From burnout to build-out: ex-MSP owner launches telco business

Running an MSP can take its toll.

For Jacob Talbot, that reality eventually led to a reset.

After more than a decade running Newcastle-based Bespoke Technology, Talbot sold the MSP late last year and set his sights on helping others in the industry avoid some of the same pain points.

“Running an MSP, I kind of got burnt out by that,” he told techpartner.news.

“Your staff look at you and go ‘we've got all these customers, they’re paying all this money, you guys must be loaded’, but they don't think about the sleepless nights because you're having to chase customers to pay their bills or you're worried about cyber security threats.

“They don't see you as a business owner with all of this stress and pressure. They see you as someone who is doing really, really well and expect the world from you. It’s quite lonely for business owners and I think it's even lonelier for the owners in the IT space.”

Despite an ambition to grow the company quickly, Talbot admits that “a few things going wrong in the business” meant he had to sell.

“A few staff left, and in turn, some customers left roughly at the same time - that resulted in me looking at passing the business on, merging it into another IT business in Newcastle and stepping away from that space for a while,” he explained.

Another factor in his decision to move on was a desire for a better work-life balance, compounded by the recent birth of a child and wanting to spend more time at home with family.

“It was a bit of a no brainer to go ‘let's not look at the MSP space; let’s still be in tech, but let’s work on something else."

“After the years of experience I've had in the MSP space, I want to be the person that's now helping other MSPs to be able to thrive and grow," he said.

"If I can give businesses that capacity and capability that they would otherwise have to spend a significant amount of time and money on to implement, then why not?”

Embracing the telco opportunity

His new venture, Netera Communications, is a wholesale-first voice provider designed for MSPs and IT partners that want to add telco services without the overheads.

Netera provides SIP Trunking, number routing, inbound services, outbound termination, number porting (LNP) and realtime CDRs and reporting services.

With points of presence in Sydney, Brisbane and Perth, the company is “already processing a good number of minutes already through the system” for the handful of partners signed up so far.

“The platform is 100% white labelled, branded to be the MSP’s business,” he said.

"We don't do lock-in contracts or minimum spends - it’s not capped with expensive licencing fees, it’s pay for what you use and we don't charge porting fees.”

While the company is still building out its PBX platform, Talbot said the vision is for Netera  Communications to be a one stop shop for MSPs, adding that he “grew the passion for telco and, in particular, voice” while running Bespoke.

“The biggest thing that we see [with partners] is the lack of compliance with the Telecommunications Act, so we want to make sure that things like the IPND database is always correct and make sure that they have their critical information summaries in place,” he told techpartner.news.

“If we can do that and automate it as much as we possibly can, we're stepping ahead of a lot of the traditional [telco companies].”