The leadership team
Meet Matt, Tim and Ellen.
Matt ran a leading MSP for 28 years, Tim is a well known leader in the AI coding space, and Ellen is the COO who keeps the trains running on schedule.
Matt Ruck
CEO and founder
Twenty-eight years running designDATA, a $30M MSP in Washington, D.C. Built xop.ai after testing AI inside his own shop and finding most of it too complex, too costly, or all hype.
- $30M MSP
- 28-year operator
- ROI-first
Tim Kitchens
CTO
Thirty years in software engineering and technical leadership. Founder of Coding the Future with AI, teaching engineers to ship AI-assisted code with real discipline rather than enthusiasm.
- Engineering-first
- Principles over tools
- Cuts the hype
Ellen Ruck
COO and co-founder
Combat veteran, and twenty-two years with the Department of War in data analytics and business intelligence. PMP-certified PMO leader. Trilingual.
- Army veteran
- Data analytics
- PMP
About
Built by someone who ran one.
Matt Ruck spent twenty-eight years running designDATA, a $30M managed services provider on ConnectWise Manage. Everything on this site was built against the problems that show up on a service desk, by the person who carried the payroll for them.
That is the one input a competitor cannot buy, hire or generate, and it is the reason this is not a general-purpose AI tool pointed at a PSA in the hope that something useful falls out.
Where it was earned
Washington, D.C. is not an easy place to run an MSP.
It is one of the most competitive managed services markets in the country. Every prospect has options, every renewal is contested, and price pressure is permanent. designDATA was consistently ranked best-in-class in it, on a highly differentiated offering, with net promoter scores in the 95th percentile.
That took operational excellence and strategic differentiation at the same time. Either one alone would have been survivable and unremarkable.
What that leaves you knowing
- How to be differentiated, not just competent
- In a market where every prospect is already talking to three other providers, competence is the entry fee. What wins is an offering the others cannot match, and that is built rather than sold.
- What it costs to serve an account
- Not the invoice. The cost, per client, per month, including the tickets nobody counted and the work that was never in the agreement.
- How to staff a desk properly
- Utilization that is real rather than reported, which engineer should take which ticket, and what it does to a team when the same three people absorb everything.
- How to get in front of a client issue
- Before the renewal conversation, before the cancellation call, and without waiting for a survey that only the furious and the delighted answer.
- What a differentiated offering looks like
- Something a client can feel and a competitor cannot match on price alone. That is a product problem, not a sales problem.
Why that matters to you
We are not trying to make you efficient. We are trying to make you hard to compete with.
Efficiency is the part that is easy to measure, so it is the part every vendor sells. It is also the part your competitors will eventually buy too. Differentiation is the harder thing and the one that actually holds a renewal, and it is what an MSP in a crowded market has to build deliberately.
So the goal here is not a lower cost to serve, even though you get one. It is that you become the provider your prospects compare everyone else against, delivering AI to your own clients under your own name, on an offering the MSP down the road cannot put in a proposal.
From “we should do something with AI” to being the MSP everyone else is trying to catch.
How it gets built
If it cannot show a return, it does not ship.
Every tool here has to clear the same bar: demonstrate a return, and deliver it quickly. Not a return in a case study, and not one that arrives in the fourth quarter of year two. The engineer application pays for itself if it saves fifteen minutes a week, and it is built to save considerably more than that.
It is also why the arithmetic is on the page rather than in a spreadsheet we bring to a meeting. Naming where the minutes come from turns marketing into a claim you can check against your own desk, and an owner who has been pitched AI by four vendors this quarter deserves that much.
Why this company exists
“Your clients are going to expect AI-era pricing. The MSPs who do this work early will be able to absorb that and still make money, because their cost to serve came down first. The ones who wait will be defending a price against a cost base that has not moved.”
“That is the whole of it, and it is a solvable problem. It is also why I will not sell you something that takes a year to pay back. I spent long enough on the other side of that conversation.”
Note what that argument is not. Managed services is not in trouble, and AI is not about to replace your engineers. Neither is true, and a vendor who tells you otherwise is hoping urgency will do the work their product cannot. The pressure is on price per user, the answer is cost to serve, and the gap between those two is where an MSP either makes money over the next few years or does not.
How we partner
The things you have probably already noticed.
None of these are accidents, and all of them cost us something. They are here because the person who built this company spent twenty-eight years being sold to by vendors, and remembers which ones were worth the meeting.
- We publish the price
- Every number we have, and the minimums as counts rather than as ask us. A vendor who hides pricing is a vendor still deciding what to charge you.
- We score ourselves down where the answer is not yet
- The evaluation checklist has four rows where we lose, and they are marked. A sheet where every answer favors whoever wrote it is not worth printing.
- We do not market to your clients
- Their staff are your audience. We have no interest in building a relationship with them around you, which is why there is no end-user marketing anywhere on this site.
- We name what we run on
- The model providers, what leaves your tenancy and what does not. Your technical people are going to ask, and the answer should not require a call.
- We do not trade on fear
- There is real pressure coming and we will describe it plainly, but a vendor who makes you anxious and then leaves has given you nothing.
The company
Small, and spending it on the product.
We are a small team in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. That is a fact worth knowing rather than one to dress up: it means the person who answers your technical question is the person who decided the answer, and it means we are not carrying a sales floor you would be paying for.
It also means we ship quickly. Agent-X enters beta in October with a small group of MSPs who get to shape what comes after it, which is the kind of thing that stops being possible once a company is large.
Ask the questions you would ask an operator.
Not the ones you would ask a vendor. The fastest way to find out whether any of this is real is to put it in front of tickets you already know the answers to.