Over the last few days, I have had some powerful conversations with MSP owners about what really moves the needle when it comes to building a scalable and profitable business, and the truth is clear. A slick Marketing campaign will not compensate for weak processes, bottlenecks in delivery, or an MSP that still relies too heavily on the owner being needed in the day to day.
I share in this episode how the three key pillars of your MSP – direction and planning, building an effective and scalable team, and then sales and Marketing – need to be kept in balance. Too often the third pillar is where everyone wants to start, because it feels exciting to get leads and talk about growth. But the more valuable thing to do is to look under the bonnet and build out efficient processes, solid leadership, and an operating model that can run without you.
This is what creates real transferable value. This is what buyers look for when they assess an MSP. It is not only about the turnover or the top line, it is about the EBITDA, the profit margins, the efficiency and the strength of the team.
AI readiness was one of the big topics I covered, because while AI can speed things up, it cannot fix a broken help desk or replace processes that do not exist. If your MSP has gaps, inefficiencies, and inconsistent delivery, AI will only amplify the problem. Get your house in order first. Once your processes are mapped, optimised, and delegated, then AI can become the turbocharger for your business. Without that foundation, you risk being left behind while others take advantage of the efficiencies AI can deliver.
Another big theme is the importance of the EBITDA multipliers. I explained how improving operational efficiency, reducing client concentration, securing longer contracts, and getting the owner out of the daily grind can all add direct value to your MSP. Each of these improvements has the power to increase your multiplier and add significant chunks of value to your business. We are talking in terms of hundreds of thousands of pounds when these changes are applied. That is worth more than years of struggling with Marketing campaigns that may or may not deliver the return you hoped for.
I also shared some of the frustrations MSPs face when they stay stuck on tasks that are not theirs to do. Too many owners remain caught up in £10 an hour work when their real focus should be leading the business, coaching the team, and driving strategic value. Delegation is key here. Trust your team, cascade clear targets, and use operational scorecards to keep everyone aligned. When your team is empowered and accountable, the business can operate smoothly, clients are happier, and you can step back to focus on building value.
Retention and operational maturity came through as another strong theme. Before chasing more leads, make sure your existing clients are delighted, your service is slick, and your delivery model is predictable. When you strengthen the foundation of your MSP, you gain the confidence to grow without fear of cracks showing as you scale. Your numbers become clearer, your cashflow more predictable, and your stress levels drop. It is all about building a business that works for you rather than you for it.
The main point I wanted to drive home in this quick episode is that Marketing is not the silver bullet many think it is. Without strong processes, efficient systems, and a team that can operate without you, Marketing will only create more pressure. Instead, take the time to map your processes, delegate the right tasks, build operational scorecards, strengthen client retention, and then look at how AI can amplify it all. Once these foundations are in place, then Marketing will have the power to add real fuel to the fire. Until then, it can be a dangerous distraction that holds back your growth and keeps you stuck.
So this episode is a jab in the ribs for all MSP owners who feel the urge to throw everything at Marketing before their business is ready. Lift the bonnet, tune the engine, and make sure your MSP is efficient, profitable, and truly valuable. When you do that, not only does your EBITDA rise, but you also create the freedom of choice. Whether you want to grow, exit, or simply enjoy a business that runs smoothly without you, the outcome is far more rewarding. That is when you truly build an MSP that works for you, your team, and your clients.
Make sure to check out our Ultimate MSP Growth Guide, a free guide that walks you through a proven process to take your MSP from stuck to scalable, without working even more hours. It’s 44 pages rammed with advice, insights and inspiration to help you decide what support is available to you now if you want to grow and scale your business. Click HERE to get your copy.
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.
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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, I want you to forget marketing in 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 good morning, good afternoon, good evening. Welcome to the IT Experts podcast. Today I'm going to help you to work out why you need to stop marketing your MSP. Basically what's happened in the last couple of days, I've had some really amazing conversations around how and what really builds a profitable, scalable, seriously valuable MSP and what we hear obviously at the Growth Hub a lot of the time is all around people who are, spending a lot of time doing their marketing. A lot of people come towards us in the world and say, Hey, I just need some sales. That's all I need. When we actually know the three pillars of your MSP.
Is around the first one's around having that direction and that plan in place. The second one's having an amazing team and building a scalable team with the right people into the right roles. And then the third one is around your, account management, your sales and the marketing. And what I just want to give you a bit of a jab in the ribs today about is to help you to focus on building some real transferable value. Now, transferable value is the thing that we talk about when you sell your MSP, when you pass it on, the EBITDA, the thing that people are actually going to buy. Because if you sell an MSP, that's got a[n] okay help desk, it's got a bit of a limping, inconsistent sales and marketing team or function. And it's doing all right, might have a good turnover, might not be amazing, profit margins, but it's okay. It's not going to be worth that much. And what I just wanted to share today was the fact that just by making some small tweaks, by holding up the mirror, looking into the business and looking at what's actually going on under the hood, under the bonnet in the operations.
Could actually make even more difference and add more profit and more valuable to your MSP than doing any marketing whatsoever. Now, this is actually quite hard for me to say this because I love marketing. I love the wholesale side of things, and I love sharing with MSPs and helping them build the confidence, doing just that which is what we're doing on a daily basis at the Growth Hub, however, this is not about that, this is about making sure that we've got that operations in place, this and the two conversations went along like this. The first one was actually about AI readiness. Now you're going to get to hear about this a little bit more over the next coming months. But AI is not going to help you build processes in your MSP. It's not going to help an ailing help desk and an inefficient help desk to become more efficient. Okay?
What AI is going to help you do, and this isn't clickbait, this is just common sense, it's going to help you to speed up your service delivery, it's going to help you to speed up some of the lagging processes that you wait for a bit of human interaction with that they don't need to be, because we want people to be operating at a higher quality and at a higher level, which is really important. But you need to have those processes in place on the efficiency side of things as well before AI can really help. And the second thing I've just touched on it a minute ago is about adding that value through the EBITDA multipliers. And even though you might have a great valuation and you might think that you've got yourself in a really good spot, there's a few things like, you not being part of the business owner, not needed, getting out of the business that could add one to your multiplier. Having your client concentration, not being too much in one client, that could add another multiplier, having longer contracts, that could be another multiplier. And if you think about that, most of these calculations take place in 250,000 pound chunks, that's a lot of sales and marketing that you could be doing while you're spinning your wheels and you're burning along for a couple of years trying to get your sales and marketing working. In actual fact, if you worked on your leadership, you worked on the efficiency of the business and you worked on actually building that value, you gotta blow the water out because if you actually think about that, the time that you're spending. It is way more multiplied by lifting up the hood, having a look underneath and seeing what you're doing. So let's break this down. Marketing is great and marketing's needed, and if you build in a sales and marketing engine as well, wow, you've got yourself a really high performing business that is going to be worth a bucket ton of cash. Really interestingly, people are going to be, have a lot of interest in it to buy the business as well, and it's going to transfer that value with the marketing side of things, it does take a long time to get the results. And as I say, most MSPs, they see a shiny ball and then they get bored a little bit maybe. They worry that if they step away from the MSP, then the business is going to fall apart, which is why we talk about the bottleneck all of the time. You are that bottleneck, but owner not needed. ONN. It's so important that we get that in place and that you have a plan every day to help your team run, operate, and grow business when you go on holiday, if you just come back from holiday and you've gone, oh, it's been a great holiday. The business was still operating when I got back. Yeah, it's great. That's not hard. Get it growing when you're not there. That's really interesting. You know the fear that the business as well is going to be undervalued at the time you've worked all these heart, soul, weekends, blood, sweat, tears into the business and then someone comes along and says, Hey, I'm going to give you X amount for it and then you go, is that all? And they go, yeah, that's all it's worth. And the other thing to think about at the moment as well is that as AI is new into the operations of the MSP model if there's other businesses that are operating with AI, with less people with a higher profit margin, get ahead of the curve now. Get your processes all organized now, get your efficiency in place now. So that's another really key point. And also your clients, they're going to be expecting much more from you. They're going to be expecting a better service, quicker for the same price as well. And you're not going to do that by doing the same thing you've always done. Because if you keep doing the same thing you've always done, you always get what you've always got. And the customer service model is absolutely needs to be going through the roof in terms of service delivery and expectations as well.
STUART INTERRUPT: Hold that thought for a moment. Ian, it's Stuart here. I just got a quick pit stop here for everyone that could really move the needle. If growing your MSP is on your radar, but it feels somehow a bit foggy, a bit difficult to get your arms round the concept, then download our ultimate MSP growth guide because it lays out all of the best support options that are out there in the channel so you can fast track what really works for you and make a clear decision. Alternatively, you may be the kind of person that likes to see things up real. For yourself in action physically. So why not come to one of our events where you can do exactly that? And we'd love to meet you, so there's just a head up for you down in the show notes that you'll find the links to be able to take the next step. But otherwise, let's get back to the good stuff and back to the show.
IAN: Cheers.
And I guess the final kind of worry for a lot of MSPs is that if you don't adapt to AI, you're going to get left behind. Now, I don't know many MSP business owners who want to be left behind. So these are things that are really real. And, you know, ignore them. You're, just going to keep yourself stuck in the weeds. Some of the other frustrations is that we talk about 1,000 thousand pound tasks and that you stay stuck doing those tasks. Cashflow could become tight, a little bit unpredictable. As your profits swing up and down, you need to have good control on your cash. And when you do that, because you've got a better level of autonomy and also knowledge and the understanding of your numbers, then things really do start to change when we talk about it all the time, but a referral comes in really big client, big bit of project work as well. It can knock you off your feet if you're not careful. You can't allow big project works to do that and knock you off your feet because the team, if they're too dependent on you, then nothing moves, it's goes to that point I mentioned earlier on about the fact that business can operate, but it is it actually growing and no one wants to be burning out, right? So when we get this right, you finally get yourself in a position where you've got a business that works for you rather than you for it. Your EBITDA multiples rise, and you can almost add chunks of quarter of a million pounds to your valuation each time you just lift up that bonnet and you give it a little bit of tune up and tweak it out. But none of this is revolving around new businesses, around that existing business. You're going to get repeatable, predictable profit without relying on the marketing side of things. The team are going to be how excited are the team going to be when all of a sudden everything's moving a lot slicker, everything's moving in a lot of a quicker position. And most importantly, you get to deal with that time as a business owner and that's when you get the real payoff. So what can we do about it? I've got five tips here for you to focus on. We've done the summer holidays, we're now in September, October time. Now let's just really start getting, focusing on building some proper value into this MSP.
So number one. Okay. It's all around building out, mapping out your processes. Fix, remove, delete all of the bottlenecks before you even think about tipping in any sales, any marketing, any more account management. Just get your processes sorted, get them organized, get a lot of post-it notes. Stick them up all on the wall. Guess what? You can connect them all together. Then what happens? Then you can get AI to make it slicker. Then you can get some tools and some systems in place to bring that all together, and that's where that really helps from a, a massively leverageable point of view. Second thing is around delegating those 10 pound an hour tasks. Okay, let's get the team trusted. Let's get the team in a strong position. Let's get you with the confidence that you can deliver. When we talk about the scale operating system at the Growth Hub and cascading those targets all the way down. Everybody's got a number, everyone's got an objective. Everyone knows what they need to be doing as they move through. So spend some time, just do one of these a week, right? Spend some time, getting those cascaded teams and delegating and looking at the tasks of, should I be doing this task or should it be the team that are doing that task? Scorecards, right? Operational scorecards are really cool and really good, because it keeps people focused on the actual delivery of the business. So we want to be tracking delivery, finance, call rates weekly performance on the stats and all of that kind of great stuff. Hone them in, buy them a pizza on a Friday, whatever it might be, but get everybody focused around the purpose of what this business is actually trying to do, and operational scorecard's a really super cool way to do that.
Then and only then when you've got yourself in a nice position where the processes are slick, they're nice and efficient, they're leverageable, so there's people, less people operate in them. Then you can use AI to automate your admin, your ticket triage those 10 pound an hour tasks, maybe even be some five pound an hour task and the reporting. So you are got not just getting reporting, but you're actually getting insights and what are the insights telling you about what's going on within your processes and within the business itself. So you can then hone in and start to look at spending your time as the owner focusing on the areas that you need to be focusing on, putting the little fires out, helping people start some fires if you need to, and to actually just focus your area so that you are spending that super, super focus time on making sure that you are adding the most value you can as the business owner into your MSP.
Next one is let's just focus on the retention and operational maturity, strengthening that foundation before you start. Chasing any more leads. So look, this is what this episode's all about. It's a bit of a jab in the ribs. It's a bit about, don't go chasing any AI. Don't go chasing all your marketing. Let's just open up the bonnet. Let's have a little look at the components of your engine. Let's just build that efficiency. Build that profitability. Track your numbers, track the performance of the business, because right now, for many MSPs, marketing is a massive distraction.
Okay? Focus on the systems, the numbers in the team, and then you'll build a business that works for you rather than you for it. And guess what? It's going to be one that's going to be more valuable, it's going to be one that's going to be more efficient. You are going to work in it in, in less amount of time, and then you'll be set for whatever you want to do post MSP, ownership.
So that's it for me today. Very quick fire hose. A bit of a contentious subject line, but that's what this is all about. You enjoy the rest of your day and I look forward to catching up with you on the next one. 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, 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.
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