In this article 7 sections
A panel on getting out of the day to day
Ian Luckett hosts this IT Experts Podcast episode with a panel of three: Mit Patel, founder and CEO of Assurix, Darren Strong, founder of Scalable MSP, and Paul Green, founder of the MSP Marketing Edge. It was recorded ahead of their panel at the MSP Show in London on 13 May. The subject is how an owner stops working in the MSP and gets it working for them.
Mit ran an MSP for 20 years and grew it to just under £8M revenue. He says he has “pretty much broken everything there is to be broken in an MSP” and fixed it along the way.
Why MSPs don’t plan
Mit gives three reasons. Most founders are technical, so planning doesn’t get their time. Many don’t know where to start. Those who set an annual target rarely break it into monthly or quarterly objectives. His example: an MSP at £1M that wants £1.2M next year has to work out where 20% growth comes from, then how to move the needle month by month.
Darren adds that the PSA should hold the data for planning. Without a plan, he says, owners answer the same question differently from one day to the next, and the business gets no consistent direction. Paul, who works with about 700 MSPs, says it starts with a decision to build a business that runs well without you, “not survives but thrives without me”.
Rallying a team behind the plan
Mit realised in 2015 that he was the bottleneck in his MSP. His answer was a common mission and goal. If you don’t know where you need to be in 12 months, you can’t rally anyone around it. At Assurix, which had 12 full-time staff at the time, he sets the 3 most important things for the year and 3 for each quarter. When the team hits them, everyone shares the success, whether or not they played a large part. He calls it a cultural thing: getting people behind winning.
Paul adds that the senior leadership team matters most, because if they can’t move as fast as the owner, friction follows.
Operations change at every stage
Mit’s point is that “what worked then won’t work at a different size and scale”. You can’t run the processes of a £10M business at £1M. There are no economies of scale and no profit in it. His MSP changed how it operated past £1M, at £3M, at £6M and again nearer £8M, with mistakes along the way.
The measure he held onto was customer experience, mainly CSAT. He aimed high without chasing 100%, because the last step costs a lot of time, money and process, and 98% may be good enough for customers to recommend you.
AI and marketing
Darren says AI has changed PSA work, dispatching in particular, in the last six months. He describes it as assisting staff, not doing the job. Paul warns against expecting AI to do the marketing. A plan written by a chatbot copies what other MSPs already do. He suggests giving it your ideal client profile and unique selling proposition, and using it as an assistant.
Where Assurix fits
Asked about standing out, Mit says the idea came from competing with MSPs that cut corners. SMEs can’t tell one MSP from another because they look and sound the same. Assurix assesses security aligned to the NCSC Cyber Assessment Framework, and operational maturity such as SLA delivery, fair onboarding and offboarding, and patching. He mentions an MSP charging an SME £15,000 to offboard five users. The evidence comes from integrations with PSA and RMM tools.
At his MSP, the marketing that paid off was consistent SEO investment from 2009. To lift conversion, the team showed prospects a limited version of proof: cameras in the office, and live dashboards with CSAT, response rates and ticket numbers.
Common questions
What one action does Mit suggest for the next 30 days?
Open your calendar and set up a two-hour recurring block every week, called planning. Book nothing else into it. Use it to look at the plan, rework it and work on the business, not in it.
What do Paul Green and Darren Strong suggest?
Paul suggests finding 60 to 90 minutes a day to work on the business and on marketing. Darren suggests being accountable for your time and matching it to your highest and best use.
Why do MSPs struggle to plan?
Mit sees three causes. Technical founders don’t make the time, many don’t know where to start, and annual plans aren’t broken into monthly or quarterly objectives.
What is the Assurix Trustmark?
The live trustmark for MSPs. Assurix independently assesses 59 controls: 40 security controls aligned to NCSC CAF 4.0 and 19 operational controls built for MSPs. Live-measured controls are checked every six hours and the rest on a set cycle. An Assurix assessor signs off. A failure left unfixed for 30 days suspends the Trustmark publicly.
