The IT Experts Podcast

In this episode of The IT Experts Podcast, I sit down with Carolyn April, VP of Research at GTIA, to unpack the 2026 State of the Channel report and what it means for your MSP right now. We hear plenty of opinions at industry events about where the channel is heading. This conversation brings something different to the table, real data from across the entire channel ecosystem, built on fifteen years of research. If you want to understand the forces shaping your business over the next twelve months, this is one to listen to with a notebook in hand. 

  

Carolyn April opens by explaining how the State of the Channel began as a pulse check on the health of the industry, back when GTIA was the association arm of CompTIA. The sample goes well beyond membership, covering MSPs, ITSPs, resellers, consultants, vendors and distributors. That breadth gives the findings real weight, and it means the trends we discuss reflect what is happening in businesses like yours. 

  

The first big theme is confidence. MSPs are feeling optimistic, and that optimism is tempered with caution. AI brings huge opportunity alongside a significant business shift, and the wider economic and geopolitical picture makes forecasting harder than ever. I shared a conversation with an MSP owner who has lost seven good clients this year because those businesses closed their doors. Nothing to do with the service they delivered. Carolyn April explains why resilience matters so much here. The MSPs that came through the pandemic in good shape were the ones with strong operational fundamentals already in place, healthy cash flow, lines of credit and a clear view of their numbers. 

  

This links directly to something we see every week inside The MSP Growth Hub. So many owners believe a couple of new clients will fix everything. When we relaunched our account management framework with 55 MSPs in the room, not a single new sales tactic was needed to give them nearly two years of valuable work. The data backs this up. The companies ahead of plan, who track their margins and know their numbers, are the same companies doing more with AI, doing more with cybersecurity and setting higher growth targets. 

  

We then explore what surprised Carolyn April most this year. For the UK and Ireland, workforce and skills gaps came out as the number one challenge, the only region to rank it first. We talk about the lasting effects of Brexit on skills mobility, the growing maturity of offshore service desks and account management, and the leadership challenge of managing remote teams well. Around 65 to 70 percent of the conversations we have inside The MSP Growth Hub come back to leadership, so this one landed close to home. 

  

AI adoption is where the gap becomes really clear. The study found 98 percent of channel companies are using AI in some form. Only 20 percent have a strategic approach with governance, policy and a named leader responsible for AI. That maturity gap is immense, and Carolyn April makes a strong case for getting your own house in order before taking AI services to market. The opportunity is huge. Complexity is the number one driver of channel health, and customers who dive in too quickly, or not at all, need a trusted advisor to guide them. That is why consulting is on the rise. 

  

We also tackle pricing. Token based AI costs are already causing sticker shock at enterprise level, and traditional per user and per device models are starting to feel out of step. Consumption and outcome based pricing are on the horizon, and nobody has the blueprint yet. My advice is simple, approach with caution and avoid embedding every tool so deeply that you cannot unwind it. 

  

The biggest surprise of all was vendor satisfaction. In the UK and Ireland, the share of partners who were very satisfied with their vendors fell from 37 percent to 19 percent. Programme changes, a heavier sales focus and the disruption AI is bringing have all played a part, alongside a wave of new AI vendors competing for attention. 

  

Carolyn April closes with three clear priorities. Put AI governance and a strategic leader in place first. Strengthen your operational fundamentals across finance, sales and marketing. Tackle workforce challenges through outsourcing, partnering with other MSPs and upskilling the brilliant people already on your team. The mindset shift is clear. Growth comes from building a resilient, well led business first, then using AI and new opportunities to accelerate from a strong foundation. 

  

To get hold of the full report, head to GTIA.org and become a member. You can also catch Carolyn at ChannelCon EMEA in London on 9 and 10 November, where she will be presenting this research and hosting a panel with some of the biggest names in the industry. 

  

You can connect with Carolyn April on her LinkedIn HERE. 

 

Make sure to check out our Ultimate MSP Growth Guide, a free guide that walks you through a proven process to take your MSP from stuck to scalable, without working even more hours. It's 44 pages rammed with advice, insights and inspiration to help you decide what support is available to you now if you want to grow and scale your business. Click HERE to get your copy. 

 

Connect on LinkedIn HERE with Ian and also with Stuart by clicking this LINK 

 

And when you're ready to take the next step in growing your MSP, come and take the Scale with Confidence MSP Mastery Quiz. In just three minutes, you'll get a 360-degree scan of your MSP and identify the one or two tactics that could help you find more time, engage & align your people and generate more leads. 

 

If you're serious about growth and want to explore what this could look like for your MSP, you can book a Right Fit Clarity Call with us HERE. 

OR  

To join our amazing Facebook Group of over 400 MSPs where we are helping you Scale Up with Confidence, then click HERE 

Until next time, look after yourself and I'll catch up with you soon!

In this episode of The IT Experts Podcast, I want to challenge one of the most common success measures in our industry. Are you measuring success, or are you simply measuring size? After more than 300 episodes, some themes keep coming back, and this is one we hear every week from prospects, clients and the wider community. It is the gap between how much revenue you bring in and how much profit you keep, and why closing that gap is the key to building a more valuable MSP. 

  

So many owners set their sights on the million-pound turnover mark, or on growing to 30 people, as if headcount were the prize. I know MSPs well past a million pounds who are making very little, and I know MSPs turning over six or seven hundred thousand who are absolutely nailing it, with more in their pocket than competitors twice their size. A bigger turnover means more money flowing through the business. It often means more cost flowing out the other end too. You can run a profitable million pound MSP with eight to ten people. When I hear of a million-pound business carrying 24 people, I know straight away the numbers cannot work. 

  

Bigger teams bring more complexity, and that complexity lands on the owner. Most MSP owners never planned to lead large teams, which is why leadership is the area we help with most inside The MSP Growth Hub. Here is the test I often share. If you are too busy to make decisions, too caught up in the tech, or the person everything waits for, you have a leadership opportunity sitting right in front of you. The most successful MSPs grow because the owner has time to think. Strategic thinking time leads to better decisions, better clients, and better profit. 

  

We also talk about the clients who quietly drain your margin. Many owners fear saying no to anyone. Some of your biggest clients are the noisiest and most demanding, and very few MSPs track profitability by client or by service. In some cases, you would be better off letting that client go, because the cost of serving them outweighs the value they bring. I share the story of MSPs who joined us bloated, with ten or twelve people in the wrong roles. One owner described his approach as destroy and rebuild. He took control of his most important clients, built the right team around them, and came out leaner and stronger. Another member recently sold his business for an eight times multiple with a smaller team than he had two years earlier. He walked out with no earnout, because he had become ONN, owner not needed. Three or four years before the sale, he knew his numbers so well it was almost unhealthy. That is how a more valuable MSP is built. 

 

From there, I walk through four practical actions. The first is to measure net profit and EBITDA before you celebrate revenue. Keep a close eye on client concentration, so that no single client represents more than 10 to 15 percent of your revenue. I share an old analogy about pound coins leaving a drawer each morning and returning each evening with friends, because every pound that leaves your business should come back with a return. Track revenue per employee and aim for north of £150,000, and track profit per employee alongside it. These are the numbers that separate a busy business from a more valuable MSP. 

 

The second action is to attract profitable, right fit clients. If someone is shopping on price, let them go. Make sure projects and managed services each stand on their own commercially, so a dangling carrot does not leave you in a pickle. The third is to build a lean team with the right people in the right roles. Keep spans of control to six to eight people per leader, design roles that are plug and play, and use AI to upskill your people and raise quality, rather than to cut heads. The fourth is to review your KPIs monthly and quarterly so they drive business value. Even a small MSP can start with one or two. This is not about boiling the ocean.

 
Something Stuart taught me many years ago still guides how we work. Where is the data? Show me the data. When your decisions rest on meaningful business metrics, you invest with confidence, you know which opportunities will pay, and you build a more valuable MSP that is easier to scale and far easier to sell on your terms.

 
Better clients beat more clients. We do not want you to build the biggest MSP in town. We want you to build the best one. So I will leave you with the same question I close the episode with. What are you measuring in your MSP this month to move your profitability up? Answer that honestly and you are already on the path to a more valuable MSP, with more time, confidence and freedom as the owner.  

Make sure to check out our Ultimate MSP Growth Guide, a free guide that walks you through a proven process to take your MSP from stuck to scalable, without working even more hours. It's 44 pages rammed with advice, insights and inspiration to help you decide what support is available to you now if you want to grow and scale your business. Click HERE to get your copy. 

 

Connect on LinkedIn HERE with Ian and also with Stuart by clicking this LINK 

 

And when you're ready to take the next step in growing your MSP, come and take the Scale with Confidence MSP Mastery Quiz. In just three minutes, you'll get a 360-degree scan of your MSP and identify the one or two tactics that could help you find more time, engage & align your people and generate more leads. 

 

If you're serious about growth and want to explore what this could look like for your MSP, you can book a Right Fit Clarity Call with us HERE. 

OR  

To join our amazing Facebook Group of over 400 MSPs where we are helping you Scale Up with Confidence, then click HERE 

Until next time, look after yourself and I'll catch up with you soon!

In this episode of The IT Experts Podcast, Stuart Warwick joins me to talk about one of the topics that makes most MSP owners squirm in their seat, raising your prices. It sounds simple on paper and it gets an eye roll from almost everyone who hears it, yet putting your prices up is genuinely one of the fastest routes to a healthier, more profitable MSP. 

 

We start by unpacking why raising your prices feels like such a psychological battle. Most MSP owners are scared their clients will leave, go out to tender, or feel hard done by. What we uncover is that the real block sits underneath that fear. Raising your prices is really about positioning yourself for value. Until you value your own business and translate that into the right pricing for what you deliver, no pricing conversation will land properly with your clients. 

 

Stuart makes a point that stuck with me. Most MSPs have not touched pricing for their legacy clients in five, ten, even fifteen years. Costs keep moving, hardware, chips, licensing, inflation, yet the invoice stays the same. The starting point for raising your prices is always your numbers. Do you know your margins? Do you know what each client is actually costing you to service? Without that clarity, you cannot confidently or intelligently decide where prices need to move. 

 

One story from the episode says it all. A client of ours had a base price of between fifteen and twenty pounds a user and genuinely believed they could not compete on anything higher. It took five years for them to shift that belief. Once they rebuilt their packaging, told the story properly to their existing base, and phased the change in gently, they added one hundred and eighty eight thousand pounds a year in additional profit. That is profit, not turnover, and it transformed everything from pensions to investment in new technology, eventually helping them toward a strong exit. 

 

We also talk about the ninety percent problem. New clients are easy. You set your pricing, your margin looks healthy, and everyone is pleased. The real heavy lifting sits with your existing base, because the vast majority of your recurring revenue usually sits on legacy packages that have never caught up with the value you now deliver. Raising your prices for existing clients means selling a story, not simply issuing a new invoice. Explain what has changed, cybersecurity, cloud, automation, the modern tools you now provide, and frame the new pricing around the outcomes they get rather than the number itself. 

 

Stuart shares a brilliant piece of thinking here too. If you have a sensible, well framed conversation with a client about raising your prices and they agree, you make more profit. If they say no and decide to leave, you also make more profit because you remove a client who was quietly costing you money. It genuinely is a win either way, and once you know your numbers, most MSPs can point to two or three noisy clients who are doing exactly that. 

 

We close by talking about confidence and selling without selling. Nobody loves the idea of pushing products, yet raising your prices sits far more comfortably when you shift the framing from selling to helping a client buy. Know your numbers, build real belief in the value you deliver, tell the story with clarity, and bring your existing clients with you at a pace that respects the relationship you have built. Price condition new clients from day one so annual increases become an expected part of working with you rather than an awkward surprise years down the line. 

 

Higher profits, stronger retention, and the confidence to invest in recruitment and marketing all start from the same place. Raising your prices properly, and believing you deserve to. 

 Make sure to check out our Ultimate MSP Growth Guide, a free guide that walks you through a proven process to take your MSP from stuck to scalable, without working even more hours. It's 44 pages rammed with advice, insights and inspiration to help you decide what support is available to you now if you want to grow and scale your business. Click HERE to get your copy. 

 

Connect on LinkedIn HERE with Ian and also with Stuart by clicking this LINK 

 

And when you're ready to take the next step in growing your MSP, come and take the Scale with Confidence MSP Mastery Quiz. In just three minutes, you'll get a 360-degree scan of your MSP and identify the one or two tactics that could help you find more time, engage & align your people and generate more leads. 

 

If you're serious about growth and want to explore what this could look like for your MSP, you can book a Right Fit Clarity Call with us HERE. 

OR  

To join our amazing Facebook Group of over 400 MSPs where we are helping you Scale Up with Confidence, then click HERE 

Until next time, look after yourself and I'll catch up with you soon!

In this episode of The IT Experts Podcast, I want to talk about one of the most common reasons MSP owners end up coming to the Growth Hub for help, and it is one I wish more people addressed before it becomes a crisis. That dreaded phone call. Your biggest client rings up and tells you they have been bought out, they are in financial difficulty, or they are simply leaving. If you are lucky, you have a three year contract in place. If you are not, you could lose that revenue overnight. This is client concentration risk in its rawest form, and it catches so many MSP owners completely off guard. 

Client concentration risk builds quietly. On paper, your revenue looks healthy because your biggest client keeps growing with you. Underneath that growth, your exposure is increasing every month. Your costs stay fixed while your income becomes tied to the decisions of one organisation you do not control. When that client leaves, the cash flow shock is sudden, staff redundancies can become a real possibility, and instead of planning for growth you are firefighting to survive. 

I want to share the five steps we walk our own clients through in the Growth Hub to manage client concentration risk properly, and I would love for you to take action on these today rather than filing them away for later. 

The first step is to calculate the revenue percentage contributed by your top ten clients. Many owners only look at their bank balance and assume everything is fine. A healthy bank balance tells you nothing about debtors, accruals, or how exposed you really are. Once you know the numbers, you can start making informed decisions rather than hopeful ones. 

The second step is to stress test what would happen if you lost your largest client tomorrow. Look at your contract length, whether that is thirty days or five years, and talk this through with your team. Bringing your help desk and wider team into this conversation matters, because client concentration risk should never sit with the owner alone. 

The third step is to build and maintain a rolling ninety day cash flow forecast. This single habit gives you far more clarity than watching your bank balance ever will. It shows you your reserves, your incoming recurring revenue, and your project work, so you can make confident decisions around recruitment and resourcing rather than reactive ones. 

The fourth step is to set a target to reduce dependency on any single client over time. If your biggest client currently represents fifty percent of turnover, aim to bring that down gradually, perhaps to forty percent next year and thirty the year after. Best practice suggests no single client should represent more than ten percent of turnover for a strong business valuation, and closing that gap steadily protects you from client concentration risk without damaging the relationship with that client. 

The fifth and hardest step is strengthening what we call your new client runway, so you consistently replace revenue rather than relying on one relationship to carry the business. Account management keeps your existing clients happy, and it needs pairing with sales and marketing activity that brings in fresh leads every single month. We call this ONCA, one new client a month. Build credibility with your target market, stay consistent on your messaging, and bring your existing clients into events where they can introduce people who are not yet clients. 

Reducing client concentration risk gives you a more resilient business. Your valuation improves, your cash flow forecasting becomes sharper, and your leadership time shifts from firefighting back into planning for growth. No MSP owner wants that call from their biggest client to be the moment they finally address this, so I would encourage you to run these five steps this week with your team. 

 

Make sure to check out our Ultimate MSP Growth Guide, a free guide that walks you through a proven process to take your MSP from stuck to scalable, without working even more hours. It's 44 pages rammed with advice, insights and inspiration to help you decide what support is available to you now if you want to grow and scale your business. Click HERE to get your copy. 

 

Connect on LinkedIn HERE with Ian and also with Stuart by clicking this LINK 

 

And when you're ready to take the next step in growing your MSP, come and take the Scale with Confidence MSP Mastery Quiz. In just three minutes, you'll get a 360-degree scan of your MSP and identify the one or two tactics that could help you find more time, engage & align your people and generate more leads. 

 

If you're serious about growth and want to explore what this could look like for your MSP, you can book a Right Fit Clarity Call with us HERE. 

OR 

To join our amazing Facebook Group of over 400 MSPs where we are helping you Scale Up with Confidence, then click HERE 

Until next time, look after yourself and I'll catch up with you soon!

In this episode of The IT Experts Podcast, I sit down with Adam Monks, group director for technical services at Academia Technology Group, to unpack the mindset shift that helped him build a ten million pound co-managed MSP. Adam Monks started his career on the help desk over twenty years ago and worked his way up through service delivery, customer success and professional services before deciding to build something of his own alongside his co-founder Chris. What makes Adam Monks' story so valuable for MSP owners is that his business, SmartDesc, grew almost entirely through a co-managed model, working with organisations of three hundred and five hundred staff from the very beginning, rather than starting small and scaling up gradually. 

  

We talk about the early days, where trust and reputation carried everything. Adam Monks explains that in the beginning, clients are buying you, not your accreditations or vendor badges, because those simply take time to earn. Doing what you say you will do, delivering safely and quickly, and building a reputation for getting things done became the foundation for growth. That same principle stayed true even as the business scaled into the millions, though the accreditations and credibility markers mattered more as the deals got bigger. 

  

One of the most interesting parts of the conversation covers the middle years, where Adam Monks describes the frustration of being seen as too small for the bigger contracts, even with strong references and a track record of results. He shares how sector focus, particularly within the charity and nonprofit space, gave SmartDesc an edge because those organisations were more open to sharing recommendations with each other. We also discuss the nervous moments, including a year when two founding customers, who made up around seventy percent of revenue, were both due for renewal at the same time. Adam Monks recalls standing in the street with his co-founder weighing up what could happen if neither renewed. 

  

A turning point for the business came when growth stopped being reliable. Adam Monks talks candidly about the year the numbers flattened, and how that pushed him to bring in proper marketing support for the first time. Working with a specialist agency, SmartDesc introduced a monthly newsletter, quarterly round tables, webinars and events hosted through their Microsoft Elevate Partner status. Adam Monks is clear that round tables delivered the strongest results, not through instant leads but through consistent, senior level conversations that built trust over nine to twelve months. Alongside this, becoming a direct Microsoft CSP opened an entirely new revenue stream. 

  

We also get into the leadership challenge that so many MSP owners will recognise. Adam Monks describes the awkward middle stage of twenty five to forty staff, where you are too big to stay hands on with everything, yet too small to have a fully structured leadership team. Bringing in a fractional finance director helped SmartDesc break through that stage, giving visibility into which parts of the business, MSP services, fractional leadership, cybersecurity and procurement, were genuinely profitable, and allowing accountable leaders to own each area. 

  

Adam Monks also shares his honest view on running fully managed and co-managed services side by side, including the margin differences between the two models and why choosing fewer, bigger customers made sense for his business. The conversation closes with the story of SmartDesc's merger with academia technology group in October 2024, a deal that took the combined business to around two hundred and seventy five staff and gave Adam Monks a seat on the board. 

  

If you are an MSP owner who has ever felt boxed in by size, or you are wrestling with the leadership gap that comes with growth, this conversation with Adam Monks will give you plenty to think about and apply straight away. 

 

Connect with Adam Monks through LinkedIn and website.  

 

Make sure to check out our Ultimate MSP Growth Guide, a free guide that walks you through a proven process to take your MSP from stuck to scalable, without working even more hours. It's 44 pages rammed with advice, insights and inspiration to help you decide what support is available to you now if you want to grow and scale your business. Click HERE to get your copy. 

 

Connect on LinkedIn HERE with Ian and also with Stuart by clicking this LINK 

 

And when you're ready to take the next step in growing your MSP, come and take the Scale with Confidence MSP Mastery Quiz. In just three minutes, you'll get a 360-degree scan of your MSP and identify the one or two tactics that could help you find more time, engage & align your people and generate more leads. 

 

If you're serious about growth and want to explore what this could look like for your MSP, you can book a Right Fit Clarity Call with us HERE. 

OR  

To join our amazing Facebook Group of over 400 MSPs where we are helping you Scale Up with Confidence, then click HERE 

Until next time, look after yourself and I'll catch up with you soon!