Before CX IT Services, I worked for an IT provider whose leadership taught me exactly what I did not want to become. No names — but the lessons were invaluable, and I carry them every day.
I am not going to name the company.
Not because I am worried about consequences, but because the point of this is not to embarrass anyone — it is to be honest about what I observed, what I learned from it, and how it shaped the decisions I made when I eventually built my own business.
The MSP I worked for before starting CX IT Services was not a bad company in every dimension. There were capable people there. The technical work was often solid. But the leadership culture was genuinely poor in ways that affected everything underneath it — the staff, the clients, the quality of service, and the long-term health of the business.
I spent enough time there to understand it properly. And I left with a clearer picture of what I wanted to build than I might have had if the experience had been unremarkable.
The Billable Hours Obsession
The metric that ran that company was billable hours. Everything — performance reviews, team allocation, client scheduling, internal decisions — was filtered through the question of whether it generated a billable outcome.
This sounds like reasonable commercial thinking, and in isolation it is. Businesses need revenue. Time is the core product in a service business. Tracking it matters.
The problem was what it did to the behaviour underneath it.
Proactive work — the kind that prevents problems before they occur — is difficult to bill for. If an engineer identifies a configuration issue during a routine visit and fixes it in ten minutes, how do you charge for that? The client did not request it. There was no ticket. The fix happened because someone who was paying attention noticed something.
In a culture obsessed with billable hours, that behaviour does not get rewarded. What gets rewarded is work that generates a ticket and a time entry. And so, gradually, the team learned to let things slide until they became incidents that could be billed for properly.
The clients paid for it eventually — in downtime, in avoidable failures, in environments that degraded steadily because the commercial incentive structure of their provider actively discouraged the work that would have kept them healthy.
I watched this happen. I found it deeply uncomfortable. And when I built CX IT Services, I structured our managed services agreements to make proactive work an expectation rather than an exception — because I had seen what the alternative produces.
The “Keep Them Confused” School of Client Management
There was an unstated philosophy at that company about client communication: do not explain things too clearly.
Not in a sinister, deliberate sense. More as an accumulated cultural norm that had developed because technical people had found it easier, over time, to communicate in technical language and leave the client with a vague sense that everything was being handled rather than investing the effort in plain-language explanation.
The practical effect was that clients did not understand what they were paying for, what was being done in their environment, or what the recommendations they were receiving actually meant for their business. They were dependent in a way that was commercially convenient for the provider.
I found this troubling from an ethical standpoint. It is not a good way to treat people. But it also struck me as poor long-term commercial strategy, even by the cynical measure of client retention — because a client who does not understand what you do for them will always be vulnerable to a competitor who explains it more clearly. Confusion is not loyalty.
At CX IT Services, we invest heavily in communication. Plain language. Business-context explanations for technical recommendations. Quarterly reviews where we walk through what we have done, what we found, what we recommend, and why. The clients who understand their own IT environment are the ones who engage with it properly, act on recommendations, and stay with us because they can see the value — not because they are dependent in a way that creates the illusion of stickiness.
What Happened to the Staff
The culture at that company produced predictable results in the team.
High performers left when they found somewhere better. Mid-tier performers stayed because the environment was comfortable enough and the demands were not high. New talent was brought in, encountered the culture, and either adapted to it or departed within twelve months.
The result was a team with significant institutional knowledge concentrated in a small number of long-serving staff, fragile succession planning, and a general absence of the kind of intellectual energy that comes from a team that is genuinely invested in what they do.
I watched capable engineers stop caring. Not overnight — gradually, through the accumulation of decisions that told them their input was not valued, that doing good work was not recognised, that the commercial imperative always trumped the quality imperative.
That observation shaped how I think about building a team. Technical skills can be assessed and hired for. The motivation to do good work — the genuine investment in the outcome, the willingness to go further than the ticket requires — is much more fragile. It depends on the environment. It depends on whether leadership models it. It depends on whether the culture treats doing good work as something that matters.
I try hard to build an environment where that motivation survives. I do not always get it right. But I know what it looks like when it is absent, and I know what it costs.
The Relationship With Clients
The company I worked for had clients who had been with them for years. Long tenures that looked, from the outside, like strong relationships.
They were not, in many cases, strong relationships. They were inertia. The clients stayed because switching IT providers is disruptive and because no one had given them a clear enough picture of what they were not getting to make the disruption worthwhile.
This distinction matters enormously. There is a version of client retention that is built on genuine value — clients who stay because the service is good, the communication is clear, the relationship is productive, and they cannot imagine a better alternative. And there is a version that is built on friction and dependency — clients who stay because moving feels hard and because they have been kept sufficiently in the dark that they do not have the information to make a different choice.
The first version is what I want to build. It requires more. It requires real investment in the client relationship, transparency about what is and is not going well, and the confidence to have uncomfortable conversations when the environment needs work that the client might not want to fund.
The second version is easier in the short term and corrosive in the long term. Clients retained by friction eventually leave, and when they do, the departure is rarely orderly.
What I Took From It
I do not dwell on this period. It was formative, not defining.
What I took from it:
Proactive work is the actual product of managed IT. If the commercial structure of your business does not reward it, you will not deliver it — regardless of what you say in the sales conversation.
Clients who understand what they are paying for are better clients. Invest in the communication. It pays for itself in the quality of the relationship.
Your team’s motivation is an asset. It is built or destroyed by the culture you create and the decisions you make when they are watching. They are always watching.
Retention built on dependency is not a business — it is a countdown. Build relationships where clients stay because they want to, not because they are confused about their options.
And perhaps most importantly: the gap between what a business tells clients it does and what it actually does is always visible to the staff. The engineers knew. The project managers knew. When the gap is wide enough, it drives out the people you most want to keep.
I built CX IT Services to be the thing I wanted to work for and could not find. Whether I have succeeded is for others to judge. But the benchmark was set by a business that showed me, clearly and memorably, what the failure mode looks like.
