Employee Retention Is A Challenge

About 35 percent of MSPs cited employee retention as a major challenge, while about half labeled it minor, the study revealed. Further, 80 percent of MSPs surveyed said at least one of their staff technicians left last year to join an end-user organization's IT department, where work can be more predictable versus a more hectic atmosphere within an MSP, CompTIA said.

"The job [at an MSP] can be fairly grueling if you're a technician," the report read. "The hours are long. Remotely monitoring and managing hundreds of customers' on-premise equipment, along with those workloads they have in the cloud, is more than a 9-to-5 proposition."

Bob Deuby, executive vice president and a partner at The Computer Guys, a 12-employee MSP in Farmington Hills, Mich., says he's had good luck in keeping employees. But recently, he lost a top performer – who had been with him for six years -- to a company where he's doing the same work, but without what Deuby called the "white noise" from customers.

Motazedi, of SNC Squared, says retention can be tough when you're a small firm such as his, and based in a rural area, Southwest Missouri. If he looks for people with key skill sets, there's no guarantee they will leave for more money elsewhere, he said.