He Ran IT Inside the Agencies. Then He Started Serving Them.

Georg Dauterman came to managed 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 managed service provider (MSP) for creative agencies in New York and Los Angeles, built when everyone else sold Windows and called it a day.We get into how a creative-only practice actually runs. Every engineer gets a Mac and Parallels and a 90-to-180-day onboarding. Freelancers work in isolated environments priced so agencies can grow and shrink. The buying moment is not a breach, it is the day an agency hires a chief operating officer (COO) who reads the master service agreement (MSA) and realizes there is no HR, no finance, no IT. And after a year of outbound experiments that did not yield, the pipeline runs on referrals, Google reviews, in-person networking 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- A history degree, a Mac repair bench, and an education inside a Havas agency- Quitting in 2004 with a newborn at home to join a non-cash-flowing business- Block hours and hands-on work before the remote monitoring and management (RMM) tool existed- The RMM-plus-cloud inflection that created the MSP industry, and why AI feels the same- A Service Leadership peer group as his master's degree in business- Cross-training every engineer, Mac and Windows both- 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- Referrals, Google reviews and a podcast instead of a thousand dials- The quarterly committee that decides the product stack- Managed Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers for under $2,000 a monthGeorg Dauterman: https://www.linkedin.com/in/georg-dauterman/Valiant Technology: https://thevaliantway.comThe Creative Stack podcast: https://podcast.thevaliantway.com