Most MSPs trying to grow are doing it backwards.
They invest in sales. They outsource lead gen to firms that book meetings for them. They hire marketing agencies. They build out a sales team. All of that is great. But it’s almost never the first move.
The first step is to reduce your churn as much as possible.
If your bucket is leaking, no amount of water poured will fill it. You’ll spend a fortune acquiring, onboarding, and offboarding clients. The cost is brutal, and the operational cost is worse. Onboarding eats your service team. Offboarding eats your service team again.
Most MSP owners underestimate churn.
The best MSPs can maintain churn around 5%.
Low churn is the cheatcode
We’ve grown our MSP to over $23M in revenue organically with a single salesperson.
We didn’t outgrow our peers by hiring more reps. We outgrew them because our churn stayed low for years.
Low churn doesn’t just keep the clients you have. It grows the business. Satisfied executives talk to their peers. Engaged clients become your best source of referrals. When your retention is good, new clients show up without you chasing them.
There’s no downside to focusing on churn first. You keep more clients. You spend less acquiring them. And the ones you keep go out and sell for you. Everything to gain.
How we kept it that way: we re-engaged the deciders and got them excited for the future of their IT every year.
Where MSPs lose the relationship
You sign an agreement with an Owner, CEO, COO, or CFO. Within months, you get relegated to an operational point of contact. An office manager, a controller, or an executive assistant. Good people, but not the person who signed.
Many MSPs hardly speak to the person who signed their agreement. Years pass. The exec becomes someone signing your check every month. You may be doing great work, but he or she has no idea.
And that’s where churn starts.
How to fix it
Once a year, you need to re-engage the person who signed.
In our MSP, we ask for a strategic alignment session. We tell the client it’ll be 45 to 60 minutes. We tell them upfront: we’re not coming to pitch anything. We just want to understand where they’re taking the business.
In the meeting, we talk 5% of the time, ask open-ended questions, and take notes.
– What are your objectives for the next 12 months? The next three years?
– Any new lines of service or products coming?
– Are you considering acquisitions, new locations, or expansion?
– Which departments are likely to grow? Which might shrink?
– What are the choke points in your business that technology could help with?
– What’s your time horizon? Are you thinking about an exit, or bringing in an investor?
Once the decider feels heard, you almost always get permission to come back with a plan. So you go build a three-year IT roadmap and budget tied to what they told you, come back and present it.
Clients won’t push back on a plan they helped shape.
Why this works
Put yourself in their shoes. I run an MSP with over 100 employees. I rarely take meetings with our suppliers. But if a supplier reached out and said “Simon, I want to spend 60 minutes understanding where your business is headed. I’m not pitching anything,” I would probably take that meeting.
Your clients are no different. They want to be heard. They will take that meeting.
What to do right now
Pick one client where the decider has gone quiet.
Send a short email. Tell them you want 45 to 60 minutes to understand where their business is going to align IT with their vision. Tell them you’re not pitching anything, just listening.
Set the meeting. Show up with questions. Talk less than 5%.
You’ll walk out with everything you need to build a roadmap they’ll actually buy into. And you’ll be shocked at how engaged your disengaged client actually was.
That’s a huge part of how you keep clients. That’s the first step to growing your MSP.
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.
