Meetings are happening. Roadmaps exist. Nobody is complaining.
But going through the motions and delivering value are not the same thing. Here are five signs of issues worth looking into:
1. Your QBRs are about tickets and uptime
QBRs aren’t the problem. Operational meetings have their place. The problem is when that’s the only conversation you’re having with your clients.
If you’re not sitting down with the right people to talk about where the business is going, you’re not doing the core job of a vCIO. That job is to put a strategy in place and get clients excited about what’s coming next.
Reviewing what happened last quarter is looking backwards. It doesn’t build trust at the executive level and it doesn’t move the relationship forward.
2. The owner or executives haven’t been in the room in a long time
Think about your top five clients. When did you last sit down with the owner or executive team, show them a strategy, and get them excited about where their technology is going?
The goal of a vCIO isn’t just to have a plan. It’s to have a plan that the executives believe in. If you’re only meeting with the operational contact, you’re not doing the core job, and the relationship is a lot more fragile than it looks.
3. You present a roadmap but clients rarely approve the projects
When clients consistently push back on or ignore the projects you recommend, it usually means one of two things: either the projects aren’t connected to what the client actually cares about, or the client didn’t feel involved in building the plan.
The roadmap has to come out of a discovery conversation about where the business is going. When clients help shape the plan, they feel ownership over it.
4. You find out about major changes at your clients after they happen
Your client started implementing a new ERP. Brought in a new CRM. Hired an AI consultant.
And you found out after the fact.
If you’re doing your job as a vCIO and meeting with the right people regularly, you should be ahead of all of these things. Not caught off guard by them. When your clients are making major technology decisions without looping you in, that’s a big red flag.
5. Your vCIOs couldn’t name your clients’ business goals right now
Ask your vCIOs: what are the priorities for this client’s business over the next 12 months?
The vCIO’s job isn’t just to know the client’s IT environment inside and out. It’s to know where the business is going and make sure the technology supports that direction.
What to do about it
The fix starts with separating your operational and strategic meeting tracks, getting back in front of the right people, and running a discovery process that actually digs into the business before you build any plan.
We’ve spent over 20 years building and refining that process at our own MSP. If you want to see how we approach it, reach out or check out our Learn section.
Simon is the President of S3 Technologies, a leading Canadian MSP he co-founded in 2003. He built and scaled the vCIO team which eventually lead to him co-founding Propel Your MSP in 2018 to help MSPs with their vCIO services.
