I had a coffee recently with an MSP owner who pulled out his phone and showed me his “growth list.” Forty-three items. Webinars, a TikTok plan, a referral scheme, a rebrand, three new service bundles, a partnership he’d been chasing for a year. He was exhausted just reading it to me. And his revenue had barely moved in eighteen months.
I told him I’d happily help him cross off forty of those. Because in my experience, almost every stuck MSP is stuck on the same three things, and the rest is just noise dressed up as activity.
You’re Easy to Overlook
The first problem is that nobody can quickly say what you do or why they’d pick you. Walk into most MSP websites and you’ll find “managed IT solutions for growing businesses.” That sentence could belong to ten thousand others. If a prospect can’t repeat your offer back to a colleague in one breath, you don’t have an offer — you have a category.
This is the part I’d fix first, and it’s the part owners avoid because it forces a decision. Open a blank document and ask Copilot in Word to help you rewrite your core offer five different ways for a specific type of client — say, a 30-seat accounting firm worried about email fraud. Then read each one out loud. The version that sounds like a real person warning a real business is the one you keep. Specific beats clever every single time.
You’re Invisible Because You’re Inconsistent
The second problem isn’t that your marketing is bad. It’s that it shows up once a quarter, when you remember, when things are quiet. Then a big project lands, you go heads-down, and the market forgets you exist. Invisibility isn’t a talent problem. It’s a rhythm problem.
The MSPs who get noticed aren’t louder — they’re just regular. One short, useful thing a week beats a brilliant campaign you run twice a year and abandon. Build the rhythm into the tools you already live in. Draft a month of client-facing tips in a SharePoint document, drop the publishing dates into Planner, and let a scheduled Outlook reminder nudge you every Monday morning. The point isn’t sophistication. It’s that the thing keeps happening whether you feel inspired or not.
Sales Feels Awkward, So You Undercharge
The third one is the quiet killer. Plenty of capable owners walk into a sales conversation, sense the tension when price comes up, and instinctively shave the number to make the discomfort go away. Then they wonder why they’re working flat out and still underpaid.
Awkwardness usually comes from walking in unprepared and hoping to wing it. Before your next prospect call, ask Copilot to pull together what you already know — recent emails with that contact, notes from earlier meetings, the brief from your discovery call — into a one-page summary of what they actually care about. When you walk in knowing their world, you’re not selling. You’re advising. And advisors don’t apologise for their price.
The Real Work Is Subtraction
What struck me about that coffee was how relieved the owner looked when I told him to bin most of the list. We’re trained to believe progress means adding more. With this stuff, it’s almost always the opposite.
Get your offer clear, show up consistently, and stop flinching on price. Do those three, and you can ignore nearly everything else. The forty-three-item list was never the path forward. It was just a very busy way of avoiding the three things that mattered.
CIAOPS 