Reactive MSP strategy: the three choices that keep sliding
AuthorMSP Late NightPublished on:MSP strategy rarely sits at the top of the list. Open ten random MSP websites one after the other and you will read the same pitch nine times, with a different stock photo here and there. Same value props, same icons, same promises about taking the worry away and being your IT partner. That is not a marketing problem. It is a strategy problem dressed up as a marketing problem. And as long as it gets treated as marketing, it will not go away.
Look honestly at the past quarter and you see a pattern almost everyone recognises but few MSPs say out loud: the work is reactive. Microsoft changes something in the Partner Rules of Engagement and you adjust. A distributor introduces a new cloud portal and you follow. A vendor shifts margins and you recalculate what that does to your end client price. Everyone claims to be out in front. In practice everyone walks along neatly behind.
The problem does not sit in the technology. Most owners are good at that, often because they came from it. The problem sits above it. Which clients do you want to serve in three years, in which vertical, with what kind of people around your table. Those questions get left because the daily rush always wins. And as long as they are left, you end up with the company you did not want: ten people going round in circles, margins slowly eroding, and a website you cannot tell apart from the one next door.
The striking part: almost every owner knows this. In an honest conversation at the bar it comes out within five minutes. But once you are back at the office on Monday, the inbox closes in again and the ticket that is stuck right now beats the question of where you stand in three years. So strategy stays something you pick up at an offsite in January and put away again in February.
What a real strategy delivers
What works in practice is not a five step plan and not a new vendor. It is reversing the order. First decide what you are going to do and for whom, then look at your tool stack, then at your sales, then at your website. Most MSPs do it the other way round: they invest in a new PSA, a new RMM, a new security package, and hope positioning follows on its own. It does not. A tool solves an operational problem. A tool never solves a problem of choice.
The three choices that genuinely matter are small in number and large in impact. One: pick vertical or horizontal, and accept what that choice costs. Two: pick platform or best of breed, and accept that an eighty per cent platform with one good exception is often more realistic than a religious preference for either. Three: decide what kind of people you want around the table in two years, because engineers alone will not take you where you want to go. These three choices hang together. You cannot make them in isolation, and you cannot push them to next quarter without the pain surfacing somewhere else.
The three choices in detail
Vertical versus horizontal is no longer a matter of taste. A smaller or mid sized MSP that picks horizontal now will be facing PE backed parties within two years, buying the same standard service cheaper from the same vendors. That is a fight you lose on price. The way out is not necessarily a classic vertical such as healthcare or construction. It can also be a region, a field of expertise, or a specific type of process. The only requirement: you have to be outstanding at it. What we see is that many MSPs quietly serve two or three half verticals and are not the first choice in any of them.
“You have to be outstanding at what you do.”
The pain of that choice sits in what you have to let go. If you choose law firms in the south of the country, you are implicitly saying no to the construction companies you happened to pick up and that now make up fifteen per cent of your revenue. Nobody wants to say that out loud. But until you do, you keep making marketing for everyone, you keep training engineers in ten stacks at once, and your account manager keeps building every quote from scratch because there is no repeating pattern in it. Focus is not a luxury. Focus is a question of operational return.
Platform or best of breed
Platform versus best of breed is the second choice that gets postponed until it can no longer be postponed. Ten or fifteen years ago you swapped your PSA and that was it. Now endpoint management, security, ticketing, documentation and invoicing are woven into one or two platforms. Moving from one to the other costs six to twelve months, a lot of money and a lot of internal resistance. In a market where margins are eroding, that is a heavy investment. But delay makes it more expensive next year, not cheaper. With the MCP connections coming for AI integration, the choice of which platform you put at the centre suddenly decides a great deal about what you can sell tomorrow.
What often helps in practice is dropping the religious debate. An eighty per cent platform with one deliberate best of breed tool alongside it for a critical service is nearly always more realistic than either extreme. The MSP that crams everything into one suite loses clients exactly where that suite is weak. The one that buys everything separately drowns in connectors and licences. The question is not which philosophy wins. The question is which combination serves your vertical best, and that answer changes the moment you have made choice number one.
“Everyone claims to lead, then quietly follows along.”
From technician to business enabler
The third choice is the hardest. The average MSP was built by and for technicians. But the value you bring to your client is shifting from the technology to the conversation about it: understanding processes, training people, guiding users through adoption. That is a different kind of person. Not an engineer. Someone who can listen, translate and coach. That profile is scarce and getting scarcer. You do not attract it with a job advert about technology. You attract it with a story about where your company stands in three years. Without that point on the horizon you cannot hire a business enabler, because you have nothing to offer them that they came for.
It works the other way round too: as long as your team consists purely of technical people, you cannot deliver on a vertical strategy. A lawyer hiring you for IT wants someone who understands their workflow, not someone who can explain their Exchange settings. Your staffing is therefore not an HR question, it is the outcome of your strategic choices. Skip this and you stay stuck advertising for an experienced systems administrator, then wonder in two years why client conversations still revolve around tickets instead of growth.
The MSPs that will pull away from the rest over the coming year are not the ones with the best tool stack or the sharpest purchasing terms. They are the ones that have made these three choices and stand behind them publicly, on their website, in their job adverts, in their client conversations. The rest keep walking along with whatever Microsoft, the distributor and the market prescribe. That is a perfectly workable business model for now, and a fragile one for three years out. The question is not whether you will make the choices. The question is whether you make them before the market makes them for you.