Staffing for MSPs: dedicated techs and back-office seats that fit your margin

The technician shortage shows up in your margin first

Open your P&L and look at what your service desk costs. You sell hours and outcomes under an agreement, and you pay for them in salaries. That makes the price of a seat a decision about which agreements you can sign at a profit, and it sets how far one queue can stretch before the SLA clock starts winning.

You know the wall: a client wants to sign, the agreement needs two more capable techs behind it, and your local market prices those techs above what the agreement will bear. That's the MSP technician shortage as your books record it. Growth waits on a hire, and the hire waits on a salary the contract can't carry, so a yes turns into a no, or into a backlog your senior engineers absorb at 7pm.

Dokimo works on the price of the seat, not on lowering the bar for who fills it. The remote tech works from their own country, so you get a wider pool at a price your agreements can carry. The aim is added capacity next to the techs you already have, so your seniors get out of the escalation loop and back onto projects and QBR prep.

A seat that works your board, under your managers

The person in the seat logs into your PSA and your RMM, whatever you run (Autotask, ConnectWise Manage, HaloPSA, Datto RMM, NinjaOne), on a named account of their own. They work your queues against your runbooks and your SLAs, join the service desk standup, follow your escalation paths and answer to your service delivery manager. The seat is dedicated to your account: not shared with other MSPs and not a queue someone else manages on your behalf.

Every candidate is tested on the real work before you meet them. For an MSP seat that is a live piece of the work, a ticket to triage, an alert to work or a config to review, not a quiz. No candidate is promised to arrive knowing your tools.

Dokimo manages the placement and sends you one monthly invoice. The person's legal employer, in their own country, is Dokimo's employer of record (EOR) partner, which runs their payroll there under local employment law. The client relationship stays yours. Which of your clients' environments the person may touch is your decision, set by your agreements and your counsel, and Dokimo fits the seat to your answer. Dokimo is the People practice of Koine Cyber.

What it costs, and what that budget reaches

Seats run from $1,500 a month in the Philippines and from $2,050 a month in Mexico, with the level of the work setting where a seat lands. The calculator on the pricing page shows the price for each role and level. The price covers the person's pay, the employer costs local law requires (statutory year-end pay included), their employment through the EOR partner, the search and screening, and one monthly invoice. You provide the PSA, RMM and other licenses. The optional Productivity and Security Suite is an extra $399 a month per person.

The monthly figure is a fraction of a comparable US hire, but reach matters more than the saving. The same budget stops being limited to whoever lives within commuting distance and accepts a local salary. It reaches two recruiting countries: the Philippines and Mexico. Run it against a real deal. An agreement that can't carry another US tech might carry a dedicated remote one, and that's the difference between signing the client and turning them down.

Month to month, with no long-term contract. If a hire isn't working out in the first 90 days, we find a replacement at no extra cost. Whoever sits in the seat, keep the runbooks and client notes in your own PSA and documentation platform from week one, so a departure costs you a ramp and not the knowledge. Contract to hire and direct placement are options for Tier 3 technical and technical management seats, if you want the person to end up working for you directly.

Where Dokimo is the wrong answer for an MSP

Some client environments should not have an offshore seat in them at all. Dokimo will not place anyone on environments with export-controlled defense data or on criminal justice systems. Any client whose contract requires US-only access, or whom you simply keep with US staff, also stays off limits to the seat, and that call is yours, made from your agreements and your counsel. The page on offshore techs and client contracts goes deeper on how to sort your clients before a seat starts.

On-site and deskside work stays local. A tech abroad can't rack a server, run cable, swap a drive or sit beside a user who's locked out of a laptop, and no remote seat changes that. A remote coordinator can schedule and dispatch your on-site techs, and a remote engineer can plan and document a rollout, but a person who can be in the room has to do the hands-on part. If a client agreement promises on-site response, that promise stays with your local staff.

Dokimo is also the wrong answer if you need the seat filled this week. Dokimo won't quote a time to shortlist, and that's deliberate: a date promised before the testing is done would be one to apologize for later. A seat takes time to recruit and ramp, so it doesn't suit a short spike.