Multi-Site Service Desk Manager

Multi-Site Service Desk Manager

The Service Desk Portfolio Manager is a senior, hands-on operations leader responsible for the health, performance, and consistency of service desk operations across every Shield-acquired MSP. This role does not replace the local Service Desk Managers at each ShieldCo, it elevates them. The Portfolio Manager is the connective tissue between Shield's operations leadership, our internal AI team, and the service desk teams already running each acquired MSP. The mission is simple, ensure every service board across the Shield portfolio is clean, well-managed, and continuously improving. That means consistent ticket hygiene, consolidated and trustworthy metrics, shared best practices across companies, and a strong feedback loop between the field and our AI and operations teams. This is a servant-leadership role, success is measured by how well the local managers and their teams perform, not by how visible the Portfolio Manager is. This is a heavy-travel position. Roughly half of the time may be spent on-site at ShieldCo locations, working shoulder-to-shoulder with local service desk teams, observing operations firsthand, coaching managers, and identifying what to scale across the portfolio. All travel is fully covered by the company.

Key Responsibilities

Own the overall health and performance of service desk operations across every Shield-owned MSP, ensuring each service board is clean, accurate, and well-managed by its local Service Desk Manager.

Establish and enforce a consistent definition of "clean and well-managed" covering ticket hygiene, queue management, SLA adherence, time entry discipline, status accuracy, and documentation quality.

Conduct regular service board audits across ShieldCos and partner with local managers on remediation plans, tracking progress to closure.

Identify systemic risks, capacity issues, or staffing gaps across the portfolio and escalate with clear recommendations to operations leadership.

Best Practices & Standardization

Develop, document, and roll out service desk best practices across the portfolio including triage workflows, escalation paths, ticket templates, board structure, dispatch standards, and customer communication norms.

Run a recurring cross-company forum for ShieldCo Service Desk Managers to surface what's working, share playbooks, and align on shared standards without erasing what makes each MSP effective locally.

Partner with operations to drive change management when new standards are introduced, ensuring local buy-in rather than top-down mandates.

Maintain a living portfolio playbook that captures the canonical "Shield way" of running a service desk.

Metrics Consolidation & Reporting

Partner with operations and the data/AI team to define standard KPI definitions, ensuring apples-to-apples comparisons across companies that may use different PSA tools or reporting conventions.

Deliver clear, narrative-driven monthly and quarterly portfolio reporting to executive leadership, highlighting trends, outliers, and recommended actions.

Coach local managers on using the same metrics to run their own desks, not just to report upward.

Partnership with Shield's Internal AI Team

Act as the operational voice of the service desk in the design, piloting, and rollout of internal AI tools. including ticket triage, summarization, knowledge retrieval, and automation.

Identify high-value, repeatable workflows across the portfolio that are strong candidates for AI augmentation and prioritize them with the AI team based on impact and feasibility.

Coordinate pilots at selected ShieldCos, gather structured feedback from local managers and technicians, and own the rollout playbook for portfolio-wide adoption.

Ensure data quality on service boards is sufficient for AI tools to perform well, closing the loop between board hygiene and AI effectiveness.

Coaching, Servant Leadership & Local Manager Development

Serve as a mentor, coach, and trusted partner to each ShieldCo's Service Desk Manager by supporting them, removing obstacles, and helping them grow rather than managing them by directive.

Spend meaningful time on-site at each ShieldCo (approximately 50% travel), working alongside local teams to understand their reality before recommending changes.

Build trust at every level of the service desk from technicians to MSP leadership, so that improvements stick after the visit ends.

Skills, Knowledge & Expertise

Required

57 years of management experience inside an MSP, with direct ownership of a service desk or service delivery function.

Demonstrated track record of running or transforming a service desk including ticket hygiene, SLA performance, dispatch, and team development.

Hands-on experience with at least one major PSA platform (e.g., ConnectWise PSA, Autotask, HaloPSA, ServiceNow) and the reporting layer that sits on top of it.

Strong understanding of MSP economics, service delivery models, and the operational levers that drive margin and CSAT.

Servant-leadership orientation - you measure your success by your people's and your peers' success, not by being the loudest voice in the room.

Excellent written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to move fluidly between a technician's ticket queue and an executive readout.

Willingness and ability to travel approximately 50% of the time, including to ShieldCo locations across multiple regions. All travel is fully covered.

Strong analytical skills - comfortable working with PSA data, building or interpreting dashboards, and turning numbers into clear narratives.

Strongly Preferred

Experience operating across multiple MSPs, business units, or acquired entities, particularly in a private equity, holding company, or roll-up environment.

Familiarity with applying AI or automation tooling to service desk workflows (triage, summarization, knowledge management, ticket deflection).

Experience standing up portfolio-level metrics, scorecards, or operating reviews across multiple companies with different tools and conventions.

ITIL foundation knowledge or equivalent service management framework experience.

Background coaching or developing first-line and second-line service desk managers.

How You Work

You lead by listening first. Before changing anything at a ShieldCo, you understand why it works the way it does today.

You favor durable improvements over heroic firefighting. You build systems and habits that hold up after you fly home.

You're comfortable with ambiguity and a portfolio of companies that don't all look the same, and you can find the signal across them.

You partner well with technical teams (especially AI/engineering) without needing to be the deepest technologist in the room.

You take ownership of outcomes across companies you don't directly manage, using influence, trust, and clear data instead of authority.

About Shield

Shield Technology Partners is a national IT Services platform formed through the collaboration between Thrive Holdings and ZBS Partners. By combining Thrive Holdings' technological expertise with ZBS Partners' proven approach to supporting founder-led businesses, Shield Technology Partners is dedicated to accelerating growth, innovation and long-term value creation for IT services companies across the country.