Here’s a mistake I see MSPs make all the time.
They finally get a meeting with the CEO or owner, the person who signed the contract, and they spend it walking through ticket volumes, resolution times, and SLA performance.
Not much comes from a meeting like that. Except the executive probably deciding not to sit through another one.
Two people. Two completely different conversations.
Most clients has two relationships that matter to you.
Your operational point of contact: the controller, the office manager, the IT lead, whoever handles day-to-day. This person absolutely should see your operational metrics. Ticket volume, response times, resolution times, open issues, project status. Meet them regularly: weekly, monthly, or quarterly depending on the size of the client. This is exactly the right conversation for them, and they’ll value it.
The executive who signed your contract: the owner, the CEO, the CFO, the person who made the decision to bring you on. This person does not care about your ticket volume. They’re not measuring you on resolution times. And every minute you spend on metrics with them is a minute you’re not spending on the thing that matters.
Most MSPs get this backwards. They take the operational deck they built for the office manager and run it past the owner, thinking they’re demonstrating value.
What the executive wants
Think back to the day they signed with you.
They were excited. They were leaving a situation they didn’t like, and you painted a picture of a better future: more stability, less risk, technology that moves their business forward instead of holding it back.
That picture is why they signed.
So here’s the question: when was the last time you painted it again?
That’s the job. Not proving what you did last quarter, showing them where you’re taking them next.
Run a strategy alignment session instead
Once a year, sit down with the executive and run a strategy alignment session.
You’re not presenting. You’re asking. Where is the business going over the next 12 months? The next three years? What’s changing? What’s the biggest risk you’re worried about? What would make the biggest difference if technology could solve it?
Then you go away, and you come back with a three-year plan. A roadmap of the projects you recommend, aligned to what they told you, with a budget attached.
The real trap: proving past value
Here’s the reflex almost every MSP has, and I understand where it comes from.
You want to show you’re worth the money. So you show what you’ve done. The tickets you closed, the uptime you delivered, the problems you solved. It feels like proof.
But past performance is table stakes. It’s what they’re already paying for. Nobody renews a contract because you closed tickets on time; they expect that.
Your real value isn’t in what you did. It’s in where you’re taking them.
The MSP that shows up once a year with a clear picture of the next three years is the MSP that doesn’t get taken for granted. The one that shows up with a ticket report is the one getting price-shopped at renewal.
What to do about it?
It’s a simple fix.
Give your operational point of contact the operational review they want, regularly, with real data.
Give the executive a strategy alignment session and a forward-looking roadmap, once a year, every year.
Stop showing executives the past. Start showing them the future.
That’s where your value lives.
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.
