Every MSP owner I talk to right now is being told they have to do AI, and I get it, because I've felt that exact pressure before. The last time it showed up for me it wasn't AI, it was Dynamics, and I didn't treat it like the business-plan question it actually was.
How we got there
Some background first: Wes Henry and I started Ignus Technologies in 1999 as two techy nerds who said why not start a business, it can't be that hard (it was pretty damn hard). We did software, websites and servers, merged with Insight Technologies in 2010 (turns out that was a big mistake, with big lessons I'll save for another post), and started TrueIT in 2012 as an MSP. By 2018 TrueIT was profitable and working, which in hindsight is exactly when you should be the most careful about new ideas.
In 2018 TrueIT acquired Summit Group Software (SGS), and that was my entry into Dynamics. The noise at the time was that every MSP needed a Dynamics practice, so we parked one right next to a profitable MSP, because we thought combining two very different business models was a brilliant idea.
What I got wrong
What I had was enthusiasm, and I confused it with a plan. Some of the idea made sense, and if you've got a plan, a strategy and the resources to run a second kind of work, adding it can absolutely be the right call. I thought I had all three, and what I actually had was a lot of excitement and a whiteboard.
The Dynamics work wanted different people, different selling and a different kind of attention than help desk, IT management and security. Project work and recurring managed services don't run on the same rhythm, and they don't get managed the same way either. We had two trades under one roof and tried to run them with one brain, and the brain in question was mine... which, if you know about my squirrel, tells you how that was going to go.
The MSP was already working, and the Dynamics work was real work with real clients. The software was never the problem, focus was, and I almost hurt both businesses before I was willing to admit it.
Splitting it is what fixed it
In April 2021 we practically split the Dynamics practice out of TrueIT, and I became CEO, which still surprises me a little after 20 years as the number two. TruNorth Dynamics legally started on January 1, 2022, and TrueIT was sold in 2023. Technically it was a sale, but we didn't get much for it, so please don't picture me on a yacht.
The split worked because each business finally got its own people, its own plan and its own attention, and the core stopped quietly covering for the experiment. We've kept simplifying since then: at the end of 2025 we bought out two partners and it's back to Wes and me, and this year TruNorth Dynamics became TruNova.
Now it's AI
Swap Dynamics for AI and it's pretty much the same movie, and shiny things are shiny for a reason, mostly so squirrels like me will chase them. AI is a real thing, and parts of it absolutely fit in an MSP, including work that can be recurring. Doing all of it because the market said so is the same trap I walked into, just with a bigger marketing budget behind it.
So before you add the shiny thing, please work through the questions I skipped too fast:
- What's my business plan, and does this actually belong in it?
- What's my business strategy, and does this support it or just sit next to it?
- Do I have the resources, the time and the money to run a second kind of work properly?
- What does this distract from in the core business that's already paying the bills?
There's no universal right answer to any of those. You might build it on purpose, broker it to a partner or leave it alone for now, and any of those can be the right call as long as you actually chose it instead of drifting into it.
Learn from my mistakes, and if you'd like to compare notes I'm always up for it.
