In 2009, not long after my first son was born, I made a decision to pivot BestMacs from a retail/repair business to a fully managed services provider (MSP) business. The hardest part of this is that in order for an MSP to be sustainable there’s a need for proactive monitoring and automated maintenance.

The available tools of the day were expensive, like 5 figures expensive, and didn’t even do the basic tasks that I wanted done. So there were a lot of late nights writing code in bed next to sleeping family. That continued well into the next 4-6 years – and even writing a lot of it on my iPhone with a newborn baby sleeping on my chest.

The advantage of building our own platform is that it did the tasks that I felt were important with as little disruption to our clients’ employees as possible.

Today that code belongs to SolarWinds MSP, the world’s largest vendor of solutions for companies like BestMacs. I guide their Apple strategy and manage the teams that build their Mac products, continuing the legacy of the tools that serve BestMacs clients – and ensuring that the quality I insisted on 10 years ago remains true today.

Why would you trust your company’s network to anyone else?