Built to Last: Twenty Years of Doing the Work

A conversation with Koert, cofounder of Kosh Solutions

2025 MARKED TWENTY years since Kosh opened its doors.

In that time, the company has grown into one of the most established managed service providers in New Mexico. It’s consistently ranked among the top MSPs in the state, regularly appears on fastest-growing company lists, and has been recognized as a place people want to work. Those recognitions matter—not as trophies, but as signals. Signals that the work has held up.

This reflection exists because twenty years is long enough to look back without guessing. Long enough to separate what worked briefly from what lasted. Long enough to speak with some authority about what actually matters when you’re trying to build something durable.

Most businesses talk about growth—how fast they moved, how big they got, what came next. They spend far less time talking about how long things took.

When asked a very open question about what he thinks about Kosh Solutions being twenty years old, Koert doesn’t start with growth or employee count numbers. He starts with time. He laments on how slow some things were. How stubborn others turned out to be. How often the version of the company in his head ran ahead of the one he was actually building.

Early on, there was an assumption that effort would stack neatly. Do good work. Take care of customers. Keep moving. The business would follow along behind, eventually catching up.

“I thought we’d be a lot bigger, a lot faster,” he says—not as a complaint, just as a fact.

The initial vision of Kosh was built around helping. Someone had a problem, you fixed it. Technology broke, you showed up. That core idea hasn’t changed over the two decades in business. The instinct to be useful is still there. What has changed is scale. More customers. More systems. More people depending on the work being done correctly every day.

Back in the beginning, being busy felt like being successful. The company worked. Customers were happy. That was enough.

However, over time, the business kept shifting. Not because the original idea was wrong, but because each stage exposed new limits. What worked with a small team didn’t stretch very far. What felt manageable at one size became fragile at the next. Every few years, it became clear that the company needed to be run differently, even if the core reason for existing stayed the same.

“There were times it felt like we were running a completely different business,” Koert says. “Same mission. Different problems.”

What surprised him wasn’t that it was hard. It was that it never really stopped being hard. Building something reliable took longer than building something functional. Clarity lagged behind growth. Some of the most important decisions seemed trivial at the time. Staffing choices. Customer boundaries. Whether to keep patching something that worked well enough or stop and rebuild it properly.

Those decisions didn’t feel pivotal at the time. They just kept things from breaking.

Twenty years later, the shape of the business is different, but the throughline is still easy to trace. Kosh still shows up when customers are in need. Kosh still explains complicated technology in plain terms. The Kosh team still takes responsibility when systems matter and people need help. What’s changed is reach—how many people rely on that work, and how much depends on it being done well.

Time didn’t replace the original idea. It tested it. It kept what held up and let the rest fall away.

When Any Revenue Feels Like Good Revenue

IN THE EARLY years, work is work.

If someone calls and needs help, you help them. If there’s money attached to it, even better. The line between opportunity and distraction isn’t very clear when you’re still proving you should exist.

Kosh said yes to a lot of things early on. Break-fix work. One-off projects. Jobs that didn’t quite fit but paid and kept things moving. At the time, it didn’t feel careless. It felt responsible to take on these jobs. It seemed like it showed competence to say "yes, we can handle that!"

“When you’re starting out, you don’t really get to be picky,” Koert says. “You take what comes in.”

That instinct makes sense. You’re building trust. You’re trying to stay busy. You don’t know when the next call is coming, so you pick up every penny even if you are missing the dollars. For a while, that approach works. Customers get helped. The business grows enough and the days stay full.

The problem is that not all revenue behaves the same way over time.

Some work builds on itself. It gets easier and more repeatable. Other work just keeps you busy. It pulls attention in too many directions. It creates edge cases. It trains customers to expect things you can’t—or shouldn’t—keep doing.

Early on, those differences are hard to see. Everything looks like progress from the inside.

“There were definitely jobs we took that, looking back, we probably shouldn’t have,” Koert says. “But at the time, it felt like survival...or thriving.”

The cost of saying "yes" too readily didn’t show up right away. But some of these decisions to say "yes" began to rear their ugly heads as stress, complexity, and stretched our team thin. By being good at too many things at once, we became weaker. Worst yet, some of this work brought revenue but left no margin, financial or emotional.

It wasn't just experiences that changed the Kosh mindset, but it was the accumulation of these experiences over years.

Patterns began to repeat. Certain types of work always caused friction. Certain customers always required more explanation, more exceptions, more effort than they returned. None of it was dramatic enough to force an immediate decision, which made it easier to justify doing it one more time.

Eventually, Koert realized that learning how to say "no" wasn’t about confidence. It was about clarity of mission and vision.

“We had to figure out what actually made us better,” he says. “Not just what kept us busy.”

That shift didn’t happen all at once. It came job by job, decision by decision. Turning down work felt uncomfortable at first—like leaving money on the table. Over time, it became clear that some revenue was costing the business more than it gave back.

Saying yes had kept Kosh alive. Learning when to stop saying yes is what allowed it to last.

Structure Isn’t the Enemy of Passion

FOR A LONG time, structure felt optional.

In the early years, speed may have been more of a driver than consistency. Fix the issue. Get the customer back up. Move on. If something worked once, it would probably work again. If it didn’t, someone would figure it out. That approach carried Kosh for a decade.

As the company grew, the strain of relaxed operations didn’t show up as a single crisis but rather as the same questions asked again and again, the same problems solved in slightly different ways depending on who was involved, basically constantly double or triple working. Fixes and decisions that should have been straightforward were taking longer than expected due to being operationally immature. We had to learn how to truly document and hold staff accountable.

“There was a point where we realized we were relying too much on tribal knowledge,” Koert says. “If the right person wasn’t there, things got harder than they needed to be.”

Improvisation worked when the team was small. Everyone knew everything. Everyone filled in. But that model doesn’t scale well. It assumes unlimited attention and perfect memory, and eventually it starts to wear down the people holding it together.

The turning point wasn’t one moment. It was the constant effort required to keep things up and running that mounted on Kosh's staff's shoulders.

Koert began to see structure as a way to lift some of the burden. Clear processes meant fewer decisions had to be reinvented. Expectations were easier to set. Problems were easier to trace back to their source instead of patched over again.

“Once we started putting real systems in place,” he says, “things got calmer. And that familiar growth engine started up again.”

That gradual calming didn't necessarily lead to the work became easier, but it opened the door to be able to focus on other areas of the business, new areas. People spent less time compensating for gaps and more time doing the parts of their jobs they were good at. Customers noticed too. Issues were handled the same way every time. Communication improved. Reliability stopped depending on individual heroics.

Structure didn’t change the heart of the work. It made it possible to sustain.

The Myth of Doing Everything Well

FOR A WHILE, being versatile felt like a strength.

If a customer needed something, Kosh tried to help—not just with core IT work, but with whatever was adjacent to it. Cabling. Websites. One-off projects. Things that weren’t central, but close enough to justify saying yes. It came from a good place. Customers trusted the team, and the instinct was to meet that trust with capability.

“We wanted to be useful,” Koert says. “And early on, being useful meant doing a lot of different things.”

The problem wasn’t competence. It was focus.

As the business grew, the cost of that flexibility became clearer. Each new type of work introduced its own standards, timelines, and expectations. None of it was impossible to manage on its own. Together, it created drag. The team spent more time context-switching than improving. Excellence became harder to define, let alone repeat.

Koert began to notice a pattern. The work that mattered most—the work customers depended on when systems failed or security was at risk—wasn’t always getting the attention it deserved. Not because anyone was careless, but because attention was spread too thin.

“At some point, we had to be honest about what we were actually good at,” he says. “And what we were just tolerating.”

That honesty wasn’t easy. Turning down work felt counterintuitive, especially when demand was there. But trying to be good at everything was undermining the very trust Kosh had built. Customers didn’t need a vendor who could do a little of everything. They needed a partner who was consistently excellent at the things that mattered most.

Letting go of certain services had to be reframed as commitment rather than giving up.

As Kosh narrowed its focus, the work sharpened. Systems improved faster. Training became more meaningful. The team could go deeper instead of wider. Problems were solved with more confidence because they were familiar, not novel.

Customers felt the difference. Conversations got clearer. Expectations aligned more easily. The relationship shifted from transactional help to long-term partnership.

Looking back, Koert doesn’t frame this period as a strategic overhaul. It was more practical than that. The business had reached a size where trying to cover every base no longer made sense. Something had to give.

What remained was a clearer definition of value—and a better understanding of where Kosh belonged in its customers’ worlds.

Longevity Is the Achievement

MORE CUSTOMERS. MORE revenue. More growth. Those markers were easy to understand and easy to explain. They also carried an assumption that the business would keep accelerating, that each year would naturally outpace the last.

Kosh did grow but not in the way early projections suggested. Some years were strong. Others were about consolidation, cleanup, or simply holding things together while the environment shifted. Progress didn’t always look like forward motion. Sometimes it looked like stability.

“There was a stretch where I thought we’d be much further along by now,” Koert says. “But staying in it turned out to be the real work.”

That realization came with perspective.

Reaching twenty years meant seeing how many businesses didn’t make it that far. Companies that started strong but couldn’t adapt. Teams that grew quickly and collapsed under their own weight. Organizations that chased opportunity without building anything that could last.

Every year that passed it became a signal that Kosh was executing on a durable model.

The market mattered here too. New Mexico doesn’t necessarily reward excess. It doesn’t move very quickly. Kosh found relationships compound. Those conditions forced a kind of discipline that might have been optional elsewhere. New Mexico isn't a big enough market where you have reputation to burn.

Koert knew that endurance required attention, adjustment, and a willingness to revisit assumptions that no longer fit. The business didn’t get here by avoiding difficulty. It got here by looking at tough times straight on.

Looking back, the scale of Kosh matters less than its continuity. Twenty years of customers returning. Of staff building careers (Kosh's first hire is still with them!). Of systems improving instead of restarting every few years. The company didn’t just survive change. It learned how to absorb it.

Longevity, in the end, wasn’t about outlasting competitors. It was about building something that could be relied on year after year.

What Stayed the Same

AFTER TWENTY YEARS, it’s tempting to focus on what changed—the size of the company, the complexity of the work, the stakes. Those differences are real, but they’re not the whole story.

Some things at Kosh never moved much at all. There's still an office in Las Cruces, there just happens to be another one in Albuquerque, Farmington, Durango, and Orange County. The bulk of the staff are still in New Mexico but are spreading out into Colorado, California, New York, and Toronto.

From the beginning, the work was about showing up when people needed help.

The job was to step in, explain what was happening, and fix it in a way that let people get back to their day. That instinct—to be present, to take responsibility, to make the complicated understandable—has stayed intact.

“We’ve always tried to treat people like people,” Koert says. “Even though we work in tech all day, that’s not really who we’re working for.”

That mindset shaped more than customer interactions. It influenced how the team was built and how decisions were made. Growth never came at the expense of approachability. Expertise never became an excuse to stop listening. Even as systems became more advanced and security demands more serious, the emphasis stayed on clarity, trust, and customer service.

In hiring decisions, Kosh would seek out not only those that have technical backgrounds but looked for people who had that unique mix of customer service experience (bartender or waiter), coachable attitudes, and technical expertise.

Kosh has cultivated industry leading customer tenure. Customers become partners as the relationship deepens, not because Kosh promised everything, but because it followed through on what it committed to. Over time, reliability became less about individual effort and more about habit—how the company operated when no one was watching.

Internally, that same consistency mattered. People were hired with the expectation that they would care—not just about solving problems, but about how those solutions landed with the customer. The work was technical, but success wasn’t measured in technical terms. It was measured in whether someone felt supported when something went wrong.

Koert doesn’t describe this as culture-building. It was more instinctive than that—a way of operating that felt obvious early on and only later revealed how rare it was. As the business matured, protecting that approach became intentional. Processes were designed to support it. Leadership decisions were made with customer service at the fore.

Twenty years in, Kosh doesn’t exist for the sake of growth alone. It exists because businesses and staff rely on it.

What Twenty Years Really Means

INTERESTINGLY, KOERT EXPRESSED that twenty years in business doesn’t necessarily feel like a victory lap. It feels like a responsibility. The longer Kosh has been around, the more people depend on it—customers who trust their operations and data, employees who’ve built careers here, partners who assume consistency because it’s been earned over time. That kind of trust changes how you think about the future.

The early years were about proving the business could work. The middle years were about learning how to keep it from breaking. Now the work is stewardship—making decisions that hold up not just this year, but several years down the line, and resisting the temptation to trade stability for momentum.

Koert is careful not to romanticize the journey. There were easier paths. Faster ones. Moments when it would have made sense to pivot, sell, or start fresh somewhere else. Staying wasn’t always the obvious choice, but it has paid off.

New Mexico played a part in that, as did the customers who stuck around long enough to shape the company alongside it.

Two decades later, the point isn’t that Kosh made it. Plenty of companies get to this milestone and Koert wasn't particularly impressed with himself for being part of this cohort. In some ways he expected to get to this point because he believed in the core of the mission.

The things Koert valued at the outset are what the customers also valued—clarity, accountability, a human voice on the other end of the line.

This reflection isn’t meant to be advice or a blueprint. It’s simply an account of what happens when a company stays long enough to learn the difference between motion and progress.

The work continues. And in many ways, that’s the real milestone.