Last Saturday morning I sat down with a coffee and went through my client list properly. Not the polished version on a spreadsheet — the honest one. The list where you stop and ask yourself which names make your shoulders drop when they appear in your inbox.
Out of every hundred clients, maybe twenty fit that description. They weren’t bad people. But they were the ones who turned a thirty-minute call into ninety. The ones who treated every standard you set as optional. The ones who had a complaint queued up before they’d even tried what you suggested.
And here’s the part most MSP owners don’t want to admit out loud: those clients aren’t just slightly more work. They quietly run the place.
The Maths You’ve Been Avoiding
Sit down and add up the hours. Not the billable ones. The total ones. The Friday afternoon you spent re-explaining MFA for the fifth time. The Sunday email you answered because they wrote at 9pm and you didn’t want them to think you’d ignored them. The team meeting that ran twenty minutes long because someone needed to vent about a client who refuses to follow the playbook.
If you log it honestly for a fortnight, the pattern is uncomfortable. A small handful of clients eat a disproportionate slice of your week, your team’s morale, and your own headspace. The rest of your book — the ones who pay on time, listen to your advice, and treat your team with respect — get whatever scraps of attention are left over.
Copilot Can Show You What You Already Suspect
Here is where Microsoft 365 quietly earns its keep. Ask Copilot in Outlook to summarise the volume and tone of messages you’ve exchanged with a particular client over the last quarter. Open your Teams channels and let Copilot in Teams surface the recurring complaints by topic. Pull up the recap from your last quarterly review with that client and read it back without the emotion of being in the room.
You will see it plainly. The same three issues raised four quarters in a row. The same standards politely ignored. The same tone in every second message. Copilot isn’t telling you anything new. It’s just laying out the evidence you’ve been too busy or too loyal to read properly.
I have started doing this every quarter. It takes about twenty minutes per client, and it removes the wishful thinking. You stop asking “are they really that bad?” and start asking the more useful question: “Why am I still putting up with this?”
The Conversation Itself
When you do decide to end the relationship, do it cleanly. Refund what is fair. Offer to hand over their data in a tidy package via OneDrive. Recommend a provider who is genuinely a better fit for them — not a punishment, just a different match.
I draft the offboarding email in Word with Copilot’s help, sit on it overnight, then read it again in the morning. If it still says what needs saying, I send it. No long justification. No door left ajar. A short, professional close.
What You Get Back
The first time I did this properly, three things shifted within a month. My team felt lighter. Monday mornings stopped starting with dread. And the clients I genuinely respect — the ones who do the work, follow the advice, ask good questions — got noticeably more of me.
That last shift is the one that matters. The people paying for your best work deserve your best attention, and you simply cannot offer it while a small group is quietly running off with the fuel.
CIAOPS 