One of the biggest traps I see MSP owners fall into is waiting until the end of the year to think about what they want to achieve next year. Why wait until December or January to make plans for growth? If you want to grow your MSP, the planning needs to start right now, while there’s still time left in the year to make an impact. Don’t fall into the trap of doing the same thing every week and expecting different results. It’s time to make a change.
I’ve spoken to countless MSP owners who’ve been running their businesses for over a decade and yet are still stuck in the same cycle. Many are fed up, struggling to hit that elusive seven-figure turnover and unsure of how to break through to the next level. If this sounds familiar, this episode is for you. Growing your MSP requires focus, dedication, and—crucially—a proper plan.
First things first, you need to take personal responsibility for your time. If you’re serious about growing your MSP, you need to carve out time to think. As a business owner, thinking time is some of the most valuable time you can spend. Book a meeting with yourself, create an agenda, and work out what success looks like for you. Be clear on your objectives and treat it like the important business it is. It’s all about setting aside time to think strategically, which is something many MSP owners’ neglect.
Next, avoid getting stuck in an echo chamber. It’s easy to keep going over the same thoughts and ideas with the same people and expect new outcomes, but that rarely works. You need fresh perspectives. Get a coach, join a peer group, or find someone who can hold you accountable. At The Growth Hub, we’ve seen first-hand how important accountability is for MSP owners who want to grow their businesses. Having someone who can challenge your thinking and keep you on track is vital if you want to grow your MSP in 2025.
The third step is to clarify where you want to end up. If you’re not sure what a successful 2025 looks like for you, think about what you don’t want to repeat from this year. Maybe it’s a lack of leads, clients leaving, or team issues. Whatever it is, pinpoint the things you don’t want to see again and start planning to avoid them. The vision you create now will guide you through the next year and keep you focused on what really matters.
Another key point is to prioritise stability before you rush into sales and marketing. Many MSPs make the mistake of jumping straight into lead generation before stabilising their current operations. At The Growth Hub, about 90% of MSPs we work with spend the first 12 months focusing on alignment, profitability, and getting their teams in place before they even touch sales and marketing. Growing your MSP isn’t just about getting new leads—it’s about creating a solid foundation for growth that will last.
Finally, as we edge closer to the end of 2024, now is the perfect time to get your plan together. You’ve got three months left to carve out time, get a coach or accountability buddy, and set your vision for 2025. The ROI of investing in the right support is massive—you’ll recover those costs in no time when you’ve got a solid plan and the accountability to follow through.
So, if you’re ready to grow your MSP in 2025, now’s the time to act. Follow the steps in this episode, and you’ll set yourself up for success in the coming year. If you’re serious about growth, take the first step today by visiting The MSP Growth Hub and checking out our Scale with Confidence quiz, where you can assess your current position and see exactly what’s needed to grow your MSP.
Remember—if you want to grow your MSP, you’ve got to make the changes. It’s up to you!
Connect with Ian HERE on LinkedIn and also Stuart by clicking this LINK
If you’re ready to take the next step in supercharging your MSP, take the Scale with Confidence MSP Mastery Quiz. This tool is designed to help you understand where your MSP stands and what steps you can take to scale profitably and effectively. This will provide you with insights and guidance tailored to your specific needs.
OR to join our amazing Facebook Group of over 400 MSPs where we are helping you Scale Up with Confidence, then click HERE
Until next time, look after yourself and I’ll catch up with you soon!
INTRO: In this episode of the IT Experts Podcast, I'm going to help you work out what to do if you want to grow your MSP in 2025.
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 good morning, good afternoon, good evening. Welcome to the IT Experts podcast. Hope you're all doing good. And today I'm just going to have a quick little session on something that we touched on in the last couple of weeks at our two day client intensive event, where we see our clients down every 16 weeks.
We spend two days, we motivate, inspire, we give some training, we do some networking, some masterminding, and some planning as well. And there was a few things that bubbled out around the planning whole, the whole planning thing around. Why wait until December or January to start thinking about what it is you want to achieve in your MSP next year? Now, we talk to a lot of MSP business owners, as you can imagine. And this podcast is for all you guys and girls out there who've been running your MSP for a minimum of 10 years, 10, 15, maybe even 20 years and you are doing the same old thing every single week, every single month, every single year expecting a different result.
Now I am going to make a wild accusation and guess right now that you're listening to this podcast because you're interested in what we're talking about and how we grow you. MSPs and how to grow your MSP. I've got a call out. I want to call out a listener a little bit later on a guy from the managed service summit I met. I'm going to tell you a little bit more about that later, if you've been running your business and you're not at seven figures, and I know that the seven figure thing is a big, oh, why do I want to run a seven figure MSP?
But I was talking to a guy last week who I'm going to get on the podcast soon. And we're talking about multipliers and exit strategies and how to improve the value of your MSP. And he made it, he made a statement and I'm going to tell you what it is. He said basically any MSP under a million pound, the exit fee is kind of negligible. Now I'm not an expert in this, that's why we at the growth hub reach out to all the experts in the channel to find out what's going on and what's the best thing to do and to think and to plan for exit, if you do want to exit. But, if you're fed up running a lifestyle business, you now want to start running a proper business or you're fed up with getting the same results, then let's get cracking and let's work out what we need to do this year to make 2025 the year that really matters to you, the year that you're really going to make a difference. And let's commit to that right now, right? You're driving along, walking around, you might be listening to this in the office, if you want to make change, you've got to make change, right? It's going to be a bit of a, I'm going to kind of go a bit deep on this one.
So yeah, there's no point moaning about the same old stuff every day, getting a different result. I had an email from a guy yesterday that basically tried every single program you could possibly try. Agencies, lead gen agencies, LinkedIn some stuff over in America and it just wasn't working. And the reason it wasn't working I'm still yet to find out, but I've got a pretty good idea why it isn't working. It's probably working because there's not much consistency. There's no plan. There's no accountability. There's no alignment. There's no learning from what other people are doing. And, Stuart and I, every single day are super grateful to be working in the channel too. Learn from not only the experts in the channel, but from the different vendors, what they're playing at and from all of the other MSPs and what they're learning with their great success and how they apply the principles of standard business growth, right?
So the problem is that you think it's going to take, why have I got to take time out for my business? Why it's going to take too long. I haven't got the time to do this. I'm busy enough being as it is. There's no point doing it right. Cause nothing's going to change. I think we mentioned it last week. I don't think, I know we mentioned it last week, you are not there to be programmed. You are the programmer of your business, right? So what happens in your business is up to you and nobody else. The actions that you take are up to you and nobody else. So let's just make sure that we're focusing on the right thing. We're spending the right time. We're building a great team. We understand our numbers. And where do you want to start? And where do you start when getting a growth plan together? It's the number one step. The first step in the MSP growth hub scale system that we use is building a growth plan in actually about 20 minutes. The door is going to knock and someone is going to walk through and one of our multi seven figure MSPs is going to get their growth planning session done today. And we're going to help them go super wide, then super narrow and put a plan and build some great frameworks and training around it. And we're going to move them slowly bit by bit and we're going to measure where they're going and we're going to get them where they need to be. I need to be hasty on this podcast. So nothing's going to change. Your team's not going to do it anyway. Do you know what? Your team are a reflection, unfortunately, of you. So shadow of the leader time Julie spoken about this before in the growth hub, what you put out, what you project is going to be what you're going to get with your team. So if you engage your team, you get involved and excited in the vision, guess what's going to They're going to get excited too. If you think you can, you think you can't, then you think you're probably, then you are probably right, whichever one you want to pick on. If you think you can grow your business, then you can. Some people say, do I just give this up and get a job? Do I sell out now and get out now? Most MSPs probably won't even get an offer, let alone an offer on a multiplier that you need. So there's some work that we've got to do to get in and there is nothing wrong with running an MSP and just taking the great profits and living a great lifestyle if that's what you want to do. But this podcast is for you guys out there and girls who want to grow your MSP, one of the biggest frustrations is around If it doesn't work, I'm going to be a failure. I said do you know what, just don't tell anyone what you're going to do anyway, just change your habits and start to do things a little bit differently. They'll see the notice/ You'll see the difference. You'll see the results and things will start to get much better.
So here we go. Here's the steps. These are the steps that we need to do.
First things first. I want you to take personal responsibility and value your time. You're thinking time as a business owner. You're thinking time as a business leader, carve out time. Book a meeting with yourself. Create yourself an agenda. Work out what the absolute outcomes are of that meeting need to be and exactly what that needs to look like and what success looks like in that meeting. Stuart and I spent all day yesterday, as we do every three months three or four months working on the strategy of the Growth Hub. How can w ensure that we create this legacy that we want to create, which is our vision. How can we become the number one MSP growth hub in the UK? How can we help many more MSPs than we're doing? You need to take time out to do that. So that's number one. You need to avoid an echo chamber with yourself and maybe your closest allies. So you just repeating stuff back again. Less time. Let's open up. Let's be a bit vulnerable. Get yourself a buddy. Get yourself someone who's going to hold you to account. Get yourself a colleague, one of maybe one of your business owners, maybe one of your senior team. Get yourself a coach, right? There's plenty of coaches out there. Come and have a chat with us at the Growth Hub, Tech tribe. There's amazing communities out there where people are there to help and support and help you overcome and help you stay accountable. Because I think the number one thing that people come to the Growth Hub for is accountability. Building that plan and getting that accountability. It's so important to get other people's views, to get other people's opinions. You can go into all these amazing communities that we keep talking about all over the time. Next few months, we've got Managed Service Summit in the North going on. We've got CompTIA EMEA Con going on. We've got Tech Tribe meetings going on all over the country. Go and check them out. Claire Jenks is involved in all of those Tech Tribe meetings. Go and get yourself booked on. Talk to your peers. Then, the third point is I want you to work out where do you want to end up? What does your vision look like for next year? What do you, if you were to sit there and we look back in a year's time and go, Hey, this is a really great year. What does a great year look like? And more importantly, if you're struggling with that. Then do this one. What do you not want to achieve next year? What are the things you don't want to do? What are the areas that you don't want to have the same results as you've had this year? Maybe a low level of leads, maybe a load of clients leaving, maybe your team being a bit rebellious and not doing what you want to do. I want an aligned team, I want a flow of leads, and then you start, when you start to break down and when you start to focus on one thing at a time, you start to focus on how do I get more leads? If more leads is what you need, now I'll give you a little secret, probably about 90 percent of MSPs who join the Growth Hub don't do anything on sales and marketing for the first 12 months because there is stabilisation, there is alignment, there is bringing your team in places. understanding your numbers, extracting profitability from your existing clients, all of this kind of great stuff, giving you the secret sauce now in what you need to do in your MSP. And once you start digging into those things in a structured, organized, prioritized, and an untargeted manner, the massive things start to happen. And if you then work on your sales and marketing at the same time, just really slowly, really gently, because it takes such a long time, right? Then all of a sudden in a year, 12 months, 18 months time, something like that, you're The magic will really start to happen. So it's as simple as that. It was a shit quick shit. Sorry, there you go. There's the old sensors off. It was a quick, short, sharp blast. I'm sure the girls will leave that one in for a bit of a laugh.
I just wanted to give you these points. We're in October now, October 24. We've got October, we've got November, we've got December, we've got. three months to get your plan together, three months to carve out that time, three months to get yourself a buddy, get yourself a coach, get yourself someone who can help support you. The ROI of getting and paying for business support is ridiculously good. It means, and that means that you could recover your fees from any of the coaches or the support networks out here within super quick time. Get your vision. Where is it you want to end up? What do you want to do? What do you want to achieve and what do you not want to achieve? And that's the most important thing. So that was it for me today a quick short sharp blast if you want to get in touch. We've got the scale of confidence quiz on the website go and hit MSP, The MSP growth hub. com and at the top. It's got the quiz. You can check your maturity out see where you are See where you want to be and where you are on the MSP journey, but just before I go I want to reach out to one listener alone.
Now we're getting around 400 listeners to download, whatever you want to call them, a week, which I think is incredible. So thank you very much for all your support. We've just done the episode 200 with our great friend Paul Green, but I want to tell you a quick little story.
A few weeks ago I was at the Managed Service Summit and a guy came up to me and he said, Hey Ian, loving the podcast, I want to pay you some money. So I turned around to him and I said, hey, that's really cool. Why don't you just join the program? Being a little bit cheeky. He says, I don't need to. I said I said, okay, why do you not need to he says I have listened to every single one of your podcast and at that point I did feel quite sorry for him a bit like my wife. She doesn't understand why you guys and girls listen to this podcast because she has enough listen to me as it is. But anyway, he said I listen to every single one of them, I'm running an MSP Just under 500 grand turnover and I've got five people and I'm happy as anything. My life is brilliant I'm really good. And I just want to thank you ever so much for the podcast for everything that you do for all of the content that you put out there because it's helped me. I've followed every single step and I've carried it forwards now I've missed a massive opportunity here because I did not know I didn't get this guy's number. I didn't even know his name. I was so humbled by what he said. I was just taken aback. So if you are listening to this podcast, please reach out to me. Drop me an email at Ian at the MSP Growth Hub. Put in the title, it was me. And don't everybody then just start to say, because I know who it was. I'm going to recognize this guy because I'd love to have a chat with you. I'd love to offer you some support and I'd love to just to continue the conversation about what we've helped you do and tell everybody else about it, right? Because isn't this about taking best practices and working out what's the right thing to do? What's the not, what's not the right thing to do? What's the wrong thing to do? That's another way to say it. Crikey, getting tumbled up now. But yeah, so if you're listening to this podcast please reach out, drop me an email. And I'd love to have a different conversation or another conversation with you. Anyway, and see what we can do to help. So that's it from me today. You go and enjoy the rest of your day This is a quick short sharp blast get yourself your planning place If you want to grow your MSP in 2025 follow these steps seriously, they work It's what we do day in day out It's what Stuart and I've been doing at the growth hub for the last three years It's what Stuart and I've been doing in our individual businesses for between five and seven years. So look, this stuff works. That's it for me today. You can enjoy the rest of your day. I'm going to look forward to catching up, connecting with you all soon. Take care now.
OUTRO: 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 if you're 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 degree scan of your business where you can identify the one or two tactics that can help you find more time engaging along 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 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.
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