Given that the franchisees are all using the same CMIT Solutions name but coming from varied backgrounds, how do you prevent one franchisee from harming the CMIT brand?

It’s true in any business and any franchise that someone can make a mistake. I think you minimize your chances there by having a really good education and training program. If you take our marketing program, we have marketing playbooks, and every month there’s a whole set of activities we want them to do, and we provide them everything from their Google ads, their banners, to everything they need to market an MSP. And the same for the service delivery side. There are playbooks of how to execute and roll out cybersecurity services and best practices. We have cybersecurity certification programs through our partners. And so we certainly are teaching all the best practices of the industry, and how to market, sell and deliver.

Was CMIT Solutions founded specifically as a franchisor? Or was it originally an MSP itself?

CMIT was founded in 1996 when the MSP market didn’t yet exist. CMIT was just an IT service and support company. It was break-fix, and was at that time focused on the residential market. An interesting tidbit: early on, ‘CMIT’ stood for ‘Computer Moms IT.’ It was founded by Georgia Jones. That was her name for the company. She got a few moms involved to be franchise owners, but she quickly found out that there were there were a lot of men who wanted to become franchise owners. She wanted to rethink the game and not turn away half the population. And so it went from there to Computer Managed IT, CMIT. And about 2007, as MSPs came into existence, that’s when this really took off.