Jennifer Roy on culture, scale, and what PE really looks like from inside a Canadian MSP

Robert Dutt: Hello and welcome to In the Channel from ChannelBuzz.ca, bringing news and information to the Canadian IT channel community for the last 16 years. I’m Robert Dutt, editor of ChannelBuzz.ca and your host for the show.

My guest today is Jennifer Roy, CEO of Nucleus Networks, a managed service provider based in Vancouver that now operates across five Canadian cities. Nucleus was recently named to the CRN MSP 500 Pioneer 250 list, and Jennifer herself was named CEO of the Year by The Channel Company in 2024.

What I find really interesting about Jennifer’s story is that she didn’t come up through IT. She had no technical background when she took her first MSP job about 15 years ago. She worked her way from service manager to COO to CEO, and along the way built her reputation for people-first leadership and culture building in an industry that doesn’t always prioritize those things.

We’re going to talk about what it actually looks like to scale a Canadian MSP nationally, how she thinks about hiring and culture when one wrong person can undo years of work, what it’s like operating inside a PE-backed platform like Lyra Technology Group while keeping your own identity, and where she sees AI fitting into the MSP business model right now.

Let’s get right into it. My chat with Jennifer Roy.

Robert Dutt: Jennifer, thanks for taking the time. I appreciate it.

Jennifer Roy: Thank you so much for having me.

Robert Dutt: You’ve talked openly about the fact that when you got your first job in the MSP world, you didn’t know what most of the acronyms in the job description meant — and that’s something I can relate to. I don’t know if you remember or know Nick Tidd, who led 3Com Canada and has gone through a variety of channel roles. But when I was a young reporter, he took me aside and said, “The thing you have to watch for in this industry is the TLAs.” I didn’t bite on that, and it was a great joke at the time.

But anyway, the point being — you didn’t come in as a technician. What made you apply anyway? What do you think being a non-technical leader brings to an MSP that someone who has that technical background might not?

Jennifer Roy: Great question. When I started in this industry — and I’m going to age myself here — close to 15 years ago, I was working in a quasi-government job and I had gone on maternity leave. I had come back from having my daughter and realized that I was underutilized and really bored. It just wasn’t a fast enough pace for me to feel fulfilled every day.

So I had gone to my manager, who was also a good friend of mine, and said to her, “I think it’s time. I’m going to start looking, and I want you to know — I want to be really upfront and clear — that you’re going to lose me likely sooner than later because I’m going to start looking for a new role.” She was so incredibly supportive and said to me, “I’ve got this tech company that’s looking for a service manager. They’re looking for someone to come in and help with their operations. Is it maybe something you want to explore?”

I said, “Well, send me the job description and I’ll take a look.” I looked at the job description and I didn’t know any of the acronyms. I didn’t know what ITIL was. I didn’t know what a SAN was. I didn’t know VPN. I didn’t know any of these things. I said to her, “I’m vastly underqualified for this position.”

She said, “I know the consultant that’s helping them hire — I think you should at least have a conversation.” I thought, “Okay, what’s the worst that’s going to happen? I apply for this job and don’t get it?” So I applied, and it happened to be the legend Chris Jay’s MSP. They interviewed me — I met with Todd Kane and Chris Jay throughout the process, had a couple of interviews. Really, what they were looking for was somebody who wasn’t going to think from a technical perspective, but look at things from a client perspective and a coaching and leadership perspective — which were tools I had.

So I took a leap of faith, and they also took a leap of faith and hired me to run their service desk. I think it was a very unique experience, something I didn’t think I was capable of doing. But I’ve always been a big believer that growth happens when you’re uncomfortable. So I made myself really uncomfortable taking a position I was massively underqualified for — and then 15 years later, this is where I’m at.

The piece that I think I offer that’s different than technical leaders is I always look at things from that client perspective. My CTO is really great at finding unique technical solutions. But my first question is always: how does that impact our people? Not just our clients, but our team. Is it going to be a positive benefit for them? So I think that’s what I bring that’s different.

Robert Dutt: You joined Nucleus as COO in late 2021 and took over as CEO from Martin DesRosiers in 2024. He’d been in the chair for a decade and built a lot of what Nucleus is. What was it like stepping into that? What did you want to keep, and where did it feel like you needed to put your own stamp on things?

Jennifer Roy: Big shoes to fill for sure. I was hired in late 2021 as Chief Operating Officer — operations has been my background forever, so it was a really comfortable position to come in and kind of become Martin’s right hand. I looked at all of Nucleus’s operations. Nucleus had done an incredible job of building their brand and their business, but coming in with a fresh perspective, I was able to optimize a lot of their KPIs and processes and procedures. I had a lot of fun restructuring operations when I first joined.

In January of 2024, when Martin asked me to take over as CEO as he elevated up to our parent company, I was definitely nervous. One, I had never been a CEO before. Two, I was stepping into these huge shoes. And then also — the elephant in the room — I’m a woman CEO of an MSP and there’s not a lot of us. So I was also mindful of the fact that I had to live up to that standard as well.

Some of the things Martin had done for the last decade I kept, because don’t change what’s not broken. But I also wanted to put my stamp on things. I used that opportunity to make changes that we probably should have made but had stayed comfortable on. I’ll use a really simple example: we were a Microsoft shop, but we used Slack as our main messaging platform. I said, “Why do we have two? This doesn’t make sense.” Everyone was really comfortable with Slack and loved it, but it was a good way for me to say, “With new leadership comes new changes. We’re a Microsoft shop — we need to eat our own dog food. We’re getting rid of Slack.”

So I made some small changes, and that really wasn’t just to put my own stamp on things — the timing just made sense. New leadership, some changes we probably should have done a long time ago. I also did a reorg and changed the reporting structure, moved some leaders into different roles I thought they were better suited for. I moved our Director of Client Success into a VP of Operations role because I didn’t backfill my COO position — I just elevated him and put him into a role he can now grow into.

Robert Dutt: Let’s talk expansion. Nucleus started in Vancouver and now has offices in Victoria, Prince George, Calgary, and Toronto. For MSP owners listening who are thinking about expanding beyond their home market — what did you learn about scaling a company across cities, and what broke along the way that you had to fix?

Jennifer Roy: Scaling across cities is challenging. Anyone who has done it with ease, I would love to learn from. It is hard to get penetration in a market you are not currently in. Building that brand awareness and reputation is difficult unless you have an anchor client that’s really helping you with referrals.

Finding talent in a new city, building brand awareness in a new city, getting new logos — a lot of what MSPs sell comes down to trust. You’re asking someone to buy recurring services. This is not a one-time transaction. It’s a recurring relationship, which means you really have to have that trust. It’s harder when you’re an unknown presence. In Vancouver, we have a ton of legal clients. I can sign legal clients much easier here because I can name-drop those other clients. When we move into a new market, I don’t have that big group of logos to point to.

The biggest lesson I’ve learned is that you need to be prepared to make an investment when you go into a new market. You need to be prepared that you’re not going to sign new clients before you hire staff and before you get marketing spend going in that area. You really have to be prepared to take a loss before you start to see the rewards. If you haven’t budgeted to lose money to expand, then you’re probably not prepared to do it.

Robert Dutt: You touch on the legal vertical, and you’ve built real depth in a number of verticals — in architecture, in construction, in legal, and in very Canadian style, in mining. How deliberate was the choice to specialize, and how does vertical focus change the way that you hire, sell, and ultimately deliver those recurring services?

Jennifer Roy: We started in architecture, engineering, and construction. Nucleus’s founder was an engineer by trade who was really handy with computers and ended up branching and developing Nucleus from that. So AEC is where we started. For a long time, the majority of our clients were in that vertical. Then we started to layer in nonprofits and expanded from there — so now, as you mentioned, mining, legal, nonprofits, and AEC are our biggest verticals. Although if you ask me, “Do you have a client in hospitality?” Yes. “Manufacturing?” Yes. We’re really vertical-agnostic, but we hire sometimes based on skill set for a specific vertical.

If you’re hiring someone for an architecture and engineering firm, someone who knows AutoCAD is probably going to be helpful. Or if you’re hiring in our legal pod — because we do everything through pods, so we have a pod that supports most of our legal clients — knowing PC Law or Easy Law and being able to troubleshoot errors with those line-of-business applications is going to be super helpful.

One of my account executives has a background working in marketing at law firms and is well connected in that space. He is my go-to to sell agreements at law firms because he understands lawyers, he understands their assistants, he understands what’s important. He understands why if you can’t print a document, that’s a crisis at a law firm in a way that it might not be at a marketing agency. So we try to hire looking at where those skills will come in handy for the verticals we mostly support.

Robert Dutt: You’ve said that people-first leadership isn’t just a slogan — not just a poster on the wall — it’s a daily operating philosophy. And I think that makes sense given the operational lens you come from. You’ve also been pretty candid about being a Type A personality who’s had to learn to delegate and trust as you move through the ranks. For MSP owners who hear “culture” and think it sounds soft — what does people-first actually look like operationally at Nucleus, and what changed in the business when you leaned into it?

Jennifer Roy: People-first to me really means that you make decisions that are going to be the most impactful for your team. Because if you take care of your people, they take care of you, and they take care of your clients. So things like investing in training and development, having better-than-average benefits, better-than-average vacation, better-than-average pay — those are the things that keep people, and you protect your culture like nothing else.

I hire by our core values. I fire by our core values. I am so particular about who we let join the team. A warm body is not good enough. I would rather have a vacancy for six months than hire the wrong person, because one toxic person can ruin everything you’ve built.

We’re a remote-first company. The majority of our people work remotely — that makes it a challenge to build camaraderie. You don’t get those water cooler conversations, so you have to be very intentional. We have huddles with each team a couple of times a week, and I make a point of joining those huddles even as CEO, just to say hello and get face time. I have an open door policy — anyone can Teams me, text me, call me with anything they want. We do fireside chats where people can sign up and ask anything, an ask-me-anything format that rotates through our executive team. No questions are off limits.

Quarterly, we do a town hall. I have a slide I call “the good, the bad, and the ugly” and I am super transparent: what went well, what didn’t go well that quarter, and what is the ugly. Even if the ugly is something I’m responsible for and I made a mistake, I hold myself accountable to the whole company and say, “I did you guys wrong. I made this decision, here’s the impact it had, here’s what I learned, and here’s what I’m going to take away from it.”

I’m really proud that employee one and employee two from Nucleus are still here today, over 20 years later. That’s really unheard of in the MSP space. Our average tenure is close to four years — from what I’ve seen, the average at other MSPs I’ve worked from was about two years. So we’re almost double. I think a big piece of that comes down to providing a culture and a place where people feel safe — that psychological safety to challenge, to say “I don’t agree with this” or “this process didn’t roll out smoothly for me and here’s why.” That psychological safety is what builds the culture piece, where people feel invested and feel like they’re part of the bigger picture.

It is not just a slogan on the wall. I read every single comment on our ENPS verbatim — I don’t have HR summarize it for me. I read every comment. I want to know exactly what we need to do as an organization to provide a better home for our people.

Robert Dutt: Nucleus is part of the Lyra Technology Group family now — 75-plus MSPs under that umbrella. A lot of MSP owners are either being approached by PE-backed platforms, watching peers who’ve gone that route, or thinking about it themselves. What does that relationship actually look like from the inside? What do you get from being part of the group that you wouldn’t have on your own — and conversely, what did you have to give up?

Jennifer Roy: Great question. And your count is actually a little lower than what it is — the last I heard was 111 MSPs. Globally, I’m told we are the largest MSP in the world with all 111 MSPs under the Lyra umbrella.

I’ll be super honest: when Evergreen purchased Nucleus, it was before I had started. They purchased in July of 2021, I joined in December of 2021. I will admit I was ignorant and did not know about the acquisition. I had known of Nucleus in the marketplace before and did not know they had been purchased by Evergreen. So it was during my first week of onboarding that I found out about Evergreen and Lyra and went, “Oh — what did I get myself into?” Thinking: private equity, this is going to be a lot of red tape, this is going to be really difficult.

I was reassured: no, it’s decentralized, we operate as we always have. And one of the best examples I give of that decentralization model is how I was hired. I had exited my last MSP and was looking for a new home. Todd Kane — who’s been a mentor of mine and gave me my first role at Fully Managed — put on LinkedIn that he knew an operations leader who was looking for a new home. He lined up a whole bunch of interviews for me. This was just a few days after I was unemployed. I had all these job offers, and then Nucleus came to the table. I said, “Listen, it’s Friday morning and I’ve told everyone I’ll give them an answer by Friday at five o’clock. You have six hours if you want me.”

Martin worked double time, had conversations with me and the rest of the executive team, and got me an offer in six hours. They had not budgeted for a COO. They had not posted for a COO. It was not a role they were actively looking to fill — but Martin knew there was talent there and he wanted to hire it. He didn’t need to go to Evergreen or Lyra and say, “Can I get approval to hire this executive team member?” He was able to just say, “I’ll figure out my budget. It’s my budget. I’m going to hire her.” That to me is the biggest story of decentralization — the fact that you can move that fast and there isn’t a lot of red tape.

In addition to that, we’ve got 111 operating companies, which means my geographical reach is incredible. I have a client with an office in Australia — I can pick up the phone and call one of my partners in Australia and say, “Can you do boots on the ground for me?” No problem. And they’ll likewise send their work in Canada to me. So we’ve got this vast network of trusted people, whereas otherwise you’re googling someone and hoping they’ll represent your company well.

And I’ve got a built-in peer group. We recently implemented Thread and were having some issues with it. We were able to call a sister company in the US and say, “I know you’re highly successful with Thread — can you help us with this?” And they said, “Here’s our code.” Most MSPs are not that transparent — “here’s our secret sauce, you can have it.” So it’s been really incredible from a professional development standpoint, and just having those relationships to leverage.

The team at Lyra genuinely cares about the operating companies. I feel like I’ve got additional support, but not a high level of involvement where they’re stepping on my toes. I’ve just got an arm of support if I need it.

Robert Dutt: And I have to imagine — to your point on the Thread issue — with a hundred-plus organizations of people all sitting in the same seat as you, if you go and say, “Hey, I’m seeing X, anyone else seen this?” — odds are pretty good someone’s going to put their hand up.

Jennifer Roy: A hundred percent. And it goes the other way too — there are sometimes opportunities. I recently had an RFP that needed Linux support, and we’re not a big Linux shop. I went into my peer group and said, “Does anyone have a Linux expert who can help me bid on this? It’s only two servers — I can support everything else.” I had a handful of people say, “Yes, no problem.” It really creates more opportunity for our business than we would have without it.

Robert Dutt: You were just on a panel at the Pax8 sales kickoff talking about AI-driven services. You told CRN that your investments this year are focused on AI-enabled automation and better data integration. Where are you actually deploying AI at Nucleus right now, and how do you think about that as a business opportunity versus a change to the billable-hour model?

Jennifer Roy: There are a lot of AI initiatives happening at Nucleus. We’re looking at our internal processes and how we can automate and create smart AI for our current workflows.

A perfect example: I have a monthly report I send up to Lyra covering how things are going in each department — initiatives, financial results. I used to ask every department to send me a summary, then I’d take all those summaries, combine them into one, and send it. It was really time-consuming, and I’d often kick things back to leaders and say, “I need more data, more context, this isn’t written clearly enough.” So I’d give coaching, wait for a revision, and go back and forth.

Our CTO built a simple smart form so that if a department head didn’t provide enough data in their response, it would say, “You do not have data in this. You need data. Jen will send this back to you.” The coaching was already baked into the form. And then it would consolidate all of their writing to sound like me — he built it by taking my old documents and putting them into AI and saying, “Make it sound like Jen.” It combines all the data, and then I go in and edit and clean it up, versus having to do it all from scratch. It probably saves six hours a month of my time.

For our clients, we’re looking at their workflows and starting really small — but we’re starting. We’re taking our noisiest clients, the ones who generate the most support tickets, and using them as guinea pigs to create AI and automation to reduce our support hours. I’m not necessarily billing them a ton of money for it yet — I’m really focused on what we can learn from their environment so we can make it more marketable and repeatable.

I’m also working on a big initiative to provide a tool called Synthrio to all of our clients as part of an opt-out campaign — so looking at how we can help our clients use AI in a safe, controlled way. We know shadow AI is happening everywhere. So how do we make it so that we can provide it in a controlled environment where our clients aren’t losing their IP? That should be going live in the next couple of weeks.

Robert Dutt: I love that example of automating what you can for those noisier customers. It looks like value add for them as a client, and it’s also value add for you as an MSP — because your effective billing rate goes up.

Jennifer Roy: Totally. And at the same time, I’m getting my technicians and engineers trained on how to create workflows. Without those real-life examples, we’re kind of flying blind.

Robert Dutt: You’re plugged into the North American MSP community pretty deeply at this point — between Lyra’s peer network and various organizational communities. When you compare notes with your American peers, what feels different about running an MSP in Canada? Is the Canadian market catching up, leading, or playing a different game entirely?

Jennifer Roy: Interesting question. I don’t know that there are a lot of differences, honestly. There are differences depending on geographic region — I have a peer in New York City and their hourly rate is basically double mine. Vancouver is an expensive city, but New York is more so. So there are differences in what you can charge per user or per hour. But I don’t actually think there is a ton of difference in how we operate.

There are economic challenges in Canada that are different from the US at different times, but they’re all very similar. I think we all operate very similarly. The biggest piece I would say is you have to be a little more mindful of Canadian data residency. Our clients want their data in Canada, so there are certain partnerships I’ve had to exclude because they weren’t willing to guarantee Canadian data residency. I can’t take on a new partner if they can’t host our data in Canada. Those are some small differences — but really, I always say: we’re delivering customer service. We’re just doing it through technology. I don’t think where you are matters that much.

Robert Dutt: How do you see that data residency and increasingly data sovereignty conversation evolving with your customers?

Jennifer Roy: It’s definitely evolved over the years, and I think it’s become more important — especially around certain verticals that want to ensure their data is protected and kept in Canada. We work with some investment firms and companies with personal identification data that they absolutely do not want released anywhere. So we really need to look at each client specifically: what is the requirement for their vertical, and how do we ensure their data is safe?

We are a SOC 2 Type 2 organization, so we take security and governance measures very seriously and ensure we’re following those to a T. And I won’t sign a deal if a client comes to us with requirements that I don’t know how we’d fulfill. I’ll walk away from the opportunity — the last thing I want to do is fail a client.

Robert Dutt: My last question. You guys hit 25 next year at Nucleus. Where does Nucleus go from here? What does the next chapter look like?

Jennifer Roy: I want to see us double our growth in the next five years — new logos, revenue, team members. Even with the introduction of AI and automation, I don’t want to see our team size shrink. I want to see us be able to work on different and more creative things.

I’d love to see us be fully across Canada, not just in the three provinces we’re currently in. That’s a very lofty goal — that’s my BHAG — but that’s where I’d like to see us in five years. Just growth, growth, growth, and brand awareness. I think Nucleus is a well-known brand, especially across Canada, but I’d love to see it even more so.

Robert Dutt: Well, good luck on attaining all those goals. And thinking back to something you said in answer to the first question — about feeling like things weren’t changing fast enough in the role you were in before you took that first MSP job — I don’t think that’s a complaint you have about the managed services world.

Jennifer Roy: No. And this is why I’m still here 15 years later — I like fast-paced. I always say my peak performance is at the brink of overwhelmed. Just before I’m overwhelmed, that is the time when I am at my best. The MSP industry keeps me on my toes. I actually can’t imagine leaving this space and going anywhere else. I love it.

Robert Dutt: Brilliant. Thanks for taking the time and sharing some of your insights.

Jennifer Roy: Thank you so much for having me. I appreciate your time.

[MUSIC]

Robert Dutt: There you have it — Jennifer Roy from Nucleus Networks.

I’d like to thank Jennifer for her time, and honestly, for her candor. This was not a corporate interview. She was remarkably open about what it feels like to take a job you’re not qualified for on paper, about the pressures of being one of the very few women CEOs in the MSP space, and about what people-first leadership actually costs you day to day when you’re reading every single employee comment and holding yourself publicly accountable when you get it wrong.

A few things that stuck with me. First, her point that customer service is what MSPs actually deliver — the technology is just the vehicle. Simple reframe, but I think a lot of MSP owners would run their businesses a little differently if they really internalized it. Second, the Lyra and Evergreen story. If you’ve been wondering what PE involvement actually looks like from the inside of a Canadian MSP, this is probably the most specific and honest account I’ve heard. Hiring someone in six hours through a sister company, getting proprietary code handed over, having boots on the ground in Australia through the network — those are real, tangible examples of what a platform can do for you. And third, her approach to AI. No hype, no panic — just practical applications like automated reporting and shadow AI mitigation that are already saving her team time and creating new conversations with clients.

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Until next time, I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, and I’ll see you in the channel.