Culture in your MSP: why saying goodbye is your hardest HR task
AuthorMSP Late NightPublished on:Culture in your MSP is not something you see in your onboarding deck. You see it the moment someone leaves, when a buyer sits down at the table, or when a new woman starts on the service desk and the male jokes suddenly fall silent. Those are the moments that tell you something real. The rest is scenery.
Every MSP owner says people are the most important thing. And then we steer on tickets, hours, margin and the MRR chart in the management review. Ask any MSP director what the last employee satisfaction score was and nine times out of ten you get a look as though you had asked for the router password. Something was filled in, somewhere, once. But nobody can say from memory what came out of it.
Then someone leaves. On the spot, with a settlement agreement, or simply with a message on a Friday afternoon. The team is awkward for a week, the service desk is missing a link, and nobody really said goodbye. Two months later a private equity firm knocks and wants to speak once with “two employees”. You know immediately which two you will put forward. And then you realise: the culture you have been talking about in your pitch for years was never written down anywhere. There is no playbook. There are only habits.
What people really choose in your MSP: learning, earning, yearning
Atmosphere is not the reason people come to you or stay. What does work is a simple triptych: learning, earning, yearning. The chance to develop, the chance to earn, and the chance to belong somewhere. In that order? Not necessarily. But if one of the three is missing, you are a stopping place.
At an MSP under 30 FTE, talent comes in for the founder. For the mission, for the shorter lines, for the feeling of not being a number. At an MSP above 50 FTE that shifts to conditions and the benefits package. Both are right. The mistake is thinking that what worked at ten people keeps working at sixty. The old guard wants it to stay as it was: friends on the floor. The younger guard wants to grow, learn, earn more. If you lead those two groups with the same toolkit you lose on both sides.
The four moments when culture in your MSP becomes visible
Culture is a word that says little until something breaks on it. In practice there are four moments when you see what is really there: with a newcomer, with a joke that lands badly, with a departure, and with an acquisition. At each of those four moments you can see very quickly whether you have built a culture or only an atmosphere.
“People are looking for learning, earning and yearning in their work”
The line between a joke and a limit
MSP teams are predominantly male. The jokes are robust. As soon as the owner leaves the building, the tone changes. We all know that. The point is not that you have to stamp it out until everyone walks on eggshells. The point is that psychological safety is not an HR problem but a leadership problem. And therefore everyone problem. If an office manager joins the service desk and you have no agreed framework at all about what is and is not acceptable, you should not be surprised when she is gone again within six months. Bringing female talent into an MSP is one thing. Keeping it on board is a completely different craft. Almost 40% of women in the broader IT and tech sector leave the sector at some point. That is not an atmosphere problem. That is a systems problem.
“You do it not because it is your job, but because it is your mission”
Saying goodbye: the most underrated HR moment in your MSP
When someone leaves, most owners think about the leaver. Wrong frame. The farewell is at least as important for those who stay. The team suddenly missing a colleague at coffee or at lunch needs room to process it. Skip that with a silent exit and a settlement agreement and you deny the rest of your organisation the ritual it needs to move on. Even with an employee you have had trouble with, the rule holds: keep your honour intact. Someone who walks out with flowers and a good story becomes an ambassador. Someone who disappears behind a closed door becomes a story in the competitor bar. The return on a good farewell is higher than the return on most onboardings.
What works practically? Three things. One: say in the team meeting why someone is leaving, in language that is true. Not in HR jargon, but in the words you would also use with your business partner. “He went for a bigger role we could not offer him right now.” Or: “It no longer fitted, and we concluded that together.” Two: give room for the ritual. A drink, a lunch, a card going round. Small gesture, big signal. Three: call that person again six months later. Not to poach, just to ask how things are going. Alumni culture has been standard in consulting for twenty years and in MSP land it is still nearly untouched ground. While that is exactly where your next senior engineer sits, or the referral that brings in your next deal.
The acquisition: where culture is settled
And then the M&A side. Anyone selling their MSP knows the first thing a buyer wants to see is the figures, and the last thing they want to see is the people. That is exactly the wrong order. Culture mismatch is the number one reason acquisitions fail, and at the same time the number one reason they succeed. In maybe one in ten processes staff are involved early. In the other nine out of ten someone stands on a crate on a Tuesday to announce the place has been sold. Anyone who really wants to protect their team communicates up front that a strategic partner is being sought. Not a word about shares, but words about the next step. Of the three to six months between the first conversation and the signature, you can use two to bring your team along. If you do not, you are buying trouble for the next owner and throwing away in one stroke what you built in ten years.
What is often forgotten: buyers smell a well-run cultural transition from miles away. If you have two key employees who can explain in their own words, unprompted, why this deal makes sense, your negotiating position doubles. Not because it is in the information memorandum, but because the buyer sees that the outfit will not empty out on day 91. The reverse holds too: one frustrated engineer who accidentally airs their doubts during due diligence can talk the multiple down. So culture is not only an HR subject. It is a valuation question. And it is decided in the months before the LOI, not after.
Culture in your MSP is not a values poster next to the coffee machine. It is the sum of how you bring new people in, how you set limits on jokes without becoming a pulpit, how you organise farewells, and how you go through an acquisition. Anyone sharp at those four moments keeps their best people longer, sells their company better, and in ten years still has an outfit where people like to work. The rest have an atmosphere that evaporates the moment the founder leaves the room.