MSP relevance: technique is no longer the difference
AuthorMSP Late NightPublished on:Staying relevant as an MSP is no longer a strategic question this quarter, it is an immediate problem. Across six tables the same undertone kept coming back: everyone feels the ground shifting, almost nobody knows where to put their feet. Meanwhile part of the market sits waiting for Microsoft, Kaseya or another vendor to turn up with a box that can be made commercial. That box is not coming, or it comes too late, or it comes for everyone at once, which amounts to the same thing.
The reflex is recognisable. Over the past ten or fifteen years you built a business in which technique was the differentiator. Better monitoring, faster response, a tighter stack. Clients came in on trust, and that trust was confirmed by technical competence. That is how it worked.
That model is now eroding in months, not years. At one of the Q2 tables sat a party from outside the MSP industry that could show more concrete AI work than the established players around it. That is the sharp edge. The softer edge: when an employee hits a greyed-out button in Google Meet, they no longer ring an MSP. They ask an AI. The helpdesk question you billed for over years is evaporating. And the follow-on problem is that the revenue stream underneath it moves with it, while the cost of your engineers does not.
What actually works to stay relevant as an MSP
What kept returning at the tables this quarter was not a new tool or a cleverer margin trick. It was a shift in where you put your energy. Back to the person, back to trust, and at the same time forward to boardroom conversations you were not having two years ago. The new luxury is human connection, someone said at a commercial table, and that sounded soft until you worked out what it means.
It means your distinctiveness shifts from what you can do to who you are at the client. Vulnerability, authenticity, saying what you do and doing what you say. For people with a technical background that is uncomfortable, because being visible was never the job. But technique itself is no longer going to sort it out for you. So if you are not at the front now, you will not be there at all.
The three shifts Q2 made visible
Put the six episodes side by side and you see three shifts happening at once. Part of the market underestimates at least two of them, and that is not a question of intelligence but of where your attention goes every day. If you are operationally busy with tickets, you miss what is happening in the conversations at board level inside your client.
“Wait for Microsoft and you reach the market too late”
From engineer to business consultant
The first shift is the type of person sitting at the table with the client. Outcome-based billing is coming, and if you are paid on results at your client, you will not manage that with the staffing you have in place now. A business consultant is something fundamentally different from an engineer. That asks for retraining or different people, and probably both. Add NIS2 to that, in force since July and making directors personally liable, and you see why the conversation has to move to C-level. Whoever can talk at management level about liability and governance gets invited to the next contract. Whoever cannot is replaced by someone who can.
“The new luxury is human connection and trust”
In practical terms this means you start making different hiring choices. Not another senior engineer because tickets are rising, but someone with a business background who understands how a management agenda works. Someone who can build a risk register, who calculates a business case in euros rather than in CPUs, and who can explain at a client what a NIS2 fine concretely means for a director personally. That is a different kind of conversation from the one your uptime report has.
Adoption is the missed margin
The second shift sits in adoption, and this is where most MSPs leave money on the table. Without adoption, innovation is an expensive experiment, and that is exactly what is happening at clients now. New tool rolled out, two update emails, a link to a video, done. Six months later there has been staff turnover and nobody uses it any more. Ask yourself how many MSPs you know that have adoption seriously built into their packaging. Probably none. And that while clients are willing to pay for it if you make someone more productive. The MSP that includes adoption as standard will win contracts over the next two years from the MSP that only rolls out. If you cannot do it yourself, line up an adoption partner and sell it under your own roof.
What helps is making adoption measurable in the language of the client. Not the number of users logged in, but time saved per role, the number of processes running through the new tool instead of through email, the number of support tickets avoided. Once a client gets a figure that touches their own KPIs, renewing your contract stops being a price discussion and becomes a confirmation of value. And that is exactly the point where you step out of the commodity squeeze.
Partnerships over consolidation
The third shift is cooperation inside the ecosystem. A wave of consolidation is under way in which large parties buy up smaller MSPs to compete on purchasing advantage and volume. Logical on paper. In practice those large houses stack back-office and headquarter fees on top, so the service does not get better in quality nor sharper commercially. The smaller MSP up to roughly fifty FTE that is seriously good at what it does, where the founder is still on the floor, has something to set against that. On condition that it dares to form partnerships for the things it cannot do itself: adoption, specific security, governance consultancy. Volume is a niche too, someone said at a table. The reverse holds just as well: craftsmanship in a narrow segment is a niche no PE-driven powerhouse can match without losing the human scale.
Everyone gets the MSP they deserve was the line that stuck most this quarter. It holds the other way round as well: every MSP gets the clients that fit what it actually delivers, not what it says it delivers. Whoever spends the next six months waiting for what Microsoft or Kaseya rolls out arrives too late for the conversation that really matters. If you want to have those conversations with MSP peers making the same choices, join one of the next tables or the performance club via mspleighthouse.com.