TLDR: When your MSP is drowning in tickets and everyone's maxed out, your gut says "hire another tech." But that instinct? It's probably wrong. Adding more technical capacity without the operational, sales, or management infrastructure to support it just creates bigger, more expensive bottlenecks. Let's talk about why your next hire should probably wear a different hat.

You know that feeling. It's 6:47 PM on a Thursday. Your senior tech just pinged you, again, because he's buried under a mountain of escalations. Your help desk queue looks like a Black Friday checkout line. And you? You're still playing whack-a-mole with client emergencies instead of working on the business.

So naturally, you think: We need another tech. Yesterday.

And I get it. I really do. When everything is on fire, hiring someone who can put out fires seems like the obvious move.

But here's the uncomfortable truth: adding another technician to a broken system doesn't fix the system. It just makes it a bigger broken system.

The Technician Trap

Let me paint you a picture. You hire Tech #4. Great credentials, solid skills, seems hungry. You throw them into the deep end because, let's be honest, you don't have time to train them properly. Within a few weeks, they're productive… ish. Tickets are getting touched, but somehow you're still drowning.

Why? Because you didn't actually solve the problem. You just added more hands to a hamster wheel that was already spinning out of control.

Here's what usually happens when MSP owners default to "hire more techs":

The technical capacity wasn't the constraint. The system was.

MSP business owner looks overwhelmed at a crowded desk while IT staff work in a busy office, highlighting scaling issues.

The Real Constraints Hiding in Plain Sight

When your MSP hits a growth ceiling, there are usually three bottlenecks that have nothing to do with how many engineers you've got:

1. Nobody's Selling (Or Selling Well)

This one's sneaky. A lot of MSP owners started as techs. We like the technical work. Sales feels… icky. So we rely on referrals, word of mouth, and hope. And when we do sell, we're often giving away the farm just to close the deal.

Here's the thing: if you don't have a dedicated sales function, you don't have a business, you have an expensive job. Research consistently shows that MSPs who prioritize sales hires early tend to scale faster and more sustainably. Founders like Robert Herjavec and David Javaheri built empires by putting salespeople in seats before stacking up technicians.

Your next hire might need to be someone who can bring in the right clients, not just service the ones you already have.

2. Nobody's Running the Ship

Operations. The unsexy stuff. Scheduling, resource allocation, vendor management, process documentation, quality control.

When there's no one driving operations, the owner becomes the de facto operations manager. Which means you're spending your days putting out fires, approving PTO requests, and trying to remember which client has that weird VPN setup.

An operations hire, or even a service manager, can be transformational. They create the structure that allows your techs to actually be productive instead of wandering around in chaos.

3. Nobody's Leading

Here's a hard question: When's the last time you sat down with your team members one-on-one? Not to talk about a ticket, to actually lead them?

Management isn't micromanagement. It's coaching, developing, setting expectations, and holding people accountable. Without it, your best people get frustrated and leave. Your mediocre people coast. And your problem children? They stick around forever because no one's brave enough to address performance issues.

If you're the only "manager" and you're also the owner, salesperson, and escalation engineer… well, management isn't actually happening.

Diverse MSP team collaborates in a modern conference room, emphasizing the importance of sales and operations roles.

But We Can't Afford a Non-Billable Hire!

I hear this all the time. And I'm going to push back: gently, but firmly.

First: are you sure you can't afford it? Or have you just not done the math? A good operations person or sales hire doesn't show up on a timesheet billing hours: but they create leverage. They free you up to work on the business. They bring in new revenue. They reduce churn by improving service delivery.

Second: consider the cost of not making that hire. How much is your time worth? If you're doing $50/hour tasks when you should be doing $500/hour strategy work, that's not frugality: that's expensive misallocation.

And third: there are creative ways to start. Part-time ops help. Fractional sales support. Outsourcing specific projects to free up bandwidth. Strategic partnerships with other firms. The all-or-nothing mindset keeps a lot of MSP owners stuck.

The Hierarchy of Hiring (A Rough Guide)

Not every MSP is the same, but here's a general framework I've seen work well:

  1. Owner doing everything → Hire a tech to free up some of your time
  2. Owner + 1-2 techs → Hire for operations or service coordination
  3. Small team, stable revenue → Hire for sales/business development
  4. Growing team, growing revenue → Hire a service manager or team lead
  5. Scaling fast → Now you can stack more techs: because you have the infrastructure to support them

Notice how "hire more techs" isn't the answer at every stage? That's intentional.

The goal isn't to have the biggest technical team. It's to have the most effective organization. And effectiveness comes from balance.

Metaphor for MSP growth with wooden blocks and figurines representing different business roles, showing strategic scaling.

What If You're Already Tech-Heavy?

Maybe you're reading this thinking, "Great, but I already have six techs and no one else."

Good news: it's not too late to rebalance. Here are some options:

The point isn't that technicians are bad hires. They're essential. But they're not the only hires: and they're often not the right hire when you're trying to break through a growth ceiling.

The Bottom Line

Scaling an MSP isn't about adding more horsepower to a car with a broken transmission. It's about building the vehicle that can actually handle the speed.

Your next hire might not touch a single ticket. They might not know the difference between a VLAN and a VPN. But they could be the person who finally lets you stop being the bottleneck.

So before you post that job listing for Tech #5, ask yourself: What's actually holding us back?

The answer might surprise you.

Ready to get off the hamster wheel and build an MSP that runs without you at the center of everything? Let's talk. At Encore Strategic, we help MSP owners build businesses that are profitable, scalable, and eventually: sellable. Because you deserve more than just a job you own.