Blough Tech hit southwest Georgia with a managed services bang in 1993, and quickly earned a reputation for offering quality work with a positive attitude. The company was poised for success — until the wheels started to fall off.

“In the early 2000s, we tapped out at $1.8 million in gross revenue, and we did that because we were really good,” said Paul Blough, the company’s president and a 30-year IT veteran.

Like many MSPs, Blough Tech struggled to scale the businesses beyond a certain size. Managed service providers often get stuck in the $1- to $2 million dollar annual revenue range, and owners spend more time answering phone calls and fixing technical issues than they do creating processes for planning, funding, hiring and training.

“When the client numbers and the related workload grow faster than their capacity to handle it, then customer and employee satisfaction ratings plummet,” Blough said. “Marketing and sales activities usually drop, resulting in lower future opportunities.”

In the case of his business, Blough hadn’t created the policies and procedures because he embodied them. “We reached a place where I couldn’t touch everything coming through, and there were things coming through that I didn’t even know about. We started getting lots of complaints and had no process to deal with them,” he said. “Our reputation was damaged from doing bad work, and people talk about that when you don’t do things correctly.”

Blough spent years rebuilding the company, which is now at full strength and once again poised for growth. “In the last three years, we’ve grown 63 percent, so we’re larger than before but with no quality control issues,” he said.

He credits the turnaround in part to earning CompTIA’s Managed Services Trustmark, a designation awarded to companies with proven commitment to customers through managed services agreements that include standard operating procedures, best practices and the right systems and tools for delivering services.

Earning the Managed Services Trustmark helped the company sustain its growth without suffering quality control issues. “There are things that you find out by going through this process that allow you to become proactive,” he said.

‘Always Do It Better’

These days, Blough Tech keeps this mantra about business: Always do it better. “We look at who we were yesterday and want to be better today,” Blough said. “Anything we can use to help push us further down that line is good.”

The self-assessment required to earn CompTIA’s Managed Services Trustmark gave the company a chance to identify their processes and procedures related to its code of conduct, operations, services, customer references, and management and finance. Through the CompTIA Trustmark self-assessment, Blough Tech found it had plenty of policies and procedures in place, but needed to get them down on paper. “As you start working through any of the assessment areas, you’ll find places where you didn’t know there were holes,” Blough said.

Trustmarks don’t tell you what to do; they guide you to areas that need improvement.

“It’s more like a skeletal framework to start hanging some things on,” Blough said. “It can be an intimidating process if you’re looking to create a policy and procedure set. Where do you start? What are the most critical things? You can get blinded by the whole thing, but having something that says, ‘Here are seven or eight things you ought to have,’ you can say, ‘Hey, I can knock those things off.’”

Blough Becomes A Process-Oriented Company

CompTIA’s Managed Services Trustmark helped Blough Tech become a more process-oriented company. “Client onboarding is a great example,” Blough said. Though the company did have a process in place that staff members knew and followed, they’d never taken the time to sort out what it entailed or how to explain it to someone.

The company also started using a templated, ticketed HR process for everything and has experienced reduced turnover since its implementation, something Blough credits in part to changes prompted by the Managed Services Trustmark. “We really shored up our employee onboarding process and discovered some inconsistencies we’d been working with,” Blough said. “Now it’s very in-line.”

Thanks to the trustmark process, Blough Tech is now adopting a standard operating procedure for everything it does. “We’re doing that until we build a library of every technical thing, so every new ticket we assign can have an existing SOP attached to it,” he said. “I don’t know if we would have done that without the trustmark.”

A Little Help From My Friends

Blough Tech earned its first trustmark, the CompTIA Security Trustmark+, on Dec. 10, 2012, and used some of the related components to achieve the Managed Services Trustmark on Aug. 13, 2013. Through a trustmark coach, Blough learned the importance of seeing the overall picture. “We’re not trying to perfect the process, we’re just creating the process,” he said. “The goal is to document the 20 percent of procedures that guard 80 percent of your behavior.”

Blough used CompTIA’s variety of resources like quick start guides and checklists to earn the trustmarks, and found another form of motivation through HTG Peer Groups, of which he’s been a member almost five years. Blough created a peer group of other companies working on the Managed Services Trustmark and they used collaboration, template sharing and weekly calls on policies and procedures to get a variety of perspectives on ways to do things.

“Any exposure to this kind of process is going to make you a richer person,” Blough said. “I don’t know that we would have gotten it done otherwise. You get lost in the details.”

Those interested in the CompTIA Trustmark already have an advantage over the competition, because they’re actively seeking a tool that’s going to help them get better. “They already have that spirit, ‘I want to be a better company. I don’t know everything, but I want to learn,’” Blough said. “With that teachable spirit, you can earn the CompTIA Trustmark and use it to go forward.”

CompTIA Trustmarks are available for a variety of verticals, from security to business. Find out which one best suits your business by exploring our trustmark site.

Michelle Peterson is a communications specialist for CompTIA.