As anyone at Shield Technology Partners will tell you, building your own tool stack is a major investment. Even in the age of Cursor and Codex, developing software takes time and money, and there are other, less tangible costs to consider as well. The benefit you get for shouldering those costs, however, is the ability to construct something perfectly aligned with your needs.
Just ask Brandon, Fla.-based MSP DataCorps Technology Solutions, which has replaced its ready-to-wear PSA solution with a home-stitched “business operating system” all its own.
“It’s very unique to DataCorps because it fits my desires, my intent as the business owner, and how I want to run the business,” says CEO Angel Rojas (pictured). It’s also made the company significantly more efficient and effective, he adds.
“Every one of our tools that we were paying money for was actually hindering our process, adding errors, adding extra time and effort, and limiting our capabilities,” Rojas says. The custom-fit tools it’s built for itself accelerate workflows, expand capabilities, and get better continuously, rather than whenever a vendor decides to add a feature you badly want to its roadmap. Rojas experiences the difference personally every time he files his company’s sales taxes, a process that used to take three hours.
“Now it takes me about five minutes a month to do it, because what we’ve built is monitoring the sales tax and the changes in the law on top of how they get applied to our invoices each time an invoice is created,” he says.
All told, DataCorps puts about four hours a day into internal software development. The skills it acquires along the way are well worth the cost though, according to Rojas, because they can be used to build custom apps for customers too.
And both rapidly and inexpensively at that, Rojas adds, thanks to AI coding tools. Indeed, DataCorps can usually have a proof-of-concept version of an end user solution up and running within a month of requirements gathering.
“We can do a trial for next to nothing and provide the client something that gets them really excited,” Rojas says.
It’s not just the demo that’s exciting either. The accounting system DataCorps built for one of its clients cut its weekly payroll process from five hours to five minutes and identified 15 people no longer with the firm but still getting checks. It also uncovered a giant pile of unpaid bills.
“They were 90 days past due on over $2 million and couldn’t figure out why they kept hitting the credit line,” Rojas says.
Projects like that yield 90 to 95 percent margins on average, according to Rojas. More importantly, he adds, they inspire the kind of loyalty only a strategic consultant can command.
“We’re not just managing technology. We’re providing technology solutions,” he says, and building a sustainable future for itself in the process.
“Here’s the reality: Everything that we’re doing today as an MSP is dying. We’re in a race to the bottom and commoditizing,” Rojas says. “Either we adapt and we grow, or we just continue to whine about margins being reduced.”