Strety CEO: ‘Growth-Minded MSPs’ Need Help Managing Employees

‘The technical side is easy, it’s the business side that gets complicated. It’s managing employees that gets complicated, so it’s taking that as seriously as they take their technology stack,’ Strety CEO Brian Dosal tells CRN about the goal of the company’s new platform.

BrightGauge founder Brian Dosal has created Strety, a software company implementing an enterprise operating system (EOS) to help businesses and their teams run smoothly and efficiently.

“The technical side is easy, it’s the business side that gets complicated,” Dosal, CEO of Strety, told CRN. “It’s managing employees that gets complicated, so it’s taking that as seriously as they take their technology stack. It’s more making sure that the MSPs are thinking, ‘How am I going to grow this business professionally? How’s the business going to operate from 10 employees to 30 employees?’ Those are two different types of companies.”

Dosal started BrightGauge in 2010, which was purchased by Continuum, which then sold it to ConnectWise in 2019. But MSPs were still coming back saying, “There are EOS tools out there, but nothing’s really dedicated to the channel.”

So Dosal, along with Strety co-founder Larry Garcia, built another product and integrated it with many of the tools MSPs already use, such as Microsoft Teams, ConnectWise and HaloPSA.

“MSPs use us to manage all of their one-on-one relationships with their direct reports,” Dosal said. “The big difference here is that we’re not selling backups or disaster recovery. If you want to run your business well and grow and one day exit, you’re going have to use a platform like ours. MSPs are picking up on that because they’re all growing. They’re all going from the classic five-person company to a 30-person company.”

Mark Lukehart, COO of San Ramon, Calif.-based MSP Parachute Technology, said Strety’s leadership team has a deep knowledge of the unique characteristics of the MSP industry, “and they used that knowledge to develop a comprehensive business operating system for MSPs.”

“Strety enables us to run our meetings more effectively and encourages team engagement with features like being able to vote on issues during meetings,” Lukehart told CRN via email. “Strety’s team is constantly improving the application with enhanced features that continue to create value for our company. Our employees love using the tool and find it very easy to organize, prioritize and resolve issues faster. Our managers love the tool as it helps them hold the team members accountable and identify issues that are off track.”

The first layer of Strety’s go-to-market strategy is to attend conferences in the channel as well as reaching out to the more than 2,500 MSPs that BrightGauge had under its belt.

Strety has more than 200 partners today with a goal of 600 by the end of this year, according to the Doral, Fla.-based company.

And its road map includes more integration and tools that will be added to the product as well as adopting AI, Dosal said.

“AI is a big part of the second half of our road map,” he said.

The main aspect, though, is that the company prides itself on being channel-first.

“That was kind of our secret sauce at BrightGauge,” Dosal said. “Just focus on how this channel, this community, works, and there’s plenty of business to go around. Having an operating system of how you’re going run that business should be top of mind at these growth-minded MSPs.”