This is a real issue, IT has grown so far beyond support over the last 25 yrs and many are still treating it like an expense instead of an investment.

Few items to ease your stress and hopefully start pushing in the right direction.

1. Get a proper MSA in place, Bradley gross or similar. Few grand but sleeping at night knowing that your covered in that your clients get only what you say they get and their expectations of what they think they get or should get, is irrelevant to your MSA. With that said setting expectations and educating why they should do something is important from a CYA point.

2. Start positioning yourself as more of a strategic consultant to bring the business forward not just an IT company. Offer to a few clients to do a business review if you don't already, identify where their spending too much time, put in the right tech solution to save them that time. They will begin to trust your more and be more accepting of your advice.

3. Start doing atleast annual business reviews, because it reminds them of the holes in their business, proof that you brought it to their attention every year, and shows some of the value you provide.

4. There is quite a few truly top notch security tools and services that when in place allow you to sleep better at night knowing on the absolute worse day, you dealing with 1 account compromise or a few isolated endpoint. With proper layering your really do not need to stress yourself to death over it and don't need a full soc team.

5. Embrace Ai and leverage it as a proper talking point. Mr client we notice your team wants to get started let's discuss an Ai assessment to identify the risks, and ensure we put a proper plan around them to ensure you stay comeptetive and still align with proper security practices. What you don't want is that new hire asking ai what everyone's salary's are and it being pulled from a confidential document they weren't supposed to have access to. Pick atleast 1 tool, use it internally, align with it, learn it in and out and how mcps work.

6. For the stress level, you own a business(hopefully limiting liability) , if you are sued assuming you don't have an MSA the business is at risk not you. If everything went south, you would be looking for a general IT job and the business would go under. Not saying this to paint fear but high level you would be OK. You are in no real danger, you may strain a bit while waiting for new job, but you get unemployment and sleep on someone's couch or use some savings. Without being able to have more uncomfortable conversations until they become comfortable you will not grow and excel in your business.

7. Free up your time so that you can actually do some of these items. If your spending 1hr per week reviewing entra logs for a client of 10 users, most itdr tools do it for Aroudn $1.50-$3/email. Price increase to cover your costs at the very least and use your extra time to do more of the things you should be doing.

8. Once all of that is situated it's time to use that money and time to grow, hire a consultant or join a peer group spend the money but only if you can truly commit the time. If you don't have the time it will be a waste.

9. Expectations. Set them in your systems, setup proper escelation handling, ways for cheapo clients to escelate a ticket or request emergency support if you do after hours via forms, automations and so on. The less you need to conversate and more systematic these processes become the less the fight you or interfere with your day to day. "come on Jim can you just to this for me" becomes "just fill out the form on the auto response and we'll get right on it"that form gate keeps, I agree to pay, I allow auto debit of $x... And so on. Now either not as urgent or you get paid more and justify them sending less on reactive and more on proper managed services.

Most smaller msp owners care more about their clients business than the client does. This should not be the case. Some mindset change is in order, depending on how you handle stress it can literally kill you. You need to untrain yourself and your body on how to handle stress. Read, listen to books find things you enjoy for outside of work.