You don’t need the data to be perfect. You need the meeting.
I watch MSPs hold off on strategic planning because they’re trying to get every integration, pulling asset data from four sources, building the dashboard that shows the client everything. It’s never ready. So the meeting never happens.
Data is great! When you can back up a recommendation with numbers, the client listens. But the data is maybe 10% of what you’re after. The other 90% is the conversation.
The conversation does something the dashboard can’t. You sit down with the client and ask where they’re going. Open-ended questions, a real needs analysis, no agenda except understanding their business. Just having that meeting alone changes the relationship. The client has never had their MSP ask them that.
Then you come back. You bring goals, projects tied to those goals, a budget, a direction. You walk them through it together. That’s the second meeting, and it’s where the trust gets built.
None of that requires perfect data. You can run it in PowerPoint. You can sketch the roadmap on a page. The client won’t care that your asset inventory isn’t absolutely perfect. They will care that someone finally sat with them and showed them where their IT is going.
Propel makes this faster, and it makes it interactive, which matters. But the tool isn’t the thing holding you back. The meeting is.
Start before you’re ready. Go have the conversations. You’ll learn more about what tool you need and how you want to run this from a couple of real client meetings than from six months of planning the perfect system.
Commit to meeting your clients strategically once a year. Two meetings. First the needs analysis, where you only listen. Then the plan, where you present and make it collaborative.
Do this with every client and watch what happens to your retention and project revenue.
Just start!
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.
