MSP strategy: why most MSPs have no plan, only a budget
AuthorMSP Late NightPublished on:An MSP strategy on paper looks the same at almost everyone: a business plan in January, a budget in a spreadsheet, and twelve months in which those two documents drift further apart. Somewhere in Q2 the first punch in the face arrives, as Muhammad Ali put it. And from that moment you are no longer working on your plan, but on polishing your quarterly figures for the bank, your private equity backer, or simply for yourself because you want to be able to say at birthday parties that things are going well.
Of the roughly 2,500 to 3,000 MSPs in the Netherlands, the great majority have between 4 and 50 staff. No marketer, often no sales role, and a founder who is still 80% technically driven. In that reality a strategy is not a 30-page document. It is a spreadsheet with a revenue target, a margin, and the hope that the number of clients grows along with the number of hands.
That approach works as long as the network delivers. New clients drift in via the local business club, an old colleague, or a tip from the accountant. But it does not scale. And it makes you vulnerable as well: if one of your five large clients falls away, you have no factory producing replacements. You have an address book. And that address book is nearly empty by now because you have not actively worked on it in ten years.
Why an MSP strategy starts with identity, not with revenue
What works in practice is not another session about targets. Every MSP owner can recite their targets from memory. What is missing is the answer to one simple question: who are you? Not what you do, because at 90% of MSPs that is exactly the same: workplace, Microsoft 365 tenant, security layer, service desk. That is not positioning. That is a product list every competitor within 5 kilometres also has.
Identity is a different dial from image. Image is the campaign, the website, the LinkedIn post. Identity is the foundation underneath: why this company was ever started, what made the founder angry enough back then to go out on their own, which type of client fits that way of working and which type emphatically does not. Without that foundation you keep tinkering on the outside. You build a house on sand, and every marketing campaign becomes a new colour on the front of the same unsteady building.
The real cost of not making a choice
Poor positioning burns sales capacity. Concretely: account managers on the road four days a week, drinking coffee everywhere, and coming home with zero deals. The problem is not that account manager. The problem is that there is no ideal client profile, so every conversation looks equally relevant. If you have not established together which list from the phone book you call and which you do not, they call the whole book. And calling the whole book back costs you a year of salary with no pipeline you can show the bank.
“You are building a house on no foundation”
At large MSP groups you now see something similar, but from the other side of the table. Clients who no longer feel at home after an acquisition. What started as an MSP with short lines and personal attention has, through three acquisitions, become an enterprise with escalation ladders, computer-says-no, and a P1 definition in which the director of a client organisation is no longer a priority because it is “only one person”. The processes are correct. The client walks away. The moment you make your process more important than the reason clients chose you in the first place, you are hollowing out your right to exist.
“Identity leads, nobody can copy you as an identity”
What a real choice costs in practice
A concrete example: an MSP won a large, well-known client, worth 50,000 to 60,000 euros of revenue a month. After a few months it turned out the way that client treated the engineers was not acceptable. Discriminatory behaviour towards colleagues the MSP had specifically trained and brought in under an inclusion policy. The choice: let the engineers go or let the client go. They let the client go. That is 600,000 to 720,000 euros of annual revenue you suddenly have to make up. That hurts. But it is exactly the moment when you find out whether your identity is a plaque on the wall or a real guide.
That choice gets easier the more clearly you have established beforehand what you stand for. Anyone who keeps their values vague has to renegotiate every difficult decision in the boardroom. Anyone who has them sharp has in effect already taken that decision by the time the dilemma arrives. The same goes for the account manager with the fine deal outside the ideal client profile, for the niche choice in a vertical market, and for the question of whether you join a price war with a competitor sitting 15% below you.
Why the network model is finished
The generation of MSP founders who started between 2005 and 2015 has one thing in common: the company was built on personal relationships. The founder knew everyone, everyone knew the founder, and the first fifty clients came in on the basis of trust built up over ten years. That is a fine starter motor, but not an engine for the journey afterwards. As soon as that founder can no longer sit down for every coffee, the intake stops. And because no marketing or sales machine was built in those years, there is nothing standing ready to take over.
What you then see is the founder trying two things at once: running the company and still building the commercial factory that should have been there ten years ago. That rarely works. Those who do manage it have flipped a switch somewhere. Usually that is the switch from “we do everything for everyone” to “we do this very well, for this type of client, and for the rest we refer on”. Only at that moment does marketing get simple, does sales become measurable, and does the company become transferable to someone other than the founder. Without that choice everything keeps resting on one person shoulders, and that is exactly what an acquirer sees as risk, not as value.
The number one request for help from MSPs has been the same for years: strategy, identity, sales and marketing. Not technology, not tooling, not AI. In five years there will no longer be 2,500 MSPs of between 5 and 50 staff in the Netherlands. There will be fewer, perhaps half. Anyone who wants to be among them does not start with a new calling campaign or an extra account manager. They start with the question of who they actually are, and which client fits that. The revenue follows by itself, provided you keep carrying that choice consistently.