MSP Well Offers a Helping Hand Out of the IT Pressure Cooker
A newly launched non-profit community is striving to connect members of the managed services ecosystem to mental health resources.
The examples of community we’ve discussed to this point have basically been B2B. I’ll close this week by discussing an arguably even better manifestation of the MSP channel’s spirit of community that’s P2P, as in person-to-person.
I’m referring to a recently launched non-profit community called MSP Well dedicated to connecting MSPs and others in the managed services ecosystem to mental health resources.
And really, could there be an ecosystem more in need of something like this? Running a managed services practice is a relentlessly-paced pressure cooker of a job held by people who spend their days, nights, and weekends taking care of clients, employees, spouses, and children—everyone, in fact, but themselves.
“If you don’t take care of yourself, how are you going to take care of others?” asks Larry Meador (pictured), channel chief at data security posture management/attack surface management vendor Cavelo, who now moonlights as MSP Well’s executive advisor for strategy and communities. It’s a seemingly obvious question that MSPs, like many others, try hard to avoid.
“Talking about mental health and admitting that you yourself perhaps have a challenge is one of those things that especially men don’t want to admit,” Meador says. “Traditionally it’s seen as a sign of weakness, so people don’t want to talk about it.”
Until recently, those people included Cavelo CEO James Minacca, who was trying as so many of us do to muscle his way through stress and depression all alone.
“He just happened to open up to me one day at a conference, and I just sat there and listened,” Meador says. “A few weeks later, he was like, ‘You know what? That was the best thing that could have ever happened. I just needed someone to listen to me and just tell me I’m not crazy.’”
A few months after that he broached the possibility of helping others in the industry experience the same relief. “I said, ‘I think it’d be a fantastic thing,’” Meador recalls.
So did Joe Ussia, CEO of Canadian MSP Infinite IT, who quickly signed on to co-found MSP Well alongside Minacca. An extensive set of advisors soon volunteered to help as well. Their mission is to connect members in need to information, advice, and peers.
“Every single one of us has something going on,” Meador says. “All we want to do is facilitate a place for them to go and get the help that they perhaps haven’t sought out before.”
It does that free of charge, he adds, noting that the organization is self-funded by its founders and advisors for now. Minacca and Ussia hope to get financial support from vendors and other sponsors in the future, and Meador’s optimistic they’ll succeed given the enthusiasm the initiative has inspired since its launch week before last.
“We knew that this would have legs out of the gate. We didn’t realize it would go sprinting out of the gate,” he says. “It’s gone viral.”
Which shouldn’t actually surprise anyone familiar with that strange, wonderful spirit of community I referred to before, and which animates MSPs and their vendors in ways that people in other professions would have trouble recognizing.
“We always talk about how unique this channel is, but I don’t think people really understand just how truly unique this channel is,” Meador says. “We’re all one big, happy, dysfunctional family.”