Industry & Opportunity Brief: Tech Johnny

Prepared for Jonathan Abramson, Founder & CEO, Tech Johnny
 
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The short answer
Your biggest question on our call: can Notion actually handle an MSP? Notion can model your clients, sites, users, and devices, with tickets that move from proposal through install and billing. It can connect to your PSA, remote-access tools, and QuickBooks through the open Model Context Protocol (MCP). The larger constraint is operational: key knowledge still lives with you and your technicians. That dependence limits time away, hiring speed, and buyer confidence. The sections below explain where Notion fits and where specialized tools should stay.

1. Executive brief

Tech Johnny is an 18-year-old managed service provider that grew from zero to ten people this year. It serves multifamily housing, a sector spending more on technology every year. Demand is strong. The constraint is turning it into work the team can deliver without you. Customer relationships, technical know-how, and important decisions still run through you, which is why stepping back for six months produced lost business, slow response times, and missed follow-ups.
Tech Johnny's goals are to hire quickly, step away from day-to-day operations, double revenue, and eventually sell. All depend on the same asset: operational knowledge that is documented, organized, and accessible to the team. Today, much of that knowledge sits with you and your technicians or in disconnected tools. Building a system around it is the work ahead.
Five findings drive this brief:
  • The market is growing. U.S. managed services is projected to grow from $84B in 2024 to $165.6B by 2033 (7.83% CAGR) (Renub / GlobeNewswire), and vendor revenue from technology in U.S. multifamily housing, your exact niche, is forecast to approach $4B by 2031 (Parks Associates via RCR Wireless). Your team needs the capacity to deliver that work.
  • Technician shortages and undocumented knowledge make hiring harder. Early-stage MSPs run on "tribal knowledge, inconsistent documentation, and technician-driven problem solving." New techs take 8+ weeks to become productive. Technician turnover is ~16%, and 54% of MSPs report high stress and burnout among support staff. Departing technicians take undocumented knowledge with them (LTVplus; Mizo/Hudu). You want to go from 10 to 100 people. Onboarding 90 technicians will require documented procedures.
  • AI is real for MSPs, but only on top of clean, connected data. MSPs deploying AI report ~20% lower operating costs and say it's critical to scaling (Enterprise Times), but the starting point is "a unified data foundation," and "without that, agentic AI doesn't have the context it needs to make reliable decisions" (ITSM.tools). Your disconnected knowledge base and ticketing leave AI without that context.
  • Founder-dependency is a tax you pay twice. It costs you your time now, and it costs you at exit later: owner/key-person dependence commonly reduces a business's value by 5–40%, with the most owner-dependent businesses taking the largest discount (Sofer Advisors). Meanwhile, well-run MSPs trade around 11x EBITDA, and strong operational fundamentals can add 3x–7x to the multiple while weaknesses strip 2x–4x, regardless of EBITDA (Aventis Advisors; CRN).
  • Document the operation before hiring a COO. A founder-led COO runs $180K–$300K base ($220K–$425K all-in) (KORE1), ~40% of external executive hires fail within 18 months (Univ. of South Carolina via Millman), and even a good one spends six months ramping before they're productive. Document the operation so a COO can run it without reconstructing everything from your memory.
Confidence level: 5 of 5 on the industry, valuation, and platform facts (all verified against vendor documentation and primary market research). 4 of 5 on the Tech-Johnny-specific figures, because those depend on your real numbers, which is what the first two weeks of an engagement are for.

2. What we heard from you

These notes reflect our October 19 call. Correct anything that's off; the brief depends on these details.
The business
What you told us
Profile
Detroit-area MSP · ~18 years operating · grew 0 → 10 employees this year · monthly recurring contracts
Vertical
Multifamily housing, apartment communities: access control, cameras, Wi-Fi, phones, and staff IT. Your site positions Tech Johnny as serving 100,000+ apartments (techjohnny.com)
Reach
Projects nationwide (CA, FL, TX) despite being Midwest-based; growth entirely word-of-mouth, no outbound marketing
Stack
Google Workspace (files, SOPs via Claude), Dialpad (calls), Read.ai (meetings), Halo PSA (ticketing), QuickBooks (billing), Claude/ChatGPT (AI layer)
Team
Jacob leading operations and the Halo PSA implementation, which you're not fully satisfied with
The problems you named:
  1. You are the single bottleneck. Customers, technical knowledge, relationships, and decisions all flow through you.
  2. Stepping back broke things. Six months of trying to step away produced lost business, customer complaints, slow response times, and missed follow-ups.
  3. No day off in 18 years. The goal is to be able to walk away without service degrading.
  4. Documentation exists but is incomplete and never iterated. New hires were asked to document and never did.
  5. Your knowledge base and ticketing system are disconnected. You called this out as the key gap.
  6. You're not sure Notion can handle MSP-specific workflows, multi-stage ticketing, remote-access integration, and your client/location/user/device hierarchy.
Your goals, in your words: double revenue every year for seven years, then exit at a target valuation; scale from 10 to ~100 employees inside a year; bring in a COO-equivalent so you can focus on business development and investors; and build a company that runs systems-first, not dependent on any one person.
⚠️
Five of the six issues reflect one operational gap: Tech Johnny's know-how is not captured in a system. A shared operating system can close that gap.

3. Your core question: can Notion actually run an MSP?

Notion can organize the operation. Remote access and monitoring still belong in specialized tools.

3.1 The three things you specifically asked about

Your client → location → user → device hierarchy. Notion handles this structure well. Notion is a relational database at its core: a Clients database linked to Locations, linked to Users, linked to Devices, linked to Tickets and SOPs. An apartment-management client with 40 properties can be represented as linked records, including each site's cameras, access panels, Wi-Fi gear, and on-site staff. Open the records to see a property's devices, a client's tickets, or every site where a given access-control model is deployed. That hierarchy is easier to express in Notion than in a rigid PSA.
Multi-stage ticketing (proposal → approval → logistics → install → billing). Notion handles stage-gated workflows natively through status fields, views per stage, templated tickets, and automations that move work forward and notify owners. Each job can move from proposal to approved work, scheduled install, and billing. Linking its ticket to the client, site, devices, and install SOP gives your technician the context in one place.
Remote-access and tool integration (SolarWinds, Splashtop, and your PSA). Keep Splashtop for remote-access sessions and SolarWinds for monitoring. Notion connects the operational context around those systems. Through the Model Context Protocol (MCP), an open standard for secure, two-way connections between tools and AI, Notion connects to external apps and custom/internal systems, letting you "bring live context into Notion and automate end-to-end workflows across your stack" (Notion; Notion Developers). Pre-built connectors already exist for tools like HubSpot, Stripe, GitHub, Intercom, and Ramp, with custom MCP for anything internal.

3.2 The real decision: rebuild vs. integrate

For each tool in your stack, decide whether to rebuild it in Notion or integrate it.
Capability
Recommendation
Why
Remote access (Splashtop)
Integrate
Purpose-built; keep it, surface session context in Notion
Monitoring / RMM (SolarWinds)
Integrate
Notion isn't an RMM; pull alerts/status in, don't rebuild
Knowledge base / SOPs
Rebuild in Notion
This is Notion's core strength and your #1 gap
Client / site / device records
Rebuild in Notion
Relational model beats siloed records; becomes the single source of truth
Ticketing / PSA (Halo)
Open question, worth the cost-benefit
You're already unhappy with Halo; the analysis below decides it
On Halo specifically: you told us the implementation isn't satisfying you. Before Jacob pours more months into it, the honest move is a cost-benefit: what does Halo do that you truly need, what does it cost in money and friction, and how much of it does a Notion-centered operating system already cover with your knowledge base attached? We'll use the first two weeks of an engagement to compare Halo's cost and friction with a Notion-centered workflow before recommending a change.
Answer to your core question: Notion can link your clients, sites, devices, tickets, and SOPs, with an AI layer that reads across them. Integrations connect that context to your remote-access and monitoring tools.

4. The market you're sitting in

Managed-services forecasts vary with the category and geography being measured. Each of these estimates projects sustained growth:
Source
Scope
2024–25 size
Forecast
Growth
Renub / GlobeNewswire
U.S. managed services
$84.0B (2024)
$165.6B by 2033
7.83% CAGR
Research & Markets
Global managed services
$279.2B (2024)
$572.2B by 2033
8.3% CAGR
Expert Market Research
North America
$73.6B (2025)
Not listed
~10.1% CAGR to 2035
(Renub; Research & Markets; Expert Market Research)
Multifamily operators now treat reliable internet and smart access control as essential, not luxury (Bisnow); more than half of residents say they'd pay 1–10% more for property technology (Parks Associates via Allegion); and vendor revenue from proptech/IoT in U.S. multifamily is forecast to approach $4B by 2031, where analysts note "a dollar spent shortening install time, simplifying integration, or training the on-site team returns more than a dollar spent on awareness" (Parks Associates via RCR Wireless).
Why it matters for Tech Johnny: the research points to demand for faster installs, cleaner integrations, and better on-site training. Documented procedures let the team deliver those without your involvement in every job.

5. Force one: the talent and tribal-knowledge crisis

The talent shortage puts your hiring goal at risk. Documented systems can shorten onboarding and reduce dependence on senior technicians.
  • The #1 named MSP growth constraint is technician shortage, and its symptoms read like your call: "SOPs or playbooks are incomplete, outdated, or missing," "high dependency on senior technicians (knowledge hoarding)," and "new technicians take 8+ weeks to become productive." The root cause: "early-stage MSPs rely heavily on informal processes: tribal knowledge, inconsistent documentation, and technician-driven problem solving" (LTVplus).
  • Technician turnover sits around 16%, and 54% of MSPs report high stress and burnout among support staff. The risk: "When a technician leaves, their undocumented knowledge leaves with them" (Mizo/Hudu).
  • The talent squeeze is expected to worsen, and it's sharpened in MSPs by trust: a technician "can see everything… all the files, the payroll… more resources than the presidents of the company" (CRN). Undocumented, person-dependent access is both an onboarding problem and a security/continuity problem.
You want to go from 10 to ~100 people in a year. At 8+ weeks to productivity, training 90 technicians through shadowing would absorb time from you and the senior techs who generate revenue. And doubling revenue every year for seven years is a 128x increase; that requires repeatable training and delivery as the team grows.
What we heard from you, in the data's words: "documentation exists but is incomplete and never iterated, new hires were asked to document but never did." Documentation has to fit into the work itself. Make documentation a structured step inside the ticket they're already closing, so the next technician can reuse what they learned.

6. Force two: the AI inflection and why yours stalls today

You already use Claude and ChatGPT. Their usefulness depends on access to your operational data.
What AI is delivering for MSPs that deploy it well: 82% of MSPs say AI is critical to scaling, 65% are already integrating AI-powered tools, and 48% report a ~20% reduction in operating costs (Enterprise Times). Platforms like Atera report automating ~25% of tickets and reducing workload up to 40% (Channel Insider). The waste on the other side is just as concrete: an MSP running 150 tickets/day at a 25% mis-triage rate burns roughly $170,000/year in pure rework (Channel Insider).
Your ticketing and monitoring systems need to share data. The prerequisite for MSP AI is integration: "aligning RMM and PSA platforms so that data flows cleanly between monitoring, ticketing, and billing… Without that unified data foundation, agentic AI doesn't have the context it needs to make reliable decisions" (ITSM.tools).
Why it matters for Tech Johnny: linking your knowledge base to tickets gives AI the context to triage a request, draft a fix from your documented procedure, and flag a missing step. Scattered Google Docs and a separate Halo instance leave that context fragmented.

7. The founder-dependency tax: what it costs at exit

Your seven-year exit goal makes founder dependence a valuation issue now.
Well-run MSPs are valuable and demand is intense. The median public MSP trades around 11x EV/EBITDA (Aventis Advisors); add-on MSPs sell in a 4x–14x EBITDA range with recurring-revenue mix as the single biggest multiple driver (CT Acquisitions); and private equity has $400B+ in dry powder targeting IT services, with one advisor noting ~154 PE groups actively hunting a platform MSP to buy, "it's definitely a seller's market" (CRN). Your monthly-recurring, retention-heavy model is exactly what they want.
Buyers value documented systems because they reduce founder dependence. Strong operational fundamentals add 3x–7x to an MSP's multiple, while weaknesses strip 2x–4x regardless of EBITDA (CRN). And owner/key-person dependence directly discounts value:
  • Key-person discounts typically run 5% to 40% of going-concern value, with the most owner-dependent businesses taking the largest reductions (Sofer Advisors).
  • As a directional rule of thumb: ~5–10% when owner-exposure is low, 15–25% moderate, 25–40% when a buyer sees a business that depends heavily on the owner (Rubi).
  • Excessive owner involvement lowers the multiple buyers will pay "because buyers perceive greater risk," and in some cases determines whether a deal happens at all (PHG Advisory).
The math: today Tech Johnny is Jonathan Abramson. On our call you described yourself as the single point everything flows through, which is the textbook profile of the 25–40% discount. On an MSP that might otherwise fetch a healthy EBITDA multiple, founder-dependency alone can erase a quarter to nearly half of the sale price. Documenting how the business runs gives you more freedom now and strengthens it for a future sale.

8. The COO question: why systems come first

Before hiring a COO, document the operation they'll inherit.
  • Cost: a founder-led COO for a $5M–$75M business runs $180K–$300K base, $220K–$425K all-in (KORE1).
  • Risk: roughly 40% of external executive hires fail within 18 months (Univ. of South Carolina's Center for Executive Succession) (Millman Search); HBR puts the odds of a new executive leaving within 18 months near 50% (HBR).
  • Ramp: even a good COO spends ~6 months getting up to speed; at a $300K comp that's $48K–$82K of unrealized executive capacity before they're productive (Stealth Agents).
The trap: a COO hired into an undocumented business has to reconstruct it from your memory, with a $300K salary attached. Document the operation first so a COO, or Jacob growing into that seat, can start with an existing system. You said on the call that you've already felt the cost of getting this order wrong.

9. What a modern MSP operating system looks like

Here is the operating system a scalable MSP needs, with Notion's role in each layer.
Layer
What it does
Build or integrate
Client / Site / Device registry
One relational source of truth: every client, every property, every device, every credential, openable from any angle
Build in Notion
Knowledge base & SOPs
Documented, versioned procedures tied to the device and install types they apply to, captured inside the work, not in a separate doc
Build in Notion
Ticket lifecycle
Proposal → approval → logistics → install → billing, stage-gated, templated, with the SOP and site context attached
Build in Notion (pending Halo cost-benefit)
Onboarding engine
New-hire paths that turn tribal knowledge into a repeatable ramp, cutting the 8-week curve
Build in Notion
Remote access & monitoring
Splashtop sessions, SolarWinds alerts
Integrate via MCP/API
Billing
QuickBooks
Integrate
AI layer
Agents that read across the whole system to triage, draft fixes from your SOPs, and surface missing steps
Native to Notion + MCP
Keep operational knowledge and client records in one connected system, linked to your specialized tools. That gives AI usable context and buyers an operation they can assess.

10. How CompanyOS closes the gap

We build CompanyOS around your operation in Notion. Scoped to Tech Johnny, the engagement runs in three phases over 90 days:
  • Phase 1 (Days 1–15), Knowledge extraction. Structured interviews with you and your top technicians to get the client/site/device model, the install procedures, and the decisions that currently only live in your head onto paper. This is also where we run the Halo cost-benefit to compare ticketing options against actual costs and requirements.
  • Phase 2 (Days 15–60), Build the operating system. Centralized knowledgebase. Role clarity. Executive dashboard. Automations built around 1-2 priority workflows.
  • Phase 3 (Final 30 days), AI + adoption. Deploy custom AI agents on top of the now-connected data, train the team, and run adoption workshops so it actually gets used.
Terms, as discussed: $5,000/month flat retainer, three-month minimum, then month-to-month, designed to return 10–15 hours a week to you for business development and investor work. A full operational buildout typically matures over 6–8 months; the 90 days gets the core system live and adopted.

11. Why Modern Operators

We have not run an MSP. You bring the domain expertise, including RMM, PSA, and DLC requirements.
We bring operating-system design from work in medical billing, energy-efficiency contracting, nonprofits, and professional services, to name a few. Those businesses shared your problem: a founder who was the bottleneck and operational knowledge trapped in people's heads.
Modern Operators is a systems-first growth partner for founder-led companies doing $2M to $20M who want to scale with clarity, calm, and predictable momentum. Instead of relying on heroic founders, scattered tools, or reactive decision-making, MO gives teams a modern operating system, a unified hub that holds vision, planning, execution, automation, and AI so the business runs smoother, faster, and smarter.
Co-founded by Damon Flowers and Mark Malian, Modern Operators brings together 27+ years of deep operating experience, brand strategy, and systems design to help companies move from reactive bottlenecks to a stable, scalable rhythm.
  • Damon Flowers has spent 20+ years building and scaling companies from early-stage to eight-figure outcomes. He is known for architecting operating systems, transforming chaotic teams into aligned execution machines, and mentoring founders and leaders through the transition from "doing everything" to building a company that grows beyond them. His work blends strategic clarity, operational structure, and the practical integration of AI into day-to-day workflows.
  • Mark Malian brings 7+ years of experience in growth strategy, brand positioning, and systems automation inside agencies and product companies. His expertise lies in turning complex processes into clean, scalable systems…especially in marketing, sales, and customer operations, so teams can produce consistent pipeline, shorten deal cycles, and unlock predictable growth.
Together, Damon and Mark and their team at Modern Operators guide founders through a new era of business, one where clear structure replaces chaos and AI amplifies human capability, with a modern CompanyOS as the foundation for long-term, scalable success.
 

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