation, versus relying on the technology side.”
Paco Lebron, ProdigyTeks
Jackson said today’s MSPs must focus on understanding customers’ business needs as well as their technology needs.
“It's really not necessarily about drilling down into traditional MSP services. Those are table stakes,” he said. “That's what everybody provides. It’s about having conversations beyond the technology. It's understanding, as a business owner or as an operations manager, the business opportunity, but also the business workflow, and how can we leverage technology to produce that outcome.”
Antwine Jackson, Enitech
Bergeron emphasized diversity as a growth trigger. She said women make up 48% of Personified’s team, and she cited that as a reason the MSP has grown more than 100% year-over-year since its inception five years ago.
“I think the biggest thing for Personified is when we went to hire, we hired from all different backgrounds,” she said. “It's not just people that have MSP experience, it’s people who have worked on campaigns, people who have degrees, people who don't have degrees, people who have certifications. We hire a lot of people from Apple because they have fantastic customer service experience. So we've really been adapting.”
Jackson said a key to success for Enitech was his ability to build a good team around him and trust them to get the job done.
“For me, the biggest challenge was changing my mindset on thinking that everything rests solely on my shoulders, and having that kind of mentality of putting everyone on my back to get this done,” he said. “Once you start trusting the people around you, the success part comes pretty naturally and easily. And for us, I think the big game-changer was joining peer groups, having peers in this industry that I can talk to every day and pick their brains, and having friends in the industry.”
Lebron uses podcasts to communicate with peers. He is co-founder of TechCon Unplugged and co-hosts the MSP Unplugged live weekly podcast. He said those podcasts help add transparency to the MSP market.
“I thought I could educate others about my own journeys, and then I was able to grab a couple other people,” he said. “My co-host, Rick Smith, who also owns an MSP [Renactus Technology] in New Jersey, and others have come around to really focus on what they're doing, where their pitfalls are and where their achievements are. People who are listening understand that we're going through it. They can go ahead and see not everything is all sunshine and rainbows, but there is a path to how we got here.”