Brian J. Weiss: TechStack, Tenant Control, and Redefining PSA Ownership for MSPs

Dave Sobel (0:02)

When an MSP decides the PSA category is broken beyond repair, the obvious move is to switch vendors. What is far less common, but being talked about and far more consequential, is building a replacement on a general purpose enterprise platform. That is what iTech Solutions is doing, and the questions it raises about cost control and whether any of it is repeatable are the ones every MSP owner should hear before forming an opinion. This is The Business of Tech.

Brian J. Weiss, you are the CEO at iTech Solutions. Welcome to The Business of Tech.

Brian J. Weiss (0:40)

Thank you for having me.

Dave Sobel (0:42)

So you started this journey to build your own platform kind of late 2023, but before we get into what you built, kind of walk me through the operational pain when your platform, your PSA was failing you. What's the kind of virtual Tuesday that it broke and what it cost you?

Brian J. Weiss (1:04)

I'll try to keep it short going all the way back to when we started in 2005 We actually had a development department in-house. We did web apps.

So initially, we built our own PSA.

You know, a ticket system. We even built our own password manager documentation system back in those days. And so when I started my MSP, I had a lot of flexibility in using software and getting it to do what I needed it to do so that we could operate more efficiently. Fast forward about 10 years, my development department was too busy with cash projects, cash is king, and they couldn't keep up with our needs on our own homegrown solution that we had developed. And that's when I found the MSP community and PSAs, these things that are PSAs, I don't even know they were called PSAs. And we adopted one of those and ran it for, gosh, it was about eight years before we started running into issues. I think in that eight-year journey, what was most interesting about a PSA is while it had some good fundamental workflows built-in for what MSPs need to perform on a daily basis, every time I ran into, I wish I could do more with this, I wish this wasn't as clunky as it is, I was literally told to go buy another tool. So fast forward into our eight-year journey, we'll call it with this PSA, I found that I had like six or seven tools augmenting the PSA doing things that in my mind, the PSA should have done out of the box, and it became cumbersome to manage and maintain at the end of the day.

Dave Sobel (2:55)

Now, you look at that, is there a better configured version of what you had that would have fixed all of that? I mean, is it APIs? Is it extensions? Is there a version of this, like an alternate universe that might have, you might have gone down if they've done it a different way?

Brian J. Weiss (3:13)

I mean, we went all in with Roost. I spent almost two years. That's really what opened my eyes to the tech debt that was in the industry, mainly because you're right to your point, it's like, well, what about using the API more? Well, most of these platforms, the APIs were barely built out because they're truly an afterthought.

And so it's not like an enterprise type platform where it's more of an API first mentality. So even when I told myself, well, if I can't do it within the program, I'll just do it outside of the program and just use their API to manipulate the data I need to manipulate. Even that was a struggle.

So I think it really just came down to the natural life cycle of software. I mean, if you build something in the early mid-2000s and it's 20 years old, it's going to have some archaic-ness to it. There's going to be just inherent limitations and clunkiness that you can't get around even as a developer. Like you just can't wave a magic wand and get rid of. And it almost requires like a redevelopment, right, of the platform to really bring it up to speed so that you're not hindered with old code, if you will, right?

Dave Sobel (4:30)

Sure. So you've described yourself as sort of building your own purpose-built ERP.

I know TechStack is in there, too, and they've got a product portion of that. So draw me the line. Like what did you buy? What did you build? Like walk me through what you created.

Brian J. Weiss (4:46)

So yeah, I sold our development department off in 2018, because I just saw it becoming really commoditized. We did mainly a lot of web apps, and here we are today with everyone vibe-coding their own apps. So I saw something. There's some good reason I was getting rid of it at the time. But I didn't want to have to build out a development department in-house again, because what I loved about selling that part of the business off is it allowed me to focus on our core wheelhouse of services, being an MSP, providing IT services. We're only 11 employees. We're not a huge MSP.