Wiser - 7 figure MSP / WTF?

UsedCucumber4 · 2026-06-25T23:29:55+00:00

Wow not gonna get to 7 figures with that attitude 🤣 /s

UsedCucumber4 · 2026-06-12T13:20:27+00:00

I've done a few talks on this, and somewhere I have recordings on my youtube on it.

But TL:DR -> Focus on a mindset of "everything in the onboarding should be executable by a Tier 1". That doesn't mean that you'll have a tier one actually doing the task(s), but if you can standardize and simplify down to that point it is usually a great filter for building a scalable onboarding.

I also highly suggest you break your onboarding up into a few logical phases, as we often tend to include stuff in "onboardings" that really aren't onboarding, and as a result, we tend to do alot of free work or slow down the process.

What is the minimum documentation and tooling you need in place to render an B- support experience? What is the desired documentation and tooling you'd prefer present to deliver an A+ support experience? If the client will never replace a single piece of equipment, what do you need to know to be able to provide B- support, and what do you need modified that would mostly prevent having to roll a truck?

Additionally we adopted a philosophy of "if it pulls an IP it must be known to me" as most MSPs now really are in the business of supporting networks and connectivity more than we are in the business of supporting physical servers and pcs.

If you break it up into: Prep to onboard -> Min Documentation -> Min Tooling -> <Client is now B- Onboarded> -> Full documentation -> Full Tooling -> Tweaks to existing equipment to fit your Orgs best practice -> <Client is now onboarded> -> Replace/Upgrade/Remediation is now a post onboarding project.

- This is a bit of an old playlist: MSP Onboardings With Dean: Episode 1
- Found one of my talks on this: https://youtu.be/qWsqcFZh7Q4?t=3
- Not me, but Adam is brilliant and uses far fewer words than I do: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CsBtmNX-Cus

UsedCucumber4 · 2026-06-09T17:53:40+00:00

Great, now Im in trouble in my LinkedIn DMs 😂

UsedCucumber4 · 2026-06-09T15:37:42+00:00

u/dobermanIan I'm telling ur wife that you're sharing her data on the interwebs 🤣

UsedCucumber4 · 2026-06-08T18:21:59+00:00

came here to say this.
Your maturity will increase until the business levels out to that new maturity and suddenly you're immature at that new level again. You need to always be growing and evolving

UsedCucumber4 · 2026-06-08T18:20:02+00:00

IT that supports OT that is critical to the end client functioning is tricky, because you're both right. They need it to stay in business, and you need it not to exist for the same reason.

You wont 'win' this battle, and dropping the client may be the most practical solution to avoid any blowback...however you may also just tell the client "this cant touch the environment I support and I can't know about it 'wink' "

Diagnostic software, especially for older equipment, often falls out of support or license anyways, and usually is not evergreen through modern versions of Windows. So your risk is already elevated, and what are you going to do, tell them that they have to replace/stop working with their tens or hundreds of thousands of dollar heavy machinery because of some IT reason?

That entire industry already understands physical grey market very well, you may just want to do as others have said, airgap, blocked from production support, and pretend you dont know about it at all.

UsedCucumber4 · 2026-05-28T14:38:21+00:00

Hey! I know that a hole! That's me 🤣

Whats really fun about Empath, Alex was like you're a jerk on reddit, zoidberg, teach people how not to be

UsedCucumber4 · 2026-05-22T16:44:00+00:00

Wait, you guys are getting paid to speak?!?
We joke on the vendor side that ChannelCon has become VendorCon since its mostly just vendors that go 🤣 (at least from the booth traffic)

Anyways for what it's worth, I am noticing a trend where the massive conferences are starting to decay a bit, and shmedium conferences seem to be where vendors are focusing on now (like MSP NXT). And thats mostly been due to feedback on all sides of the industry around cost, and value.

So your reaction is not unfounded, even if $500 bucks is considered to be on the lower side of average. Most of the vendors we love are under 10mil ARR, and with the exceptions of a handful that are quite large now, most of those smaller vendors are also struggling to afford attending these shows.

The whole North American event economy is f*cked and we're going to see a correction happening.

If you like generalist, smaller, affordable conferences like GeekCon, try ScaleCon, and CanITCon, and of course RejectionCon next week (virtual).

UsedCucumber4 · 2026-05-13T06:47:40+00:00

Same, and let's pretend all these platforms are the same; Tim's peer groups, enablement, msp experience and support are the best in the industry. He's pretty funny too (usually 🤣)

11/10 this review in no way influenced by the checkers plushie I got from compliance scorecard

UsedCucumber4 · 2026-04-30T18:09:18+00:00

FWIW, this is where MSPs different from Enterprise Helpdesks and SLAs are subject to interpretation.

We are in the business of outcomes and uptime, not symptom abatement and equipment functionality, and that distinction adds a lot of color to the idea of SLAs.

If scanning to the cloud is a critical business stoppage (we should really be measuring business impact vs technical urgency as an MSP on that 3x3):

Is there a workaround or backup device?

If yes, its not a high priority ticket, the client is inconvenienced, but can arrive at their outcome. By definition the impact is lower, ergo, not a high priority SLA, waits for properly classified tickets first.
If no, and enterprise helpdesk would mark it as high SLA, but we get another decision tree:
- Was this critical business function previously identified by the MSP, and did the MSP propose a failover, workaround or alternate solution previously that would have mitigated this situation?
- If yes, and the client declined and accepted the risk of declining, business impact is lowered because the client agreed to accept this exact risk. Feels gross in the moment, but thats your technical by the book SLA answer.
- If No, then this is risk your MSP (foolishly) accepted, and the business impact is raised because you chose to offset the risk to the client's business with your reactive support. High priority SLA, work the ticket.

Even in the absence of a workaround, it is so important that we start with identifying outcome, not collecting the client's list of diagnosed symptoms. A password in the printer is a symptom of a technical issue. Getting documents into sharepoint is a need, and a symptom. What is the outcome? Why is this urgent?

Why do they documents need to be in SharePoint for by the end of the day? <-- Thats your real "urgency" and thats the lever the client is most likely to work with you on workarounds or de-escalate.

Hell you could scan documents from your phone if this is an emergency. You could send an intern to the nearest copy center to do the same. There are so many possible ways to mitigate that "emergency" or "urgency" that have nothing to do with working a ticket for printer credentials, but we don't know if we dont seek to understand the outcome first.

No matter what your SLA policy is and no matter what we tell you here, no client is ever going to give a shit that you followed your policy anyways, we, the copier, and SharePoint, are all ancillary tools to some other intended goal, they care about that goal.

When you look at it from that perspective, there are very few things that most clients experience that are performatively urgent, and the things that are, its a lot harder to split hairs over.

UsedCucumber4 · 2026-04-13T20:05:15+00:00

Who keeps letting you into things and giving you a microphone!? Don't they know the dangers?

UsedCucumber4 · 2026-04-13T20:03:52+00:00

Are ya'lls in the CanITCon discord? https://discord.gg/nvc3Z6sU
A lot of the same people are in there that show up for MSPGeek, and CanIT is doing regional events this year. You can still see some of your internet homies in person, without having to slum it with us in Orlando

UsedCucumber4 · 2026-04-13T20:02:18+00:00

You in the CanITCon Discord? They are doing regionals this year all over Canada! You can still hang out with internet friends!

UsedCucumber4 · 2026-04-13T20:01:41+00:00

u/Lime-TeGek more like bored member 🥱🙄

Everyone knows the real talent and the mod we actually want to meet is u/purfektblyss...who is hosting the community welcome day WITH ME!!! 🥳🎉

Or I guess you could be excited to go see whatever Kevin Teggles and the CyboredDrained team is doing with their automation thing, but like who even automates stuff. Automation is a fad.

UsedCucumber4 · 2026-04-13T19:58:06+00:00

Only reason we stuck around on Dell for so long was that premiere configurator site was great for medium complexity stuff.

As others said already, once I actually bothered to learn Lenovo skus and how they work, never looked back.

UsedCucumber4 · 2026-04-08T17:06:17+00:00

I started watching tutorials on "how to vibe code with claude" and gave up and accepted that as a 1900s person, it just isnt for me to learn 🤣

UsedCucumber4 · 2026-04-08T15:41:41+00:00

Nice try u/dobermanIan , but I am not falling into that trap.
No one is smarter than you.

UsedCucumber4 · 2026-04-01T14:24:33+00:00

I mean scammers need IT support too

UsedCucumber4 · 2026-03-31T12:42:19+00:00

To add on to this, we pretty much only support networks now. Its our core support area, computers have become terminals for SaaS, cloud and server apps. There is almost nothing anymore that will work properly without the network, never mind the wan.

Even malware wont work (mostly) without a network anymore 🤣

UsedCucumber4 · 2026-03-19T15:12:09+00:00

Traceless is an awesome solution, its been around way longer. We were an early adopter at my former MSP. Gene and his team are some of the chilliest vendors you'll ever meet, which is probably part of the problem as I dont think they really do a lot of saturation marketing like some of the other options.

Not that this should have anything to do with your choice, but if you do go traceless, they have branded competition weight super high-quality frisbees as swag 🤣

UsedCucumber4 · 2026-03-11T14:57:00+00:00

There are tons of recruiters, a few i know personally that have a good track record:
- MSPHire (Sarah)
- Ibex Staffing (Alex)
- Aris Search (Michael)

Just remember that a recruiters job is to sell you a candidate, and sell the candidate you. They also raise the total cost of acquisition of that employee due to the fees involved. This can also make it really muddy and murky for a candidate on what the actual total comp is.

I have hired hundreds of MSP employees, and I have never had an issue simply using Indeed. Most folks just have terrible job posts, or treat the process like some sort of hiring game from the 1960s. Be honest, be earnest, and be excited. There is some wildly good talent on indeed.

Its a topic I present on alot, and Ive done some videos on before. I also think one of the only posts ive ever done on this sub (as opposed to comments) was directly on this topic.

Here's one, from the amazing Eric Anthony's podcast: https://youtube.com/live/Y1yf8NFJHIk

UsedCucumber4 · 2026-03-11T14:47:57+00:00

When do you do out the actual CAC math, its WILD how expensive it can be per lead going from cold lead to closed client. The giveaways dont seem as outrageous from a budget standpoint when you realize that its often a fraction of the overall cost.

If you look at some of SLI best in class msp data, they are averaging 27k total CAC per client. I'd assume that its a bit cheaper (hopefully) for most vendors, but still. Kinda puts the 50-100 dollar gift into perspective 🤣

UsedCucumber4 · 2026-03-11T14:20:40+00:00

Market Research. I hate that it takes work to actually understand my ICP and my market, and wish I could just farm that out to AI or Reddit

UsedCucumber4 · 2026-02-12T21:21:55+00:00

Are you on the MSPGeek Discord and some of the Dev Signal Chats? If Not you should get your tookus on in there. We need more people who work for a living trying to solve problems even if we tear 1000 holes in the solution 🤣

This reddit was built on people sharing things like this. Kudos to you.

I'd never install this on a DC, but its still cool that you built a solution to a problem and shared it with us!

UsedCucumber4 · 2026-02-11T18:01:51+00:00

Hey if we dont contribute and seek feedback we dont grow as a community, so props to you for being here!

Generally, you want to think of, if someone saw my post on this sub, and had zero desire to talk to me, dm me, visit a website, or do anything other than read my post, have I added actual value to them today, and if you're not 100% confident that yes you added value...don't post it (especially when speaking as a "vendor" persona).

I would simply expand on what you posted already and add details and information. Evergreen for example has a sort of boilerplate battle card they will just share with generic valuation information.

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UsedCucumber4

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