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There are few documents more important to an MSP than its Master Services Agreement. There are also few documents MSP owners spend less time thinking about. The pattern is pretty common. Someone starts an MSP and needs a contract. They find one online, borrow one from another MSP, download a template from a peer group, or modify an agreement they used somewhere else. Maybe an attorney reviews it. Then the agreement starts getting signed and nobody thinks much about it again.

Meetings may be one of the least examined expenses in an MSP. We scrutinize software licenses. We track technician utilization. We look at agreement gross margin, project overruns, and labor costs. Then we put eight relatively expensive people in a conference room for an hour every week without giving much thought to what that hour actually produces. That meeting isn't costing you one hour. It's costing you eight. If it happens every week, that's more than 400 hours a year. A

Seems like every peer group meeting or MSP industry event I attend, MSP owners are spending a lot of time talking about culture. They organize lunches, plan outings, buy swag, create contests, add games to the office, celebrate birthdays, form culture committees, and hand out awards. None of those things are inherently bad. But they aren't culture. At best, most of them are employee engagement activities. People may enjoy them. They may provide a temporary lift. Some are abso

Delegation is often framed as a productivity tactic, but for a growing MSP, it’s something far more foundational. It’s a leadership discipline. A maturity milestone. A rite of passage for owners who want their business to scale beyond their personal capacity. Every MSP hits a point where the heroics that built the company become the very thing holding it back. What worked at $1M breaks at $5M. What you carried on your shoulders at $3M becomes impossible at $10M. The owners wh

As a Tennessee Volunteer fan, it’s not in my nature to praise Alabama. But former coach Nick Saban built a leadership system so strong that ignoring it would be a mistake. Even if you’re not into sports, the principles below apply directly to high-performing organizations—and especially to MSPs trying to scale. Nick Saban built one of the most dominant programs in college football not by obsessing over championships, but by obsessing over the behaviors that produce championsh

Every MSP loves a new customer. But few MSPs handle losing one with the same maturity. And that’s a problem—because one of the most defining moments in your company’s reputation isn’t how you win a client, but how you let one go. Here’s the truth every MSP leader eventually learns: You should hate losing a customer. But when it happens, your offboarding experience must be exceptional. Better, even, than your onboarding. Most MSPs get this backwards. They treat offboarding lik

If there's one term the MSP industry has worn out—and watered down—it’s vCIO. For years, MSPs have told clients they “deliver strategic leadership” through a virtual CIO role. But in most cases, that “vCIO” is: a former account manager with a new title a salesperson tasked with quarterly business reviews a technician repackaged as a consultant or someone who has never sat in a true executive IT seat And clients can feel it. The industry has taken a title that should signal ex