MSPs Don't Have a Lead Gen Problem. They Have a Profit Leak Problem

I am here to talk to you about our Lord and Savior. You do not have a lead gen problem. MSPs have a profit leak problem. You need a more profitable growth engine, not just a marketing engine, not just an outbound engine, not just more revenue, not just more leads. You need to score client quality beyond MRR. You need to figure out how bad fit clients are draining profit, team morale, and delivery capacity. And you need to understand how underpricing is showing up as operational pain inside of your org. Most MSPs assume that they have a lead problem when they actually have a profit leak problem. Before you start spending money on marketing, hiring another salesperson, investing in new tools, you need to understand where revenue, margin, capacity, and operational inefficiency are leaking inside the business. Growth amplifies your existing problems. If the foundation is weak, more leads simply create more chaos and more problems. Most MSPs do not have a lead problem. They have a revenue systems problem pretending to be a lead problem. Leads is where you feel the pain, but there are a million questions I can ask you that will tell me that's not really the problem that your business has. Only 1 in 20 MSPs that come to talk to me actually have a lead gen problem. Many MSP owners are asking, how do I get more leads? Should I hire an SDR? Should I increase my marketing budget? Should I raise prices? But the better question is, what is actually preventing profitable growth? There are really 2 questions I wanna ask you on a weekly basis about yourself and about your business. Are we profitable? Am I happy? Are we profitable? Am I happy? Until that's diagnosed, every growth investment just becomes a guess and you're just shoveling your cash into a hole. So how do you start scoring client quality beyond MRR, right? Revenue is the number. You've been told your whole career that it's all about revenue and endpoints, but MSPs are often evaluating clients based only on the monthly recurring revenue, the contract value, and the number of users. That just sounds like noise and chaos. Those metrics are only telling you a small part of the story. A better client quality factor would be to evaluate your clients based on profitability, the actual margin, ticket volume, support burden, strategic fit. That's alignment with ideal client profile, industry fit, service alignment. Operational impact. That's gonna look like ease of support, documentation quality, decision-making speed. Team impact. That's gonna look like your relationship quality, the stress created, the escalation frequency. Are your clients calling you the owner or are they putting in a ticket at the help desk? Also look at growth potential, cross-sell opportunities, expansion opportunities, referral potential. Not all revenue is good revenue. Say that back with me, guys. Not all revenue is good revenue. A $2,000 a month client who rarely creates tickets and refers new business may actually be more valuable than a $5,000 a month client who consumes Excessive support time and constantly escalate issues. Your bad fit clients are draining profit, morale, and capacity. Some of the symptoms you might be experiencing: team burnout, constant firefighting, margin compression, poor customer experience, and the inability to scale. So why the fuck is that happening to your organization? A lot of MSPs are accepting clients that are way outside their ICP, don't value their expertise. Buy on price alone, require excessive customization, and ignore best practices. That means that you have hidden costs. Bad fit clients create profit leaks. There's more labor than expected. Capacity leaks. They're preventing the team from serving your ideal clients. Morale leaks. There's an increase in frustration and burnout. You have clients that every time they call, your front desk person's having a panic attack, but, and you won't fire them because you are afraid of the revenue number going down. But you're not taking into account how much profit they're eating. Growth leaks. They're occupying resources needed for better opportunities. Your bad fit clients aren't just draining profit, they're draining your ability to grow, especially when you are doing founder-led sales and you as the founder are getting dragged into service because you signed a bad client. A lot of MSPs focus on client acquisition while avoiding client evaluation. And growth sometimes requires deciding who not to serve. Pricing is starting to show up as operational pain. Really common MSP thinking is if we lower prices, we'll win more deals. And that's how we all ended up in a commodity race to the bottom. And what's actually happening is underpricing is appearing first as delivery stress, staffing issues, overworked teams, service inconsistency, and client dissatisfaction. And that's long before it ever shows up on a financial report. What are some signs you can look for that you might be underpricing? Your team feels consistently overwhelmed. Profitability is inconsistent. The owner can't afford strategic hires and everyone is busy, but growth feels stalled. You need to reframe that. Pricing is not simply about covering costs. Pricing should reflect your business outcomes, expertise, risk reduction, and strategic value. Underpricing starts showing up as operational pain before it shows up on your P&L. Ask my dude Dean about this. Okay, so let's talk packaging. Buyers struggle to value tool lists, technical jargon, and long service descriptions, but I see these on almost every single MSP website. What buyers actually understand is reduced risk, increased productivity, and better business outcomes. I promise you, you can charge more for business outcomes than you can for tooling, technology, and talent. Tell them how it's gonna impact them in a year, in 2 years, in 3 years, in the outcomes of their business and what they actually care about. All right, so where did I come up with all of this? Revenue triage is what I do, and it is a product inside my business. When growth stalls, the problem is usually in one of 5 areas. ICP, ideal client profile. You are bringing on the wrong clients. You don't even know who the right clients are. Or number 2, positioning. There's no differentiation. You don't know how to make yourself sound different than the other MSPs in your market. And genuinely, most MSPs I talk to do not know how they're different. They all say we're proactive instead of reactive. We're likable. We are the best. We respond the fastest. But none of them are like, oh, we do this one really specific thing for this industry that I've never heard anyone else to solve that problem. Offer and pricing. It's number 3. You're undervaluing your services. Usually comes back to the positioning. You're undervaluing your services because you don't know how to translate what you do into value for your client or your prospect. You are expecting them to do that labor for you. It is 2026. Do not expect the prospect to sell your service to themselves. If they were ready to do that, you could probably just add checkout onto your website. Number four, the sales process. There's weak discovery and follow-up. You are not going deep enough in discovery. You are not mapping to business outcomes. You do not understand their business priorities, and therefore, later in the process, when you are trying to close a deal, when you are trying to pull them through, you don't know what to say, and you end up in this follow-up cycle of doom where you're just like any thoughts? Hello, how have you been? Sending them a random article. If you did discovery well, follow-up should literally never be hard. Number 5, accountability. There is no ownership of growth metrics. Everything just belongs to the founder, but it's not defined and it doesn't look like one trackable number. We don't know what the, that are, that sit underneath our big goal. Maybe you have a goal that you wanna grow $1 million this year. You do not know how many accounts that means you have to touch this month. That is a problem. You don't know your conversion metrics at every stage of the process, and therefore you don't know how much has to go in at the top of the funnel. So you're just screaming, we need more leads when you don't even actually know what that volume has to look like. When I do this math with MSPs, I cannot tell you the number of times that they, someone comes in and they're like, oh, we just need a few more leads a month. But when we crunch the numbers, they can only close 10 to 20% of the deals they're in. And they're only doing $2,000 a month and, and profit margins are only 10%. And when we actually do the math, the ROI is never going to get hit by just doing more leads. There are things that need to be fixed in the middle, but because we're not tracking them, we don't even know what needs to be fixed. You cannot scale chaos. Actually, you can. You're just gonna live in a super chaotic world until everything breaks. So if you're listening, What the fuck can you do other than calling me, booking a meeting, and paying me a whole bunch of money? First thing you wanna do is go review your last 10 closed deals. What do your best clients have in common? You closed 10 deals, segment them, grade them, go talk to your service delivery manager and be like, hey, scale of 1 to 10, how much do we like this client? Rate them all. Then figure out who your lowest margin clients are. Who consumes the most resources? If you cannot do this math, you need to hire someone to figure out how to do this math. for you, you need to know who is profitable. A company that pays you less and is less noisy may actually be a better prospect than the bigger company. And I know we all wanna go upmarket upstream, but if there's no profit in it and your larger clients are super noisy, that's a bad deal. It doesn't actually matter what the top number is that they're paying you. What matters is what comes out the bottom and goes into the bank account and what allows you to hire and grow and continue to be Who are your highest ticket volume clients and are they profitable? So go ask service delivery, pull up the report in ConnectWise, whatever. Figure out who's doing the most tickets and ask yourself, are they paying enough to be worth being this noisy? Then discount activity. Go look at how many discounts have been given in the last 90 to 180 days. Ask yourself like, why were those discounts given? Was there a reason? Was there an outcome? Did this improve client satisfaction? Did it get us referrals? Did it get us a case study? Why did we discount this? Was it less work than we expected? Then we need to talk about founder dependency. Where is the owner still required to close deals and deliver service and why? And can that be solved? When we're talking about the future of MSP growth, there are a couple of key trends. AI is gonna reduce the value of commodity services. So if you're literally just pushing buttons, someone can automate that. And strategic advisory services are gonna become more important. It's gonna be more valuable what you can tell a business they need to do than what you can do for them, I think. And differentiation's gonna matter more than tools. No one really cares what your stack is. They care how you do things different than other MSPs. And I'm not talking about your process. How do you solve problems? What problems have you solved? What problem are they having today that they're not gonna have when they onboard with you? Buyers care about your outcomes, not your technical jargon. And MSP owners are gonna need to become revenue architects rather than firefighters unless they're gonna hire somebody to do that. The future belongs to MSPs that create strategic value, not just technical value. So there's this common MSP reaction when revenue slows down or pipeline gets thin. The owner immediately is just more leads, more leads, more leads. And what I usually find is existing underneath that is unclear positioning, weak differentiation, low close rates, poor retention, bad fit clients, and underpriced agreements. So most MSPs don't just need more leads. They need to stop wasting the opportunities that they already have. And more leads won't fix a broken revenue engine. They just help break it faster. So think of it as if the pipe is leaking and you just pump more water down it, the pipe's gonna explode. Dude, if you don't have a sales process, what business do you have asking someone to hand you a bunch of leads that you don't know how to close and you don't know how to move through the pipeline? There is a cost to you being generic. And most MSPs today look fucking identical. I pull up your website, it's obviously a template. I can tell you who you went to get it done. And it says absolutely nothing about you that's unique. You are borrowing someone else's template. Messaging, same website, same service page, same trusted technology partner, same cybersecurity messaging. And it is creating pricing pressure on your shoulders because when you look identical side by side, they will just buy from who is cheaper. They're just gonna buy the cheaper solution. If I'm— Hey dude, I have a bunch of shoes, Nike, New Balance, Adidas, whatever. If you don't have brand loyalty, You're just gonna buy the cheapest shoe, right? And if I can't tell you what the difference is and it's all just, oh, you put 'em on your feet, then you walk, that means nothing. I have to get you to buy into the difference for the brand. When buyers can't tell the difference between providers, they only compare price. When they understand that you're different, then they start comparing value. You want to sell on value, not price. You want them to think that you are better and worth more money. The fastest way for you to become a commodity in your market is to sound like everybody else. You can't charge premium prices with commodity messaging. It's just, that's just not how the world works. You don't get to be like, oh, we wanna be a $250 a seat MSP while your website looks like Joe down the road. A lot of MSPs feel like they're busy, but they're just not growing. That sounds like we've never been busier. And yet the revenue's flat, the margins are flat, the team is exhausted, and the owner's still closing everything. Activity is not growth. Being busy does not mean that you are productive. And many MSPs have accidentally built a machine that maximizes their effort instead of profitability. And I could go on about this for hours and hours, not just on the revenue side, but what you've done inside your— to reward activity instead of Intellect and, and working smarter, not harder. Busy's not a growth strategy, and you shouldn't just be rewarding your employees for activity, especially if they're in sales. I don't care how many calls they make. I care if they are talking to people, having conversations, booking meetings. I care if those meetings are moving into deals and those deals are closing. If it's not moving, then it really doesn't matter how much activity we're putting in if the conversions aren't happening. It's the same on the service side of things, but that's somebody else's lane, so I'm gonna shut the fuck up. There's a lot of founder dependency and founder bottlenecking with MSPs. A lot of MSPs think that they need to just hire a salesperson, but if you haven't done the pre-work, that's not gonna be it. You're probably gonna be even more involved than you were before. You're gonna be frustrated. You're gonna feel like you're burning money. What you actually need is a repeatable sales process that doesn't rely on your personality as the founder. If every deal still needs the owner, you haven't built a sales process, you've built a dependency, and that dependency is going to crush your revenue goals. And I don't mean in a good way. I mean, you're gonna mourn them. Revenue per employee is a metric that is rarely, rarely tracked at MSPs and is part of the reason that this year I've talked to 3 separate MSPs over the $5 million mark. that other than paying themselves a modest salary, do not have profit. Well, meanwhile, I have million, $2 million clients that are profiting more than 20% a year. And I'm not saying I'm some operational guru that's gonna fix your business. I am not. I'm just saying I can come in and look at the numbers and say, dude, why do you have 100 employees when you only have $2 million in revenue? The math is not mathing. You have to be paying everybody poverty wages. You cannot be making any money. So ask yourself, what's the revenue per employee? What's the gross margin per employee? And what is ticket volume per employee? You need to stop hiring before you fix the efficiency. Hiring doesn't fix your efficiency. It often hides it because you have more people being busier. It gets noisy, but that doesn't mean that the numbers are gonna come out in a way that makes any sense whatsoever. You need a little bit of stronger future prediction. While AI will reduce the value of commodity services, it's not just the future of MSP groups. AI is compressing the value of reactive support. Automation is eliminating much of the perceived value of commodity IT work, and the winners are going to be MSPs that own a niche, solve business problems, advise leadership teams, and create measurable business outcomes. Your future MSP isn't selling IT support. They're selling business certainty, and businesses live on top of technology. You do not have a growth problem until you've proven you don't have an efficiency problem. Okay, I'm done. Okay. Sorry for ranting at you.