{"type":"rich","version":"1.0","provider_name":"Transistor","provider_url":"https://transistor.fm","author_name":"Play It Smart","title":"Why a Three Person Fund Gets Billed for Ten Seats","html":"","width":"100%","height":180,"duration":2595,"description":"Most managed service providers (MSPs) price per seat and then quietly lose money on their smallest clients. Raffi Jamgotchian bills a three person firm for ten.\nHe founded Triada Networks in 2008 and spent the early years taking whatever walked through the door. Four years in he looked back and noticed that of his first five or six clients, four or five were investment firms. He has aimed the business at financial services ever since. Not exclusively, he is clear he is no purist and plenty of those early non-finance clients are still with him, but that is who Triada markets to and who the business is built around.\nThe pricing rule is the part worth stealing. Triada sets a floor at ten people. A three person fund pays the ten seat bill and keeps paying it until it grows into the number. That sounds aggressive until he explains it: the compliance layer takes roughly the same work whether the firm has three people, ten or thirty. Same labour, smaller invoice, so the money has to come from somewhere. He is careful about the reason, too. Plenty of these firms do grow, three people to seven in a couple of months, ten by the next year, maybe twenty after that. But he says the floor is not a bet on growth. Some clients decide to stay small and nimble and that is fine. The floor exists because there is a built in cost to servicing any regulated firm, whatever its size.\nThen there is the marketing, which nobody in his corner of the industry does. He runs Facebook and Instagram ads, and Instagram works best. His reasoning is simply that finance IT companies do not advertise, so turning up in the feed of someone who fits the profile is a pattern interrupt. People reach out. The ads point at a due diligence checklist he built from his last book.\nHe is also blunt about where the industry is kidding itself. Asked what is most overrated right now, he says artificial intelligence (AI), and that everyone is sprinkling AI dust on places that do not need it. Asked what is most...","thumbnail_url":"https://img.transistorcdn.com/6-vnBhWGbIbshBWg9R_x1QuxBgHMyYLu3QMWAn9CBmY/rs:fill:0:0:1/w:400/h:400/q:60/mb:500000/aHR0cHM6Ly9pbWct/dXBsb2FkLXByb2R1/Y3Rpb24udHJhbnNp/c3Rvci5mbS80NmQ4/YWRhNTcxNmU3ZDg1/NGU2NGYwNDY1NGI1/YzY2YS5qcGc.webp","thumbnail_width":300,"thumbnail_height":300}