I’m confident the higher tier experts at the MSP are making more than $40 an hour. Besides, the guy working for the MSP is getting paid hourly regardless of whether there’s work or whether/how much the MSP’s clients pay, a guy you hire hourly for a one-off can’t get by charging the same $40/hour for freelance work.
At MSPs the employees may spent a few minutes on a ticket, but customers get billed in 30 min or 1 hour increments - and employees are working on multiple tickets at same time. Many times, tickets are worked on by multiple employees at same time.
Lots of issues I find are caused by MSP employees themselves. Everytime somebody makes a change, it causes tens of things to go wrong and causes production downtime, and then the MSPs escalate the issues to me to resolve their emergency - instead of them reverting the change they did. (And often they do not plan for what can go wrong).
Then, I find MSPs are constantly are re-inventing the wheel. Everything works, but MSP decides the client is using Cisco, but most of their techs do not know Cisco, so they replace the hardware with another vendor where config is limited to web GUI. Then they call me for help, and I spend hundreds hours on the phone with that vendor's support (and had to be midnight hours, as I couldn't make changes during production hours), and I discover dozens of bugs in that vendor's firmware, and the client ended up going back to Ciscos, and the new equipment customer paid 6 figures spent years collecting dust.
Another client, they have open-source software that does all the monitoring of all systems and network. MSP decides to get a commercial software that does the same function, and then takes hundreds of men hours to configure, and then years later, everytime something goes down, it's the customer that alerts that there is an issue, instead of of automatic alerts from the monitoring system.
And then MSPs sign up clients to countless of software subscriptions which are not necessary, or ends up never being use. But the clients will never know, because for them all they care is 100% uptime and immediate support, and MSPs do not get audited.
Problem is most MSPs are run by amatuers. The job is completed at the end, but if one would work for a major company in the corporate world, IT is done totally differently, and with lots of methodology and discipline. Any time there is a production downtime for minutes, it can cause millions of dollars of loss of revenue for the firms, but most MSPs management and emoployees did not come from such environments, so they do not have the experience.
