The IT Experts Podcast

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!

In this episode of The IT Experts Podcast, Stuart and I mark a genuine milestone, our 300th episode, and 300 episodes later we sit down to share what we have learnt across seven years and every one of those conversations. This is not a tidy list of tips. It is a set of honest reflections on what has changed, what has stayed true, and what we would tell our younger selves if we could. 

We start with the belief that has shifted the most for Stuart. Every MSP owner knows they need a plan, and that has never changed. What has changed is the recognition that most owners already know what to do. The real gap is accountability, having someone or something that holds you to the actions you already know you need to take. Overwhelm shows up more than almost anything else in our coaching sessions, and it nearly always comes from a blurry list of a hundred things rather than a lack of knowledge. 

300 episodes later, my own thinking has shifted too, particularly around vision, mission and values. I once believed that work was reserved for bigger businesses with bigger budgets. Seven years on, I have watched smaller MSPs transform once they get genuine clarity on who they are, who they help and why. That clarity becomes the foundation the rest of the plan sits on. 

Some lessons have stayed constant the whole way through. Stuart is firm that MSPs do not need more leads, they need a better business to bring those leads into. Structure, people, process and culture are the legs of the stool, and if any of them are weak the business cannot carry the weight of growth. On my side, the advice that remains just as true today is that MSPs must understand their target market properly. Too many businesses try to serve everybody, end up competing on price, and repeat the same generic messaging as every other provider in the channel. 

We also talk candidly about the mistake we see repeated most often, waiting for a crisis before making a change. Stuart shares how businesses often join us shortly before losing a major client, and how that shift from growth thinking to survival thinking can set a business back for months. I share a similar pattern, where owners have tried a marketing agency, a salesperson or a lead generation service without first understanding their own model, their own audience and their own value. 

Looking ahead, Stuart believes the next three years demand stronger processes, documentation and governance, so that AI can be layered onto a business that is genuinely ready for it. I focus on people, and the importance of bringing in younger, more driven talent who can push a business forward rather than simply maintaining what already exists. Being brave enough to shake up a settled team matters too. 

Finally, we reflect on the lessons we each wish we had understood sooner. For me, it is the power of a properly connected operating model, one that content, pricing, packaging and account management all hang off, rather than a model that looks good but lacks a true, connected story. Stuart reminds us that this connected story is what allows a business to articulate its value to employees, prospects and existing clients alike. 

If you are somewhere between four hundred thousand and nine hundred thousand pounds in turnover and feel stuck, this episode will resonate. Structure, accountability and a genuine understanding of your value are the threads that run through everything we have learnt, 300 episodes later. 

 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 Neil Shaw to unpack why most MSPs stay stuck, and what it really takes to build lasting momentum after years of plodding along. Neil spent over thirty years in the IT industry, built and exited his own MSP, and now helps other owners avoid the traps he fell into himself. We start by exploring what stuck actually looks like. It rarely means rock bottom. More often it is an owner who has found a level of success and settled there, surrounded by choice paralysis, too many options, and no clear next step. This is one of the clearest reasons why most MSPs stay stuck, they default to what they know rather than making a deliberate decision to move forward. 

 

We talk about the danger of referral success. When new business keeps arriving without effort, there is little pressure to build proper marketing or sales processes, which quietly reinforces why most MSPs stay stuck for years longer than they need to. Neil shares how he and his business partner stripped their own business back to basics, figuring out exactly what was missing before hiring ahead of need rather than waiting until they were creaking under pressure. We spend real time on letting go, and Neil is candid about how hard this is for techie owners who are used to doing everything themselves. His advice is simple and powerful. Look at the tasks that belong to old you rather than business owner you, and find the right person to take them on, even if they only reach eighty percent of your standard to begin with. 

 

Shiny object syndrome comes up too, particularly with the flood of AI tools now aimed at MSPs. Neil's advice cuts through the noise. Before buying anything new, work out what would break if you were away for a day, a week, or a month, then fix those things first. We also get into some of the most common regrets Neil has seen, firing bad clients too late, waiting too long to raise prices, and holding onto delivery work that should have been handed off years earlier. This theme of avoidable delay runs right through why most MSPs stay stuck, and Neil is refreshingly direct about the fact that most owners already know what needs to change, they simply have not made the decision yet. 

  

One of the most practical moments comes when Neil walks through his own client matrix, ranking accounts by spend and by how much hassle they cause, then working through the list from least favourite upwards. It is a simple, repeatable way to raise prices with confidence and free up capacity for the clients who deserve it. We also talk about trust, and how building a team who can think for themselves, rather than constantly asking permission, is one of the biggest unlocks for any owner trying to step back from day to day delivery. 

 

Towards the end we shift to momentum itself. Motivation fades fast once real life gets in the way, so Neil talks about the value of an accountability partner, someone to share your roadmap with and lean on when the energy dips. His rapid fire answers say it all, the best decision he ever delayed was getting rid of a bad client, and the worst was not raising prices sooner. If you recognise any of this in your own MSP, the message from this episode is clear. Understanding why most MSPs stay stuck is the first step, and taking one small, imperfect action this week is the one that actually moves you forward. 

 

You can find Neil Shaw through his 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!