"We've hit sub-3-minute average response times across all clients and all issues ever since joining TopLeft. I can go back through all history and prove it." - Matthew Bookspan, Founder, Black Tip MSP
Are you exhausted from juggling 20+ ticket statuses?
Wrestling with projects that drag on for months?
Watching tickets get escalated while waiting on third-party vendors?
You're not alone. Most MSPs operate like they're stuck in quicksand—the harder they work, the deeper they sink.
Black Tip MSP faced the same challenges in 2010. With a background in Scrum and software development, founder Matthew Bookspan saw an industry where:
20-30 ticket statuses creating decision paralysis
Dispatch bottlenecks choking response times
Projects lingering without clear milestones
Technicians cherry-picking tickets
Zero visibility across work in progress
"Kanban doesn't work for service tickets"
"We need dispatch to maintain order"
"Clients expect traditional service delivery"
"Our team won't adapt"
The weight of these beliefs creates organizational inertia, a force so strong that 90% of MSPs never escape it.
Think of it like a typical Monday morning: tickets flooding in from the weekend, technicians arguing over who takes the "nightmare" client, projects pushed to "next week" for the fifth time in a row. Everyone's busy, but nothing is actually moving forward.
Change didn't come easy. Black Tip's early years looked like:
Post-it notes on whiteboards
Mental mapping between boards and tickets
Manual workflows with limited software
Daily friction between old habits and new methods
"Software was pretty limited back then. There were very few products that allowed you to do Kanban or anything of merit." - Matthew Bookspan
But here's where physics works in your favor: Objects at rest stay at rest, but objects in motion stay in motion.
Instead of adding features, Black Tip stripped them away:
From 20+ statuses to just 5:
Backlog - Work waiting to start
Blocked - Waiting on something
Ready - Prepared to begin
Doing - In progress
Done - Completed
"If you're blocked, that means you're waiting for anything. Why do you have to have a special status? You're still waiting. What difference does it make?" - Matthew Bookspan
Consider this: whether a ticket is "waiting on vendor," "waiting on parts," "waiting on approval," or "waiting on client response," your technician still can't work on it. Having 10 different ways to say "stuck" doesn't unstick anything. Instead, it just creates more fields to update in your PSA.
The boldest move? Eliminating dispatch entirely.
"We've never had a dispatch person. I'm never gonna hire one. What we train here is for accountability. It comes in, you take it. It's a full pull model." - Matthew Bookspan
This single decision removed the biggest bottleneck in their workflow, and their response times plummeted (in a good way).
To put this in perspective: imagine eliminating the morning ritual of "Who's taking this ticket?" debates. No more cherry-picking the easy password resets while the complex server issues languish. When a ticket arrives, the next available tech grabs it. It's like switching from a traffic-clogged intersection to a highway on-ramp. This means that everything just flows, and nothing gets permanently stuck.
What's on your day?
What is blocking you?
Where can you help others?
Facts only, no war stories
Every ticket. Every day. No exceptions.
"It takes 15 minutes to validate what we've already done throughout the day." - Matthew Bookspan
These rituals create what physicists call angular momentum, meaning that once spinning, the system wants to keep spinning.
When Black Tip discovered ConnectWise's beta Kanban board and later TopLeft, everything accelerated:
Unified view of service tickets and projects
Automated ticket categorization
Color-coded visibility (brown = projects)
Real-time tracking across all work
"When we could integrate not just reactive tickets but project tickets too, it completely changed our workflow. People who come to work for us go, 'Holy smokes, this is awesome because we totally understand what's happening right now.'" - Matthew Bookspan
Year 1-3: Under 3 minutes average
Year 4-6: Periods under 2 minutes
Year 7-9: Stretches under 1 minute
Year 10-13: Consistently sub-3 minutes
Maximum 6 projects open simultaneously
Weekly sprints keep work flowing
Clients asking them to slow down
"We've been told by some clients, 'Can you give us a couple of minutes before you respond?' They're like, 'We can only swallow so much.'" - Matthew Bookspan
This is the MSP equivalent of a restaurant that's "too fast." One client told them, "I haven't even finished describing the problem in my email and you're already calling me back!" Another mentioned they started writing shorter tickets because they knew Black Tip would resolve issues before they could finish typing a novel-length description.
Following Kaizen principles:
1 improvement per week = 52 annual changes
1 improvement per business day = 240+ annual changes
13 years of improvements = 3,000+ optimizations
Each change reduces friction. Less friction means more velocity. More velocity means easier change. It's a virtuous cycle that builds on itself.
Here's what this looks like in practice: Year 1, they automated ticket categorization, which saves them 2 minutes per ticket. Year 2, they created email templates for common issues, meaning another minute is saved. Year 3, they integrated remote access tools (5 minutes saved). By year 13, those thousands of tiny improvements mean technicians spend time solving problems, not navigating systems.
Reduce statuses to under 10
Start visualizing workflow (even on paper)
Pick your first "pull" champion
Institute 15-minute daily huddles
Review yesterday's completed work
Track one metric that matters
Eliminate dispatch bottlenecks
Automate ticket routing
Trust your technicians to self-assign
Integrate all work visually
Standardize your Kanban columns
Celebrate velocity improvements
"This method has been around for over 50 years in other industries. Yet in MSPs, we act like it's revolutionary. The resistance isn't logical—it's emotional." - Matthew Bookspan
Sunk cost in complex systems
Identity tied to traditional methods
Fear of client reaction
Comfort in familiar chaos
Black Tip's journey reveals a fundamental truth: Making that first change to your workflow is harder than maintaining new processes once they're in place.
The first push is reducing statuses, eliminating dispatch, starting daily huddles that feels impossible. However, once you start, momentum takes over.
The question isn't whether Kanban and pull-based systems work for MSPs. Black Tip proved they do. The question is: Will you stay stuck in the quicksand of 30 ticket statuses, or will you take that first difficult step toward velocity?
Start tomorrow. Pick one thing:
Reduce your ticket statuses by half
Run a 15-minute morning huddle
Create a simple Kanban board
Remove one bottleneck
Because here's the truth: The hardest part of improving your service delivery isn't learning new processes. It's letting go of legacy workflows.
And once you're moving? There's no going back.