MSPs sell their book. The vendors they’re authorized on. The platforms they’re certified on. The products they have margin on.
The infrastructure they’re about to recommend for your business is shaped by all of that before you walk in the room.
This Playbook covers what that actually means for you: how to size the right MSP for your company, what security capabilities a small MSP genuinely cannot deliver regardless of what they tell you, why outsourcing IT decision-making to someone with a vested interest is one of the most expensive mistakes a growing company makes — and the one rule that keeps you from getting locked into the wrong stack for the next three years.
You should be leading the MSP. Not the other way around.
WHAT RISK IS YOUR MSP RELATIONSHIP HIDING FROM YOU?
Nine questions from the other side of the table.
The structural problems in MSP relationships don’t surface through bad service. They surface during an incident, a renewal, or a transition — when it’s too late to fix them cheaply. The questions below come from the channel mechanics buyers don’t see and the contract terms written to protect the MSP, not you. Answer them against what you actually know — not what you were told when you signed.
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1. Has your MSP ever told you to buy something they can’t sell you?**
Before an MSP can represent a product, they need manufacturer authorization — certifications, volume commitments, and in many cases contractual restrictions on recommending competitive solutions. A good MSP will tell you when the right answer is outside their stack. If yours never has, that silence tells you whose interests the relationship is optimized for.
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2. Did you know your deal was registered before you finished evaluating?**
When an MSP begins working with you on a project, they register that opportunity with the manufacturer. First-come, first-serve. That registration locks out every other MSP from accessing the same discount tier on your account — and it happened before you chose them. If you talked to multiple MSPs during evaluation, every one of them registered your deal. The mechanism exists entirely to protect the MSP’s position. You were the last to know it existed.
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3. Can your MSP show you documented instances where they recommended less?**
Reduced scope, reduced spend, reduced complexity — because it was the right business decision for you. The difference between a vendor and an advisor is evidence, not claims. Ask for examples. If they can’t produce them, or if the conversation gets uncomfortable when you ask, you already have your answer.
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4. When did you last test after-hours escalation — and what failed?**
Don’t trust the escalation path on paper. Trust the last time it was tested. A real test reveals whether response times are theoretical or actual, whether the on-call rotation functions, and whether the chain holds when the primary contact is unavailable. “I think someone gets paged” is not an escalation path. It’s an assumption — and you won’t find out the difference until you’re in an incident at 2am.
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5. Have you tested recovery — or are you paying for backup?**
Backup means your data is being copied somewhere. Recovery means you’ve proven you can restore it — in what timeframe, to what state, under what conditions. Ask for the date of the last full recovery test, the documented RTO and RPO, and what failed during testing. If the answer is “the backups are there but we haven’t verified restoration” — you will find out whether recovery works during the incident that requires it.
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6. Can you see your own environment without asking your MSP to show it to you?**
Ticket queue, patch status, endpoint coverage, active alerts, asset inventory, contract and renewal dates, open risk exceptions — can you pull any of this independently, without requesting a report or scheduling a call? If that visibility requires your MSP’s cooperation, you don’t control the environment — you’re just paying for it.
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7. If you left your MSP today, what would you actually own?**
Documentation, admin credentials, tenant access, configuration runbooks, license ownership, domain control — who holds these, formally? Most buyers in stable MSP relationships have never thought about this question. Many MSP contracts are structured so that exit requires the MSP’s cooperation — cooperation that is much harder to get when the relationship is adversarial. The time to understand your exit position is before you need one.
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8. Are security responsibilities formally documented — or assumed by both sides?**
There should be a written delineation: exactly what the MSP monitors, what they respond to, what they escalate to you, and what stays your team’s responsibility. The most common failure isn’t capability — it’s that the MSP believes endpoint detection is covered while the client believes the MSP is monitoring for active threats. Neither assumption gets tested until an incident makes the gap visible.
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9. When your contract renews, does the pricing go up automatically — and by how much?**
Standard MSP contracts include annual escalation clauses. They’re buried in the terms, rarely surfaced in the sales process, and compound quietly. A 5% annual escalation on a $200K contract is $10,000 more in year two. After five years you’re paying 28% more than you signed for without a single change in scope. Find your escalation clause before the renewal conversation starts — not during it. During it, the MSP already knows the number. You’re catching up.
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What your answers tell you:**
If you paused on two or more of these, the issue usually isn’t performance. It’s that the relationship was structured on the MSP’s terms — their authorized stack, their deal registration, their escalation documentation, their contract language — and no one was representing your interests when it was set up. That’s a structural problem, not a character one. It shows up at the next incident, renewal, or transition. The question is whether you address it before or after that moment forces it.
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If none of those fit exactly — that’s what the first conversation is for. No pitch. No prep. Just answers.
_Get Started →
Transcript
Max Clark: [00:00] It is exceedingly dangerous to outsource any sort of decision-making process for your business to a third party, especially if that third party has any sort of vested interest in selling their book to you.
If you do not have somebody that is making IT decisions and is looking at this from a strategic planning for your business of what is the long arc? The infrastructure that’s going to be selected for you by default by whoever you’re engaging with may or may not be correct for you, and it might be a situation where you find yourself a year down the road. looking for a different MSP because that MSP is not giving you the capabilities, the support, the care or the features, know, what the cost structure, whatever it is that you actually need.
Today’s topic is MSPs. No fluff, off the cuff, here we go.
First thing you need to know is MSPs sell their book. That means what they’re allowed to, what they’re authorized to, what they have margin to. When you’re looking at MSPs, you’re gonna hear and you’re gonna see what their… what their business is built around. And this isn’t a bad thing. This is just the reality. And whether or not it’s being explained to you, you understand it, it’s on the surface, or it’s hidden, this is the reality of it. OEMs require MSPs and partners in their channels to do multiple things before they’re authorized to work with them. They have to have certified engineers. They have to have certified salespeople. And they need to have volume. In a lot of cases, they can’t sell competitive stuff.
So if you’re trying to buy equipment from one OEM and that MSP reps a different OEM, what are you going to hear? You’re going to hear about how their OEM is better. And the one you’re looking at sucks. It is just the nature of the beast. The other thing that you’re going to find if you dig into this is based on the size of the MSP and how much volume they have with different OEMs and different manufacturers of different software platforms, whatever it actually is, they’re going to have different discount tiers.
What does this look like every process is going to go through deal registration deal registration is a first-come first-serve thing if if you as a Client are going out as a buyer going out and talking to multiple MSPs. They’re all gonna deal read your deal They’re gonna say hey, I’m so and so and this is my project and that’s gonna protect them with that manufacturer with that vendor Can you displace it? Absolutely? You can does it require energy on your part? Absolutely. It does because now You have to help the underlying manufacturer or vendor believe that this other MSP is the right one for you. Now we get into alignment with MSPs. A small MSP, let’s call it 10-ish people, that MSP’s capabilities versus an MSP that has 100 people and has sit scale is very different. If one MSP is selling, by the way, these things are also called VARs, right? If one MSP or VAR, is selling $20 million a year with a vendor, and another one has crossed $100 million plus, who’s going to have bigger margins and discounting leverage? Now, by default, those margins goes into the MSP’s pocket. But if you understand what those margins actually look like and what they actually are, this becomes an advantage for you. Now, look, if you’re a small business and you’re talking to a very large MSP VAR, You know, it’s gonna be frustrating to work with them because they’re just not equipped to deal with you and they also just don’t care about your project It’s not that they don’t care about you know, no, they do actually probably not care about your project You know of our that is hit scale and is doing north of ten million dollars a month in any one vendor if you show up with a hundred thousand dollar project I mean, it doesn’t move the needle for anybody. How much care and interest are they gonna really give to you? so ⁓ MSP var, know Any sort of vendor alignment based on your size is really important. How big are you? What kind of organization and vendor can you work with? And how do you actually map this up is really important. Now, the other part of this becomes capability. We talk about what they’re authorized to, what they’re allowed to. MSPs add to their capabilities by going out and partnering with other companies. So ⁓ what’s really popular right now, you see MSPs that say they can do security for you. I’m going to. tell you straight up, if you are talking to an organization that is less than 50-ish people and they tell you that they have a sock and they can do security for you, they cannot. They don’t have the team to do it. They haven’t hit scale. And security specifically, you have education, continuing education, keeping up with what’s going on, having volume in order to detect patterns on a larger basis, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Now, could they configure Intune for you? Could they configure Defender for you? Probably.
Could they make sure that Defender’s actually doing what it’s supposed to be doing? Maybe not. Do they have pattern and a team to be able to do investigation at scale? Absolutely not. So what becomes popular in the market is we have lots of software platforms that go out and sell the MSP specifically, whether this is ⁓ their itsm platforms the rmm platforms backup platforms security platforms. I mean you name it There’s there’s tons of platforms that sell specifically to msp’s for the msp so then go out and sell to you Is that what you want to buy? I don’t know Depends right. This is where we get into a lot of these conversations about it depends If you’re talking to an msp and you have an expectation of them being able to show up in your office Is that msp geared to do it or are they outsourcing that truck roll?
What does that mean for you? How do you evaluate that? If you’re opening offices in a different market, can that MSP support you there? Do they have to truck roll? What’s the consistency of the experience and the quality of the experience that you receive as a result of that? These are all factors that you have to look into and consider. Now, this is where I see the wheels fall off the bus. It is exceedingly dangerous to outsource any sort of decision-making process for your business to a third party, especially if that third party has any sort of vested interest in selling their book to you.
If you do not have somebody that is making IT decisions and is looking at this from a strategic planning for your business of what is the long arc? The infrastructure that’s going to be selected for you by default by whoever you’re engaging with may or may not be correct for you, and it might be a situation where you find yourself a year down the road. looking for a different MSP because that MSP is not giving you the capabilities, the support, the care or the features, know, what the cost structure, whatever it is that you actually need. And now when you’re actually going out to market and looking and trying to figure out who can fit the, you know, do this for you. That now we start talking about rip and replacing infrastructure. This is very disruptive in some cases is probably not possible because you’re in contract, you can budget, you know, if you signed a three year contract and you’re a year into it, now you want to rip that out and replace it with something else.
Guess what? That’s probably not happening. having an understanding what your IT and technology needs are from a neutral standpoint that actually matches your business, start there. Then go out and talk to vendors. Go out to talk to MSPs. Go out to talk to VARs. Now, ⁓ I started my career working for a VAR. Now we’d call it an MSP.
We were really good. We were really good at what we did, but we were opinionated as well. You know, what was going on back then in those days, right? Compact was better than Dell. Was it really? We sold Compact. We couldn’t sell Dell. For us, Compact was better for Dell. There was no way for us to support Dell infrastructure. If you were a company that had purchased Dell desktops and Dell servers, we could not help you. So yes, in our world, Compact was better than Dell. I wouldn’t got Compact certified. I got a really nifty toolkit afterwards. So…
The point here is, is MSPs are valuable. MSPs do amazing work. Every company probably should be engaged with an MSP at some level. But what’s important here for you is figuring out what’s actually important for you, what infrastructure you want, and then finding the MSP that can support the infrastructure that you need for your roadmap, not the other way around. Don’t let the MSP lead you. You want to lead the MSP. That’s the playbook.
More is available at itbroker.com podcast. And if you’re in the middle of a real tech decision and want someone in your corner, that’s what we do. Book an intro call at itbroker.com and buy tech without regret. I’m X Clark. See you on the next one.
