If one person at your MSP is handling IT strategy, billing questions, escalations, and check-ins, you have a structural problem. The fix is simple: separate your vCIO and Account Manager roles completely.
These are two different jobs with distinct skill sets.
The vCIO: strategic technology advisor
Your vCIO is like your client’s outside counsel, a trusted expert who knows their business and infrastructure inside out. That’s an expensive, rare skill set.
A vCIO should only be doing three things:
- meeting with clients
- building roadmaps and proposals
- providing guidance to the project team when needed
Operationally, their involvement should be the exception. For a major incident or a critical client situation, of course, they step in, but day-to-day operational noise should never be on their calendar.
To do this role well, someone needs to be deeply technical and an exceptional communicator, able to translate technology into business language and get executives excited about where things are going.
The vCIO owns: technology roadmaps, major proposals, and the annual strategic process with executives.
The account manager: the quarterback
The AM is the client’s go-to for everything else. Billing issue? AM. escalation? AM. Scheduling an on-site tech? AM. They know how to navigate your MSP on the client’s behalf and get things moving fast.
This role is about responsiveness, organization, and relationship management. Clients should feel like the AM is their quarterback inside your MSP.
The AM owns: day-to-day communication, billing, operational issues, client satisfaction, and the quarterly operational review with the client’s operational point of contact.
Two meetings cadences, Not one
- Quarterly (AM-led): Operational review: tickets, SLAs, projects, satisfaction. The audience is the client’s operational point of contact.
- Annual (vCIO-led): Strategic planning: business goals, technology direction, cybersecurity posture, roadmap, budget. The audience is the executive team.
Jamming both into a single QBR is a mistake.
One more reason: redundancy
When one person owns the entire client relationship and walks out the door, you have to rebuild it from scratch. When you split the roles, the AM maintains continuity while you transition to a new vCIO or vice versa.
Getting started
Start with your larger clients and assign whichever role is missing: a vCIO if you don’t have one in place, or a dedicated AM if that’s the gap. Get the structure working, and you’ll naturally roll down to the rest of your client.
We made this change at our MSP over 15 years ago and have never looked back. It’s one of the best structural decisions we’ve made!
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.
