If you’re running an MSP, this is one of the most important distinctions you’ll ever make about your client-facing team.
The vCIO and the Account Manager are not two versions of the same job. They’re two completely different people, with two completely different skill sets, doing two completely different things.
Blend them into one role and you weaken both. Split them properly and you build stronger relationships, protect your best people, and make your whole operation more efficient.
Here’s how to think about each.
The vCIO: your client’s trusted technology advisor
The vCIO comes from a strong technical background. This is not a salesperson in a nicer shirt. It’s one of your most technical people. Someone who understands infrastructure, cybersecurity, and where technology is heading, and who can explain all of it to a client in plain language.
The best vCIOs are the people clients already gravitate toward. In your MSP’s technical life, they’re the ones a client naturally trusts to make sense of their technology. They have vision, and they can communicate it in a way that gets an executive excited.
What the vCIO actually does:
- Builds three-year roadmaps and budgets for each client
- Puts together custom proposals for major solutions and projects
- Meets with the client annually to walk through the roadmap
- Steps in whenever a project or decision comes up. The client is buying a company, moving offices, rolling out new software, opening a location. This is the person they call first.
That’s the job. Strategy, vision, and trusted advice on anything technology-related.
One critical rule: don’t pay your vCIO commission. The moment you attach a commission to their recommendations, you turn a trusted advisor into a salesperson, and the client feels it immediately. The vCIO’s credibility comes precisely from the fact that they’re recommending what’s right for the business, not what pays them best.
The Account Manager: the quarterback
The Account Manager is a completely different animal.
Ideally this is someone highly organized. They’re the client’s point of contact, the quarterback for anything the client needs from your MSP. Scheduling resources, a billing question, a question about what’s included in the contract, an operational hiccup. It all flows through the AM.
What the Account Manager actually does:
- Serves as the day-to-day point of contact for the client
- Runs the operational status meetings with the client’s operational contact, weekly, monthly, or quarterly depending on the size of the account
- Handles billing questions, scheduling, and contract questions
- Makes sure everything across the account is being delivered as it should be, and follows up with the right people internally when it isn’t
The AM’s value isn’t technical depth. It’s responsiveness, organization, and follow-through. Clients should feel like the AM is their person inside your company. The one who always picks up, always follows up, and never lets things slip.
Why one person can’t do both
Plenty of MSPs try to make a single person handle both roles. I understand the temptation, but the skill sets are just too different.
The person who’s brilliant at technical vision is rarely the person who’s brilliant at operational coordination, and vice versa. Worse, when you ask your strongest technical mind to also chase billing questions and explain what’s in the contract, you’re wasting your most valuable and hardest-to-replace resource on admin.
Your vCIO’s time is expensive. It should be spent meeting clients, building roadmaps, and shaping proposals. Not sitting in operational status meetings talking through ticket queues.
Think of it as a duo.
They also scale differently
An Account Manager can typically handle more clients than a vCIO. The AM’s work, while demanding, is more repeatable across accounts. The vCIO has to genuinely understand each client’s infrastructure and business well enough to build a real plan for them, and that depth takes time. You can’t spread it across as many accounts.
So as you grow, expect your ratios to be different for each role.
The hidden benefit: relationship redundancy
There’s one more reason this structure matters, and most MSPs don’t think about it until it’s too late.
When one person owns the entire client relationship and they leave, you’re at serious risk of losing that client with them. Clients follow people.
Split the roles, and you build redundancy into every relationship. If your vCIO moves on, the AM holds continuity while you transition someone new, and vice versa. You’ve protected the relationship at the account level, not just the individual level.
Two roles, two meeting cadences
The clean way this plays out in practice:
- The Account Manager runs the regular operational meetings with the client’s operational contact, as often as the account needs.
- The vCIO leads the annual strategic session with the executive, and shows up for any major project or decision in between.
Getting started
You don’t need to restructure your whole company overnight. Start with your larger clients and assign whichever role is missing. A vCIO if you don’t have one, or a dedicated AM if that’s what is missing. Get the duo working there, and it rolls down to the rest of your base naturally.
We made this change at our MSP years ago and have never looked back. It’s one of the best structural decisions we’ve made, for our clients, our team, and our business.
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.
