Hatz AI’s having its greatest impact among 10-50 person MSPs. Nancy Henriquez wants to make an impact on even smaller firms.
“I’m really looking to work with the MSPs that reflect who I was when I was an MSP,” she says.
That was back in pre-pandemic times, when Henriquez drew on grit, trial, and error to turn a fledgling IT shop near Houston into the business she successfully sold to a larger firm in 2021. She’s been lending a helping hand to the industry’s smallest providers ever since, through the sales, marketing, and operations consultancy you read about here last winter, the book she published last fall, the MSP community (called MSP Unplugged) she’s been helping run since June, and now the backup business she acquired two months ago.
Which is the least likely of her ventures to date. Called Dr. Backup, the company provides fully outsourced data protection services to break-fix practitioners and MSPs too small to handle BDR on their own. Henriquez (pictured) had never heard of it when a friend told her about it, and had little interest in owning it right away either.
“Honestly, I didn’t really see myself being on this side of the MSP world,” she says, and especially not in backup. Then she took a closer look.
“It was a 20-plus year old company, and it was stable, it was profitable,” she says. It also had 100 partners with no more than a handful of employees each and a familiar set of challenges to cope with.
“I immediately saw, ‘OK, that’s where I can really help,’” Henriquez recalls.
Her unconventional plan for doing so treats backup and other services even the smallest MSP must offer as the foundation of a kind of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs pyramid for MSPs that layers on education, coaching, and peer-to-peer mentorship.
“And all of that coming up to the very tippy top of that pyramid, which is self-actualization,” Henriquez says.
The ultimate goal, she continues, is to help tech entrepreneurs who value independence over growth remain independent rather than sell to one of the many investors actively constructing MSP platforms.
“That’s not to say that growth can’t be achieved while remaining independent,” Henriquez says. “I think that it absolutely can, but it takes a community to do that.”
Which is why rolling out a partner program is priority number one for Henriquez at present. “If you resell or are one of the partners that works with Dr. Backup, our partner program will have some of the coaching practices that I have embedded into that,” she says, along with informal monthly member meetings.
“We’ll also bring in experts to help educate and encourage them in the ways that they need, whether that be sales support, whether that be marketing assistance, or whether that be operational assistance,” Henriquez adds.
Product upgrades, including integrations with popular RMM and PSA solutions and remote assistance, are on the roadmap too, along with white labeling, which Henriquez knows from personal experience matters a lot to MSPs who don’t want something as critical as backup to look like it’s coming from someone else.
“It’s their own, and we’re acting as their team,” she says.
And doing so 24 x 7, moreover. “I’m staying up at night so you don’t have to,” Henriquez says.