Grow your MSP faster than your clients can outgrow you.

How I work

What does an MSP business coach do?

An MSP business coach works on the business with you: the numbers, the priorities, the people and the decisions you've been putting off. Then they hold you to what you said you'd do. Here's how I run it.

1. One call to start. It's free, and there's no pitch deck. We figure out whether we're a fit.
2. We start with your numbers. How you make money, where you stand financially and what you want the business to do next. Out of that come the first 90 days' priorities and the handful of numbers worth watching.
3. Then a steady rhythm. You, your leadership team and me. Every session looks at what got done since last time, takes on the decision that matters most right now and ends with what you'll do before we meet again.
4. Structure where it helps. Sometimes the leadership team also needs a shared way to set priorities, own the numbers and run meetings that end in decisions. I bring tools from EOS, Pinnacle and Scaling Up, fit to how you run, and we skip what you don't need.

You and your team lead and execute. The reporting, the budget and the day-to-day management stay yours. This is a coaching relationship, so if you need an outsourced CFO or COO, that's a different hire.

Book a call

Track record

What have I done in this industry?

I ran an MSP from $2M to $20M in under four years as its operator, a true 10×. It runs near $50M today on the same structure I built. I was on the hook for every number.

Since then I've guided five clients through their exits, one of them a 21× EBITDA exit. Another client did about $8M the year before I started, about $16M the next year and almost $30M the year after, without a single acquisition. Those wins were theirs. My job was keeping them pointed at the number.

I got plenty wrong along the way. At the MSP I ran, we hired the wrong salesperson and had to learn to sell ourselves, so I know that mistake from the inside.

My LinkedIn profile has 35 recommendations from MSP and IT leaders, and the full set of numbers is on my results page.

The bottleneck

What limits your MSP's growth?

Talent and operational maturity. Most owners are convinced they have a sales problem. What they actually have is a delivery problem. They can't take on more clients without the wheels coming off, so on some level they're relieved when the pipeline is slow.

Here's the test. If ten new clients signed next month, would that be the best month of your year or the worst? If your gut says worst, your growth ceiling is inside your operation. The work to raise that ceiling is the right people, clear ownership and systems that don't depend on you remembering everything.

That's the whole job of coaching here: make your business able to carry the growth you say you want, so you stop quietly hoping the phone doesn't ring.

Pricing & profitability

Price with conviction, then stop discounting.

You can't reinvest in people and systems out of money you gave away at the negotiating table. Pricing is the cheapest growth lever you have, and most MSPs underuse it because they don't believe their own number.

Almost every dollar of a discount comes straight out of profit. Knock 10% off a deal at a 40% margin and you've cut the profit on that account by 25%. That's the money that funds raises, hires and the systems that let you grow. The discount you gave to win the deal is usually a pay cut you handed your own team.

Read the full guide: Managed Services Pricing →

Build your price per user: the MSP pricing calculator →

Sales & the sales team

Build a sales engine that doesn't run on you.

Most MSPs grow on the owner's relationships until the owner runs out of hours. Getting past that takes a real sales process and someone other than you who can run it.

That is what the book is about. Start with the full guide below, then the pieces underneath it.

The working tools are free too: the sales funnel calculator, the business plan calculator and the rest of The Workbench.

Read the full guide: How to Sell Managed Services →

Advisory revenue

Turn support into advisory revenue.

The fastest-growing MSPs I've worked with sell outcomes. The lever that gets them there is the vCIO seat: becoming the strategic advisor your client plans their business around, the person they call before something breaks.

It changes the whole relationship. You move from defending your invoice to sitting in the room where the budget gets set. It raises your margins, it makes you harder to replace and it turns a flat support contract into a growing one. This is the lever I push hardest with clients, because it compounds.

Read the guide: What Is a vCIO →

AI for MSPs

Put AI to work inside your MSP.

Start with internal work: ticket triage, documentation cleanup and preparing a client handoff. Keep a person responsible for what reaches the client, and measure where the saved hours go.

AI speeds up the process you already have. If that process is a mess, fix it before you automate it. Your people still need to learn how to have the client conversation.

Read the full guide: AI for MSPs →

Growing past $5M

How do you grow your MSP past $5M?

Build the team's capacity to deliver while you fund the next stage of sales. Put these numbers in front of your leadership team so you can decide what needs work first. These are my planning targets; your costs and capacity decide what you can fund.

Revenue growth: 16% to 20% a year, averaged over several years. That's the bar I set. Track it alongside retention so new sales don't hide customers leaving. Read how growth rate affects MSP valuation.

Net revenue retention: 105% to 110% or better. Compare what last year's customers pay you this year with what they paid last year. Leave new customers out. The NRR calculation shows you whether the existing book of business is growing.

Gross margin: about 50% on the agreement. I price to that target with the delivery labor included. That margin has to fund overhead and reinvestment. Start with the cost-to-price calculation.

Sales and marketing: roughly 9 to 11% of revenue for a 20 to 25% growth plan. That's the faster-growth case in my operating model. Set the budget against the pace you're actually pursuing, using the sales and marketing budget by growth target.

Operational maturity

Mature the operation so growth doesn't break it.

Growth that outruns your systems feels like drowning in a nicer office. Before you pour more clients into the top, the machine underneath has to be able to carry them.

That's onboarding that runs the same way every time, documentation your team actually trusts, a vendor stack you chose on purpose, and the discipline to stop saying yes to work that doesn't fit. It's unglamorous work, and it's what separates an MSP that scales from one that just gets busier.

Start with the model and the margins: the MSP business plan →

The owner

Grow yourself out of the way.

At some point the business stops being limited by the market and starts being limited by you. Every decision routing through your head is a ceiling, and you built it without meaning to.

The work is to make yourself the least busy person in your own company on purpose: a real leadership team, decisions owned at the right level and your time spent on the few things only you can do. That's what finally lets the business grow past your own capacity.

One client was a financially mature firm with no operating structure at the top: an owner, a spouse and a partner, and no org chart. We built an org chart that fit how they ran and put the leadership team on a quarterly rhythm with the KPIs and the financials in front of them. They sold at 21× EBITDA.

Straight answers

Questions I get from MSP owners.

Should I hire an MSP coach or join a peer group?

They do different jobs, so start with the one you need. A peer group gives you perspective: a room of owners who've hit the same walls, usually once a month. A coach learns your numbers, holds you to what you decided, and is there when a decision can't wait for next month's meeting. If you mostly want to hear how other owners solved it, join a group. If you already know what needs doing and it isn't getting done, hire a coach. Some owners do both, and it works when each one has its own job.

Who do you coach?

Owners of MSP, IT and cybersecurity companies, usually 25 employees and up, who want to grow faster than their peers without giving up margin or culture to get there. Headcount matters less than two things: you have a team to lead, and you'll do the work between sessions. If you want a cheerleader, I'm the wrong guy.

What limits an MSP from growing?

Usually talent and operational maturity. If you can't take on more clients without the wheels coming off, growth feels dangerous, and somewhere in the back of your head you're relieved when the pipeline is slow. Fix how the work gets done and who owns it, and the growth stops being scary.

How fast can an MSP realistically grow?

My bar is 16% to 20% a year, averaged over several years. Service Leadership's 2026 profitability report puts the industry average at about 11% a year for 2021 to 2025, and the top 25% of MSPs by profitability grew 21.4% a year. I ran an MSP from $2M to $20M in under four years as its operator, and what set the pace every time was whether the team and the systems were ready for the next step up.

Do I have to niche down to grow my MSP?

Not always. The fastest-growing MSPs I've worked with know exactly who they serve best, build a repeatable offer around it and are disciplined about who they say yes to. Focus beats breadth almost every time.

What should I fix first to grow profitably?

Your pricing and your margins. Service Leadership's 2026 profitability report puts infrastructure managed services gross margin at about 46% for the median MSP and about 53% for the top 25% of MSPs by profitability, averaged over 2021 to 2025. I target about 50% on the agreement. Most MSPs leave real money on the table by discounting and by not knowing their true cost to deliver. You can't reinvest in people and systems out of revenue you gave away, which makes pricing the cheapest growth lever you have.