He Ran IT Inside the Agencies. Then He Started Serving Them.
with Georg Dauterman, President, Valiant Technology. Mac-heavy managed service provider (MSP) for creative agencies in New York and Los Angeles
Georg Dauterman came to managed information technology (IT) from the other side of the desk: a history degree, a quarter-life crisis, a Mac repair bench, then years running IT inside publishing houses and a Havas ad agency. In 2004 he quit, with a three-month-old at home, and joined Valiant Technology, a Mac-heavy MSP for creative agencies in New York and Los Angeles, built when everyone else sold Windows and called it a day.
We also get into how a creative-only practice actually runs. Every engineer gets a Mac and Parallels, plus a 90 to 180 day onboarding. Freelancers work in isolated environments, priced so agencies can grow and shrink. The buying moment is rarely a breach. It is the day an agency hires a chief operating officer (COO) who reads the master service agreement (MSA) and works out that nobody inside owns technology. After a year of outbound experiments that did not yield, the pipeline runs on referrals, Google reviews and his own podcast.
What we cover
- Running Valiant on the Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS), with the integrator seat split across two people
- Core values you can live with, and why “cheer” made the list
- Quitting in 2004 with a newborn at home to join a business that was not cash flowing
- The remote monitoring and management (RMM) plus cloud inflection that created the MSP industry, and why artificial intelligence (AI) feels the same
- The unmanaged Macs sitting in your clients' boardrooms
- Due diligence questionnaires (DDQs), MSAs and the trust chain that makes agencies buy
- Employees and freelancers as two separate user classes
- Managed Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers for under $2,000 a month
What's inside
- 00:00 Cold open and intro
- 00:47 Only my grandmother called me George
- 01:01 Running the firm on EOS, with two integrators
- 02:30 Core values you can live with, and why cheer
- 03:56 A history degree and a quarter-life crisis
- 05:30 The Mac repair bench and a Havas agency education
- 07:04 Quitting in 2004 with a newborn at home
- 07:39 Block hours before the RMM existed
- 08:18 The RMM-plus-cloud inflection that made MSPs
- 09:26 A peer group as his master's degree in business
- 10:55 Organizing a Mac-first team
- 11:29 Onboarding that takes 90 to 180 days on purpose
- 12:59 Unmanaged Macs in every environment
- 14:43 Saying yes to Windows as well
- 15:38 The ideal customer profile (ICP): agencies serving sophisticated clients
- 17:00 DDQs, MSAs and the trust chain
- 17:24 The COO hire that triggers the buying moment
- 18:59 The 15-to-100-person independent agency sweet spot
- 21:17 Serving remote-first agencies
- 23:41 Employees and freelancers as two user classes
- 25:26 Go-to-market: podcast, networking, lawyers and certified public accountants (CPAs)
- 26:26 Google reviews treated like gold
- 27:02 A year of outbound experiments, and the oblique approach
- 29:39 The quarterly product-stack committee
- 31:26 Managed MCP servers under $2,000 a month
- 32:46 Fire round
- 36:23 Close
The guest
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