In this episode of The IT Experts Podcast we explore why transparency in leadership plays such an important role in creating a confident and high performing team inside your MSP. The conversation opens with the truth many owners recognise. Leaders often hold information close because they feel unsure about what to share. When you move from the early survival stage of running your MSP into a growth stage, you realise that the team need more clarity, more context, and a clear view of how the business works. This is where transparency in leadership becomes a genuine accelerator for engagement and performance.
Ian and Stuart explore the common fear that many owners experience when the subject of financial openness comes up. There is a feeling that people might judge you for the revenue or the bank balance or even assume you can offer pay rises every time numbers increase. When transparency in leadership is missing, the owner ends up carrying most of the weight alone. The team remain in the dark and make up their own stories about how the business is performing. When you introduce a simple rhythm of sharing the right information with the team, the atmosphere changes. People understand how the business works, why certain decisions are made and how their daily actions influence the results.
Stuart talks about how many MSPs begin with a lifestyle mindset and then evolve into a growth focused business. As this shift happens, the owner needs greater leverage across the team. The only way to create leverage is to help your people understand what they are contributing to. They do not need a detailed profit and loss. They need clarity. They need to understand the vision, the values, and the purpose of the business. They need to see how their role supports the goals of the company. Transparency in leadership helps them see that connection clearly.
A key point raised in the episode is the importance of education. You cannot walk into a Monday stand up and announce that you are suddenly talking about numbers. You ease the team into it. You tell the story of why the business exists and what it is there to deliver. You explain why profitability matters for job security, growth, bonuses, new equipment, and new opportunities. When you frame your message through a story rather than a spreadsheet, people lean in. Transparency in leadership creates a sense of belonging rather than pressure.
The conversation also highlights the practical side of sharing numbers. You pick three or four simple metrics that matter. These could be customer satisfaction scores, service gross margin, the value of monthly quotes raised by the service desk or age debtors. You then update the team regularly and show them how their work influences these figures. When people see progress, they feel motivated. When numbers slip, they understand where focus is needed. This rhythm of transparency in leadership builds accountability without creating fear.
Ian and Stuart share examples of how service desks often create thousands of pounds worth of quotes without recognising that they are contributing to sales. When you show them this, they sit up straighter because they realise they are part of something larger. That awareness strengthens culture, confidence, and teamwork. It also encourages healthier conversations about how projects deliver margin, how time is used, and where improvements can be made. Everything becomes lighter because the team understand what success looks like.
As the episode closes, the message becomes clear. If you hold all the numbers close, the business slows down. People guess what is important. They guess what success looks like. They guess what they should prioritise. That kind of guesswork never scales. When you embrace transparency in leadership, you gain momentum. You create clarity. You show people how they can help move the business forward. This opens the door for stronger culture, aligned behaviour, and a shared sense of progress.
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Until next time, look after yourself and I’ll catch up with you soon!
IAN: In this episode of The IT Experts Podcast, we're going to walk you through the truth about transparency and why sharing your goals can actually boost the performance of your MSP.
INTRO: Welcome to The IT Experts Podcast, the only podcast to help MSPs scale to 1 million, and if already there, get to five and go faster. At the end of the day, isn't it all about building a business that works for you rather than you for it? I hope you enjoy the show.
IAN: So, morning, good afternoon, good evening. Welcome to The IT Experts Podcast. Stuart's back in the podcast house. Good morning, afternoon, evening, Mr. Warwick.
STUART: Good morning, afternoon and evening, Mr. Luckett.
IAN: That took longer than it needed to, but anyway, let's crack on. Right, today, another financial based podcast about getting a bit more vulnerable on the leadership score, sharing you know, when you open up and you start to share some of your, your goals, your targets, the performance, how the business is going, this can have a dramatic effect on the performance of the business kind and the efficiency of the team and everything like that. And that's what we're going to run through today. So, to start off with, what do we see with regards to MSPs and withholding this information because it's almost like there's this rule that I'm not going to share with you how much money we're making and the profitability and all of this kind of stuff. There's this whole fear around sharing information with the team, because it's like, are they worthy? You don't need to know that much about me. They'll work out how much I take home at the end of the day. Well, probably less than you to be honest with you, but what does the landscape look like with this? And what do we see in the MSPs we come across?
STUART: Yeah, I think if you are scaling and you are seeking to grow, there's a point at which you need to involve the team more, more in the business because when you are in the survive start, you know, section or phase of growing your MSP, it's just all hands to the pump. So it's just day to day, but slowly as you begin to realise that this business is something you want to grow beyond just a lifestyle business. There is a need to, if you are to gain leverage and delegate independently to people, they need to know more about why they're doing it and what's in it for them effectively. And I don't mean the numbers in terms of what's in it for them, but what are they are a part of. And it links back to kind of vision and values, but open book leadership, should I or shouldn't I? And I think that's the question we're talking about today.
IAN: It's question.
STUART: And you mentioned the F word, you know, fear. I think fear of sharing, revealing too much because they're going to judge me for having, you know, hundreds of thousand pounds worth of, you know, revenue.
IAN: Well, the money you've got in the bank.
STUART: Exactly.
IAN: Surely I can get a pay rise.
STUART: Exactly, exactly. What they don't understand is the cost that come behind running a business. And of course many do, but obviously they don't think day to day. So it's really important that you, if you're going to do it, you do it and you don't, you don't have to share everything. Yeah. You don't have to get your P and L out and show every minute point, because also employees are employees for a reason. They don't want to run a business. Some may in the future, but they mostly have chosen to be employees and they love what they do. So sharing becomes important when you want to grow the business and cascade the numbers through. And if you are asking your, well, we talked a couple of episodes ago about sales run rate. And actually by breaking it down and understanding where the sales in your business comes from. You can actually identify that the help desk and the support desk could be quite a large part of your recurring sales team, not that they think of themselves as salespeople. So when you break that down and show them how they're contributing to the growth of the business, the sustainability of the business, by actually just doing their jobs of helping clients, what do we do? We create motivation and engagement. So by sharing turnover, by sharing gross margin. And, but this is the key point. We have to educate to a point our employees as to what these numbers mean. And if you work for a company Ian, which you've done in the past, would you be worried if they weren't profitable?
IAN: Absolutely. Yeah.
STUART: You never thought about their profitability. You just thought about whether I got paid at the end of the day.
IAN: Absolutely.
STUART: But if you link people's understanding that a business has to make profit, in fact it's legally obliged to make profit effectively, because there's a duty of care, upon the directors to make the business a success for the benefit of the shareholders, which is ultimately about making profit, is that that profitability means that everybody is in a secure business. It can pay its wages and it can invest in the future, which means bonuses, salaries, new offices, new equipment. So once people begin to understand a high level how a business works from a numbers point of view, you can then just pick key numbers and share them every month and show the team how together, you're moving towards those numbers that is motivational, but it's also an opportunity to show when we're perhaps falling short where we perhaps need to sit up a bit straighter and look at what we're not doing that we should be doing. Because the service index numbers are falling down or we're making less profit on the service desk because people are not paying attention to the new price list or there could be a myriad of reasons, but that transparency of numbers suddenly becomes an enabler rather than a blocker where you are the one carrying all the weight and worry of how the numbers are made up and how they're going to be delivered in the future.
IAN: Exactly. Before we get into the steps that we've got here to help the listeners out, surely this must start with quite a careful educational piece about what we're going to do now is we're going to run through, explain to you about some of the numbers in the business because of this because of that. How would MSPs get started with that? What would, how does that start off? Because you can't just all of a sudden go to a team meeting and then just go, right, we're going to talk about profit and loss today. And they'll go, well, you know, you've got to position this correctly, haven't you? And select your KPIs and the metrics you are going to share with them that are important. And also, you know, as you've just said, maybe just play this podcast but may, you know, just explain to them that, you know, we need to make money otherwise we won't invest. You won't have nice offices, nice cars, nice tech. By the way, all cost money and things like. What does the educational, the, I suppose it's a bit of education, a bit of engagement, isn't there, right. At, at, at day zero before you even get into this with them, what does that look like?
STUART: You've kind of done it, it's telling a story, educating them about why the business exists and if you take it back to why do we exist, guys? You know, the vision of this business, my vision of it is why we set it up was to be, you know, X-Y-Zed. And day to day, what do you think we will do? Yes, exactly that. You know, that's what this MSP exists to do. And our goal is then translating that into numbers. And but you've got to break it down into numbers that may be relevant. So customer satisfaction score, service gross margin, revenue from existing clients, revenue from new clients. So you don't have to share your, not net profit, your EBITDA...
IAN: No.
STUART: Your wages, your pension contributions. It's just a given. You know, everyone gets a pension contribution. We pay an annual bonus at the end of the year. Guys, you know what that is? Let me explain why it's important that as a business we make profit and explaining what gross profit is. You pick a Microsoft license, you know, we are not going to get rich living on Microsoft licenses.
IAN: You're not
STUART: We buy them for X and we sell them for X plus a tiny, tiny, tiny bit. You know, therefore, but, you know, our other products and services, we make much greater money on.
IAN: Right. Let's get into it. What are some of the steps that we need to follow through just to bring this one alive?
STUART: I think pick three key metrics that are relevant for the business at an employee level and explain how they sit. And, but then consistent secondly is then to consistently update them on what those, how those metrics are changing. So, I mentioned CSAT a moment ago, that's a key metric of client satisfaction. I think on the service desk you could have, new, not new business, but, quotes. And value of quotes per month. Because if you look historically back at what's been going on, there's a story to be told to say, Hey guys, you've been doing this for years. This isn't a new thing.
IAN: Yeah. But without looking at it.
STUART: Yeah. We've just never calculated what it is. And so the service desk might be doing 10,000 pounds a month in new quotes. Some of it's hardware, some of it's service. So I think pick three key metrics that explain the business's progress across the department. So sales and account management, operations, and then customer satisfaction. And if you've got a finance department, maybe debtors, you know, age debtors, and then the teams can understand what those key numbers are for them, and you can celebrate them. I think the other key benefit is linking, helping them understand how what they do is linked to those numbers.
IAN: Absolutely. Yeah.
STUART: We talked about the service desk a moment ago and quotes, you know, taken over the phone or over the ticket by them that they will never have realised that they're contributing to sales through that. The other is consistency of reporting and feeding back, you know, whether it be weekly or certainly monthly, feeding back to the team as to how they're impacting those numbers that makes a big difference. And leading by example. And I think that leading by example, it's down to you to set those meetings, hold those meetings, put a little PowerPoint, one or two slides together, just bringing those that dashboard data together. It's as simple as that.
IAN: Because they're going to want to see the "the walk the talk", aren't they? They're going to want to see, okay, what does that mean? And then the next month you can say, well, you know, that big project that we did, that we delivered, and you know, unfortunately it didn't hit the profit margins because we had to buy a different piece of kit or it took longer for us to do it and things like that. I mean, that's one of my biggest gripes, I think I've been burnt in previous life with regards to, you know, did the project, did the professional services department deliver the margin they quoted and there's always a discount there. So if you're listening to this and you're not checking in on projects when they're finished to check the profitability, do so, because you'll probably find you've got a, well, there probably isn't a bottom in the bucket, it's probably just gone all the way through. But when you start bringing it to life and sort of saying, well, when we won this customer it meant this much to this, you know, and kind of bringing it to life, they're actually going to see, oh, and by the way, we've just invested in some vans or some kit or whatever and oh, and that's been good, but we had reserves for that and kind of explain all of those sort of things through, which is good because this is really going to help build engagement with that team then, isn't it? And really help to embed not only the values, but also the culture as well.
STUART: Yeah, it supports motivation. And, because people get excited when you're winning. And so if you can show without having to focus on the, you know, the turnover of the business every month, you can focus on numbers relevant to that team. Then the nature of open book goes away, they can get excited about delivering a better result every month, you can have awards, like some people have little trophies that go to the team that's perhaps had the, who's hit their target or hit the goal for the month. But the thing that underlying all of this that it flows through, it is improved accountability and ownership across the business. And so if you are ambitious and it comes back, it's below a certain size, you could potentially get away with this. It's not ideal, but certainly if you're ambitious to grow and build a team beyond three or four of you, it's crucial that you are clear about the numbers. And you’re open book about them. Because if you, well, as I said earlier, if you hang on to them yourself, you are the only one that knows them. Therefore, everyone else is just turning up and making it up as they turn up and hoping that they, well, you are hoping that they do what you want them to do and they're hoping that they, they've read your mind.
IAN: Yeah.
STUART: That they're doing the right thing every day. Otherwise they're guessing. They're guessing and guesswork that isn't scalable. And that's the really important thing. So, I think if you are feeling like, you know, you're trying to hug all the numbers in the business to yourself, you're probably not opening yourself up to give clarity of success that's going on in the business. And you are holding people back from being clear about what true accountability and ownership looks like, and I think as a result, well, no, I think I know that you'll go slower. So if you've got that goal to grow to a certain size for whatever, either to hire other people so that you can do less in the business and or to exit, it's going to take you longer to get there.
IAN: More if you hide the numbers.
STUART: If you hide the numbers or holding onto the numbers. Hiding or holding. It's the same thing.
IAN: Lovely, brilliant stuff. I think that's the mic drop moment. That's a great episode. Thank you very much, Stuart.
STUART: You're welcome.
IAN: Catch you on the next one.
STUART: Yeah, will do.
IAN: See you later.
STUART: Bye everyone.
OUTRO: Hang on a minute. Just before you go, and if you're curious about how this episode links with the ability to scale your MSP to a million or, or if you are already there, accelerate to five, then we want to invite you to come and take the MSP Mastery quiz. And in just three minutes, you're going to get a 360 degrees scan of your business where you can identify the one or two tactics that can help you find more time, engage in, align your people and help generate more leads in your MSP. It's really simple. Just click on the link in the show notes and if you have enjoyed this episode, we'd love to get some feedback from you by means of a rating review on Spotify or iTunes, or your podcast platform of choice. We really appreciate every single one of them. Now, you can go and enjoy the rest of your day and we look forward to catching up and connecting with you soon. All the best day.
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