Turning saved costs into growth: How Real Solutions tripled their margins  

Case study highlights: 

• Margins tripled within two years of adopting Kaseya 365 Endpoint Pro 

• 60% Reduction in tooling cost per seat 

• Endpoint count grew from under 500 to over 1,300 

• Technicians now handle double the weekly ticket volume 

• MSP practice grew profitable enough to spin off as its own company 

From ERP to MSP 

Real Solutions is a Holmdel, New Jersey-based MSP that grew out of an unlikely beginning. Its parent company, Clients First Business Solutions, spent more than two decades building a reputation as a leading ERP provider. But when ERP clients started asking if Clients First also handled IT, the company began fielding those requests occasionally and eventually passed them to an outside partner. 

That didn’t last. “The company we sent them to didn’t have our standards,” said IT Director Shawn Walter. “So, we started building it out internally.” What started as a necessity to keep ERP clients happy quickly became a small managed services team of two technicians. 

At first, the MSP division wasn’t designed to be a profit center. The parent company subsidized it. As Walter put it, ” We were a cost center inside Clients First. The division existed to serve our ERP clients, not to generate profit on its own.” 

That changed with Kaseya 365 Endpoint. The division is now profitable enough to operate as its own company. Under the Real Solutions brand, the team oversees 1,300 managed endpoints and they’ve tripled their margins. Walter is unequivocal about what made it possible: “There’s no way without Kaseya that would have happened.” 

Too expensive to protect, too risky not to 

Before Kaseya 365 Endpoint, Real Solutions began manually piecing together its own security stack. The team ran Bitdefender and Viper for antivirus, Iron Scales for email filtering and CyberQP for user elevation. Each tool came with its own portal, its own licensing and its own learning curve. At its worst, the team was juggling fifteen different products across as many vendor relationships. 

The operational burden was steep. One technician spent nearly all of his time monitoring antivirus alerts, checking whether flagged files had actually been removed and sorting actionable threats from false positives. With only two technicians on staff, that consumed half the team’s capacity. 

The financial burden was worse. The all-in per-seat cost across the fragmented stack sat at roughly $6/month across hundreds of endpoints. Assembling a mandatory security package at that price point made it nearly impossible to compete. 

“We had basically decided that if a client wasn’t going to take the full stack, we didn’t want to give them EDR and AV at all, because it wasn’t worth our time to monitor it,” said Walter. “But the cost of doing it right was pushing prospects to competitors.” 

Thomas Falteich, the company’s President, put the market impact in sharper terms: “If we kept that multi-vendor stack, we would have priced ourselves out of 60 to 65 percent of our market. We would only have been able to serve customers north of $50 million a year.” 

And the vendor management itself was draining the team. “I could spend half a day to a full day just keeping on vendors,” said Walter. “If Proof Point was down for a customer, I’m calling them all day long trying to get an answer and nobody knows what’s going on.  

First at the booth 

When Kaseya announced Kaseya 365 Endpoint, Walter didn’t wait. 

“I called Tom as soon as the Kaseya 365 keynote was over and told him, Tom, we’ll save $3 a license alone just by doing this. He immediately gave the go ahead,” Walter recalled. The team signed up for both Kaseya 365 Endpoint and Kaseya 365 User immediately after the announcement. Walter believes they were literally the first in line, both times. 

The math was straightforward. Real Solutions had been spending roughly $6 per seat across a patchwork of Kaseya and third-party tools, each purchased and managed separately. Kaseya 365 Endpoint replaced the entire stack with a single subscription at $3.00 a seat, SOC included. 

“The savings were immediate, and we got even more. We gained products we weren’t even using before,” said Walter. Existing customers moved quickly to the new pricing. Prospects that had previously balked at the per-seat rate became winnable again. And with the competitive pricing in hand, Real Solutions could undercut competitors enough that prospects would cancel existing contracts early and still save money by switching. 

The non-negotiable standard 

Real Solutions built two standardized packages around Kaseya 365 Endpoint: Cyber Suite Standard, their recommended offering, and Cyber Suite Basic, the minimum they will accept. The core of Kaseya 365 Endpoint runs through both. 

The packaging philosophy is simple. 

“You either get our full kit, or you can go down the road,” said Walter. “If a customer comes in and says they want to keep Bitdefender, the answer is no. We need assurance our customers are completely protected and that happens with Kaseya.” 

His rationale: Mixing tools puts technicians back in multiple portals, working in products they don’t know inside and out and leaves customers less protected. Real Solutions has transitioned every customer off Bitdefender and onto Datto AV. 

When customers raise the “eggs in one basket” concern, Walter has a straightforward answer: “How much do you want to juggle? At some point it’s not worth it. If my customer is completely safe and protected, let’s move on.” 

Tripled margins, double the capacity 

The financial and operational impact of Kaseya 365 Endpoint showed up almost immediately and has compounded since. 

Margins tripled. Before Kaseya 365, the MSP division was barely breaking even, often subsidized by the parent company. “The first year was almost double, and now we’re probably at triple on the margins,” said Falteich.  

Per-seat costs cut in half. Tooling costs dropped from roughly $6 per seat across the fragmented stack to $2.50 with Kaseya 365 Endpoint ($3 with Managed SOC). “By the time you added everything up, it was like half the cost of what we were spending for individual tools. It just made sense,” said Walter. 

Ticket capacity doubled. Before Kaseya 365, the team’s KPI was handling 20 support tickets per week. Today, the team handles 100 to 120 tickets per week. “A typical tech is probably doing double the amount of tickets we were doing before Kaseya 365 and being able to close them out,” said Falteich. 

Managed SOC replaced a full-time role. Before the bundle, one technician’s entire job was monitoring AV alerts. Managed SOC now handles threat monitoring, alert triage and response validation. “It is like having an external team that handles all that,” said Walter. 

Team capacity expanded. The cost savings from consolidating tools allowed Walter to grow the team from two to five technicians. Combined with the efficiency gains from a unified platform, the effect was even greater. “With those tools, that was like hiring six, because they’re able to do so much more,” Walter said. 

When Inky replaced Iron Scales, Real Solutions immediately recovered $1.50 per seat per month, a cost they had been absorbing rather than passing to customers. Across the client base, that translated to several thousand dollars in monthly savings from one component alone. 

One number, one answer 

One of the most underrated benefits of consolidation is what happens when something goes wrong. With 90% of the stack under one vendor, support is a single phone call. 

“Now for 90% of our stack, I call one phone number, I email one person, and I get an answer right away,” said Walter. Falteich sees the same operational leverage from the leadership side. With tools that work together natively, his team can focus on serving clients instead of managing vendors. “Now the tools all work together and flow,” he said. “That becomes the next big savings, the ability to do one-to-many for a tech.” 

The team is now migrating from ConnectWise into Autotask, and Walter sees it as the final piece. “With Autotask entering the picture, I feel like we’re ready to start that aggressive push,” he said. 

The practice is now preparing to actively cross-sell managed IT and security services to the hundreds of existing ERP clients within the parent company, migrating onto Autotask and operating with the confidence that comes from a platform where every tool works together and every technician can do the work of two 

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