Why a Three Person Fund Gets Billed for Ten Seats

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.

He 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.

The 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.

Then 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.

He 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 underrated, he says identity protection, human and non-human both. His own clients generated more support tickets once AI tools arrived, not fewer. When he asked other MSPs in his peer group, they were not seeing the same thing.

What we cover

• How Triada ended up focused on financial services, and the four year delay before he noticed
• The two client types today, alternative asset managers and independent wealth advisors
• Why teams breaking away from Charles Schwab, Merrill Lynch and UBS suddenly need an outside partner
• What an investment firm needs that a manufacturer does not
• Why investors started asking cyber due diligence questions before the regulator did
• Security in three places, identity, data and devices, and why the program beats the tools
• Where new clients come from, new funds versus firms leaving a generalist provider
• The ten seat pricing floor, and why compliance work does not scale with headcount
• The channel mix: referrals, chief compliance officers, commercial real estate brokers, ads and cold calling
• Why Instagram ads work for an MSP selling to investment firms
• Selling one all-inclusive tier instead of three, plus co-managed and advisory arrangements
• When a firm should hire internal information technology (IT) staff instead of an MSP
• What AI actually did to his ticket volume, and the guardrails they built
• The move toward consumption based pricing
• The lightning round: one tool he cannot work without, most overrated, most underrated, cloud or on-premise

Find Raffi on LinkedIn, where he says he posts videos regularly. He does not name a website or a book title on the episode.

What is Play It Smart?

Play It Smart is the show where Alexej Pikovsky sits down with MSP operators and business owners and takes apart how they actually do it: winning clients, pricing, staying lean, using AI, and building toward an exit worth having. Season 2 is dedicated to MSP operators. Past guests include Rand Fishkin of Moz and SparkToro and the founders of Chili Piper, Flowchat and 3DLOOK.