The IT Experts Podcast

In this episode of The IT Experts Podcast, I take a step back from the usual growth tactics and invite you into a conversation about what wealth really means for MSP owners. We are past the midpoint of 2026, and rather than waiting until year end to reflect, I wanted to offer a checkup from the neck up right now, while there is still time to make the second half count. 

  

I talk through the MSP journey many of us recognise. You start in survive, move into drive, then into thrive, and eventually reach arrive, the point where the business works for you rather than the other way round. Along that journey, it is easy to lose sight of your original why. You get caught up in the grind, in the day to day running of the business, and somewhere along the line the reason you started fades into the background. This episode is my attempt to help you reconnect with it, because understanding what wealth really means to you personally changes everything about how you build and run your MSP. 

  

I share why Stuart and I built The MSP Growth Hub the way we did. Our own why is rooted in family, in supporting people with additional needs, and in using the business as an enabler for something much bigger than turnover or profit margin. That is the thread that runs through this episode. Profit should be treated as fuel for your vision, not the end goal itself. When you start asking what wealth really means beyond the numbers on a balance sheet, you open the door to a much richer definition of success, one that includes freedom, fulfilment, relationships, and the life you actually want to live outside the business. 

  

I cover the danger of decisions driven by fear rather than by vision and values, and how burnout, stress, and anxiety often show up when purpose has quietly disappeared from the picture. I share a simple challenge you can do right now, wherever you are reading or listening from. Revisit your original why. Write down how it has evolved. Bring your team into that conversation. I mention two books that have shaped my own thinking recently, Simon Sinek's Start With Why and Arnold Schwarzenegger's Be Useful, both of which pushed me to think bigger about the supported living homes I want to help build. 

  

We also explore the people you surround yourself with. You become the average of the five people you spend the most time with, so if you want a bigger vision for your business and your life, it pays to move towards people who inspire and challenge you rather than those who keep you small. I talk about building reflection into your leadership rhythm, measuring how far you have come rather than only how far you have left to go, and leading with transparency even when others doubt what you are trying to achieve. 

  

Ultimately, this episode is an invitation to define what wealth really means to you, in your own words, on your own terms. It might mean more time with family, more freedom to choose how you spend your Fridays, or the ability to give back to your community in a meaningful way. Whatever it looks like for you, the message stays the same. Profit is your fuel. It is not the finish line. 

  

I hope this gives you space to reflect and reconnect with your own purpose as an MSP 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, I sit down with Yvonne Matzk to explore a subject I rarely get the chance to talk about on this show, the invisible ceilings that hold back talent, culture, and growth inside our businesses. Yvonne Matzk is the founder of Coachere, a coaching and consulting practice supporting leaders and the next generation of talent in the IT industry, and also the founder of the Channel Community, a free network built to help emerging talent find mentoring in a safe and inclusive environment. I loved hearing the story behind her book, Smashing the Class Ceiling, born from research showing that only nine percent of people working in tech came from a low socioeconomic background. Yvonne Matzk and her fellow founders at the Channel Community realised how many of them had come from working class backgrounds themselves, and decided to raise awareness of this gap by aligning with the Social Mobility Foundation. What started as a podcast grew into a book, designed to showcase people who started from humble beginnings and went on to build genuinely impressive careers. 

  

Yvonne Matzk introduces the idea of the class pay gap, a concept she told me she had never heard of until she began this work, despite having lived its effects throughout her own career. She reflects candidly on her early years on a training wage, doing work worth considerably more, and later struggling even as a business owner to ask for what she was worth. She explains that people from working class backgrounds often carry a quiet sense of gratitude that stops them from demanding fair value, while those from more privileged upbringings tend to carry a natural confidence that opens doors more easily. Listening to this, I could see clearly how it creates a hidden pool of talent that most MSPs never think to look for, simply because they keep recruiting from the same familiar places. 

  

Yvonne Matzk and I spent time discussing why this matters so much for MSP culture. Hiring people who look, sound, and think alike feels comfortable, yet it quietly limits how a business solves problems and challenges itself to grow. Yvonne Matzk argues that talent is everywhere, while opportunity is not, and I agree that businesses need to actively remove unnecessary barriers such as rigid degree requirements if they want access to that wider pool. She points to research showing that resilience, passion and work ethic predict success far more reliably than qualifications ever could, and these are the traits I encourage every MSP owner to recruit for. 

  

We also explored confidence, or as Yvonne Matzk prefers to call it, courage. She describes confidence as a learned behaviour shaped by upbringing and environment rather than something people are simply born with or without. Overcoming that conditioning, she says, starts with recognising fear for what it is and choosing to act anyway. I found this links directly into leadership, where Yvonne Matzk made clear to me that culture always starts and ends with the owner. If a leader is not willing to be vulnerable, admit uncertainty and model the behaviour they want to see, no amount of clever recruitment will shift the culture underneath it. 

  

Yvonne Matzk shared some genuinely practical steps I want every listener to try. She suggests MSP owners ask their own teams what the culture genuinely feels like, rather than assuming, and recommends simple anonymous surveys as a starting point for honest feedback. She encourages leaders to benchmark where their culture sits today against where they want it to be, then commit to closing that gap deliberately. I want to leave you with the same challenge Yvonne Matzk gave me, sense check your culture, ask your people what they really think, and rethink where you are looking for talent, because most skills are transferable and the right people are often hiding in plain sight. 

 

Connect with Yvonne Matzk through her LinkedIn and websites: Coachere and The Channel Community. You can get her book 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 tackle one of the most common frustrations I hear from MSP owners every single week, the belief that MSP marketing simply does not work. I hear it constantly. Someone has tried an agency, a friend who knows social media, some pay per click, or a few Facebook ads, and each time the results fell flat. The real issue, as I explain, is not the tactic itself. It is the absence of a system that connects every activity back to booked calls and revenue. 

 
I open by challenging you to interrogate your marketing agency with one question, how does what you are doing connect to more booked calls. I have found that many agencies do not understand the MSP model, focusing on surface level activity like website redesigns and vague positioning work rather than a measurable path to pipeline. Inside The MSP Growth Hub, this connection between activity and results sits at the heart of the New Client Runway framework I teach from day one. 

 
I also address the MSP habit of leaning heavily on referrals. While steady referrals feel comfortable, I point out that this approach leaves owners exposed. If your biggest client leaves or a referral source dries up, you can lose a significant chunk of monthly recurring revenue overnight, with no backup plan in place. This is where account management, paired with consistent MSP marketing, becomes essential for protecting and growing your income. 

 
A central theme of the episode is what I call the stop start marketing cycle. I describe the familiar pattern, a quiet pipeline triggers a burst of marketing activity, a referral arrives, focus shifts back to delivery, and a few months later, the cycle repeats. I call this Groundhog Day marketing and I link it directly to why so many MSPs remain stuck under a million pounds in turnover. Without consistent visibility, you never build the compounding authority needed to be recognised as the expert in your niche. 

 
To fix this, I share five practical steps for building an effective MSP marketing system. The first is committing to a twelve-month runway rather than a three-month test, broken down into quarters and months so you know exactly what to focus on and when. The second is setting leading indicators, tracking visibility, conversations, and engagement rather than only watching for closed deals. I share a real example of a client who needed fresh leads, better numbers, and a profit first mindset, showing how leading indicators reveal what is really happening in your business. 

 
The third step is building weekly consistency. I recommend posting on LinkedIn at least three times a week from your personal profile and a couple of times from your company page, alongside keeping your Google Business Profile updated. I remind you that people buy from people, and visibility builds the trust required before anyone books a call. I also stress that the money is in the follow up, encouraging you to stay professional, purposeful, and persistent with every new conversation rather than sending one message and giving up. 

 
The fourth step is tracking pipeline momentum using our ONCAM framework, One New Client A Month, which helps you understand how many conversations and what conversion rate you need to hit your growth goals. The fifth step is treating MSP marketing as a genuine cost of growth, with a proper budget attached, reported on regularly alongside your other key performance indicators. 

 
I close by reminding you that sustainable growth is built on visibility, not luck. I encourage you to step outside your comfort zone, commit to the process, and trust that consistent MSP marketing compounds over time into a stronger brand, a healthier pipeline, and a more confident position in your market. 

 

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 hosted an MSP Insights Roundtable on AI, automation, and observability at scale, bringing together three brilliant guests, Joe Burns, Fiona Challis, and Nick Horner. What struck me straight away was how all three agreed on one thing before we even got into the detail. AI, automation, and observability only work when you understand your own processes first. Joe walked us through how his MSP, Reformed, built its operational maturity by identifying repetitive tasks, spotting where human error crept in, and asking his team what they actually disliked doing. Only once that groundwork was done did he bring in automation, including an early AI triage system on the service desk, and it paid off. 

 
Nick added a perspective I loved, describing how starting small with clients avoids the scope creep that can derail an automation project before it even gets going. He shared a story about a modest HR automation that grew organically once the client saw the value for themselves, and how bringing end users into the process from day one builds the kind of trust that makes AI, automation, and observability actually stick. Getting genuine buy in, as Nick put it, turns a nervous stakeholder into a project sponsor rather than a blocker. 

 
Fiona introduced an idea I keep coming back to, becoming your own customer zero, assessing your own readiness before you ever take an AI conversation to a client. She told us most MSPs score only two or three out of five on her readiness assessment, which shows how much foundational work is still undocumented across our sector. We spent time discussing how observability has changed, moving away from juggling dashboards across Microsoft 365, PSA, and RMM tools towards a single intelligent layer that pulls everything together securely and quickly. Nick made the point that speed and accuracy no longer need a dedicated Power BI specialist, and Fiona reminded us that the ROI conversation always starts with measuring a baseline before you change anything. 

 
One of my favourite moments came from Joe, describing a law firm that spent three to four hours every week cross checking court lists against their case management system, a task his team solved with an agent in fifteen minutes. Fiona echoed this, encouraging MSPs to lead with one practical win rather than an overwhelming pitch, because solving a single small problem tends to open the door to many more conversations. We also got into the tension between compliance and outcome. Fiona argued that clients buy the outcome AI delivers rather than the technology itself, and Joe pushed back with honest feedback from his law firm clients, who want compliance answered first given how sensitive that sector is to reputational risk. Both agreed that governance needs to be built into the foundations of any deployment rather than bolted on afterwards. 

 
Drawing on Daniel Priestley's thinking around demand and supply tension, Joe warned us against pouring all our energy into operational capacity while neglecting sales and marketing, a gap that can quietly erode margins even as efficiency improves. Fiona picked this up with real enthusiasm, describing how AI and automation can make selling feel far more natural, framing every client conversation as a business problem to solve rather than a service to pitch. She introduced the three pillars she coaches MSPs towards, capacity, experience, and revenue, and stressed the importance of owning your intellectual property rather than giving away your hard built agents for free. 

 
We closed by sharing how each of us measures success, from outcome-based tracking to client and employee satisfaction scores, before final takeaways. Nick urged everyone to embrace the shift and stay ahead of the curve, Joe reminded us that capacity means nothing without the ability to sell it, and Fiona encouraged listeners to stop overthinking and take the first step. I came away from this session convinced, more than ever, that AI, automation, and observability can genuinely transform an MSP, provided the fundamentals are respected along the way. 

  

Connect with Fiona Challis through LinkedIn and website. 

Connect with Joe Burns through LinkedIn and website. 

Connect with Nick Horner through LinkedIn. 

 

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, we take you inside The MSP Growth Hub for a look at what happened during the May 2026 Intensive event. Ian Luckett is joined by his business partner Stuart Warwick and coaches Julie Hutchison and Peter Williamson, each sharing what unfolded across two days dedicated to helping MSP owners build stronger, more capable teams. At the heart of the conversation is MSP team alignment, and why it sits right at the centre of scaling a business with confidence. 

  

Stuart opens by explaining the theory behind the Intensive itself. The MSP Growth Hub runs this event three times a year, and each one is themed around one of the three pillars of the Scale with Confidence model. This May the focus was Amplify Capacity, using a framework called Embed and Connect to help growing MSPs align their people behind the strategy and goals of the business. Stuart describes how the vision and annual plan cascade down into a sixteen week plan, then into departmental plans, then into a daily and weekly rhythm across the business. This is MSP team alignment in practice, connecting people to systems, plans and direction so the business becomes a genuine asset rather than something that owns the owner. 

  

Ian reflects that around eighty percent of the challenges MSP owners bring to The MSP Growth Hub trace back to a leadership opportunity rather than a team problem. He and Stuart discuss the difference between a peer group and a structured programme, and how pausing to look back at progress is often the moment clients realise how far they have actually come. That pause, built into the Intensive itself, gives them the chance to calibrate against others on the same journey, working towards genuine MSP team alignment rather than isolated effort, and walk away with practical steps rather than vague encouragement. 

  

Julie takes listeners through her session on maximising team dynamics, focused squarely on MSP team alignment through clarity of function and clarity of requirements. She shares a memorable exercise called There's Been a Breach, where clients were deliberately given incomplete information about roles and responsibilities. The resulting confusion mirrored exactly what happens back in their own businesses when expectations are not clearly set. Julie explains that most people arrive at work wanting to do a good job, and that a leader's role is to set them up to succeed by removing ambiguity around who owns what. 

  

Peter Williamson, newer to The MSP Growth Hub coaching team, brings his background in governance to the conversation. He describes helping clients map every function in their business against the people who currently hold the skills to deliver it, revealing gaps that point directly to training needs or new hires. Peter's simple diagnostic question, asking each team member whether they understand their role and have what they need to do it well, proved to be a powerful starting point for many owners in the room. He also shares a story from one client who, after embedding clearer roles and responsibilities, took a holiday for the first time in three years because their team could confidently carry on without them. 

  

Across all three conversations, a consistent thread emerges. MSP team alignment is not a soft nice to have, it is the mechanism that turns a business from something the owner is trapped inside into something that can scale on its own rhythm. Whether through cascading plans, clarity exercises, or mapping skills against functions, the Intensive gave clients practical tools alongside the confidence to use them. 

  

The episode closes with a reminder that these insights are available to any MSP owner ready to bring more structure to their team. Getting the fundamentals of roles, responsibilities and communication right creates the foundation for sustainable growth, freeing owners to lead rather than firefight. 

  

How to build a high performing technical team, when you do not know where to start by Ian Luckett 

STOP Attracting the Wrong People to Your MSP with Julie Hutchison and Ian Luckett 

  

Ready to find out if we're the right fit to help you scale? Book a right fit clarity call: https://go.themspgrowthhub.com/are-we-the-right-fit   

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. 

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!