It’s 9 p.m. on a Tuesday. You’re staring at a firewall configuration or a messy ticket escalation that’s been sitting for three days. You told yourself that as the owner, you would be focusing on the big picture by now. Instead, you’re the bottleneck. If you don't touch it, it doesn't get done right—or so you tell yourself.
Running an MSP is a unique brand of chaos, and if you’re feeling stuck at a revenue plateau or just plain burnt out, it’s usually not a tech problem; it’s an MSP leadership problem. Here are the hard lessons that separate the owners who own a business from the owners who just own a very stressful job.
Lesson 1: The "Hero" Mentality Kills Scaling
The biggest trap in this industry is the belief that your value is tied to your technical expertise. It’s easy to get stuck in a problem-solution loop. Jumping in to fix an escalated ticket feels like a win, but while you’re fighting server outages, you’re simultaneously losing the war on growth.
Strong MSP leadership is about building a system where you are the least important person in the server room. Focus on the ultimate business outcome—a company that runs predictably without your manual intervention—rather than the fire in front of you.
Lesson 2: Desperation Is a Bad Recruiter
Most owners hire out of desperation. You’re drowning, so you hire the first person who knows how to reset a password.
Veteran leaders do the opposite. They look at their goals for next year and hire the person who can get them there. If you want to hit $10 million, you need an MSP leadership team that has seen $10 million before. This means building a functional team with the autonomy to handle the day-to-day work. When they can make decisions without texting you every five minutes, you finally stop being the bottleneck to their productivity.
Lesson 3: "Best Practices" Often Fail
We’ve seen plenty of owners make massive financial decisions based on a "vibe" or generic best practices they heard at a conference. The hard lesson is that those generic tips often fall apart the second they hit a messy, real-world PSA integration.
Veterans know that vibes don’t scale. You need to move from manager to leader by mastering effective decision-making. That requires clean data from your PSA and a clear view of your margins. If you’re still doing your own bookkeeping or trying to hack together ConnectWise reports on Sunday afternoon, you are stealing time from your own growth.
Lesson 4: Revenue Is a Vanity Metric
Obsessing over top-line growth is a dangerous distraction. Revenue doesn't necessarily equal value. In fact, many $5 million MSPs are functionally insolvent when you factor in the true cost of the owner’s overtime and a bloated, unoptimized tech stack.
Real enterprise value comes from documented processes, a clean tech stack, and a predictable sales engine. Buyers increasingly favor MSPs with well-structured delivery models and clear accountability across service lines. These components build a business that runs on its own—the primary metric used to judge a firm’s worth.
Partnering for Stronger MSP Leadership
The "lone wolf" approach works until it doesn't. Eventually, the weight of the tech stack, the people, and the strategy becomes too much for one person to carry.
We know this because we lived it. The team at MSP+ isn't a group of consultants who read a book on IT management and decided to sell advice. We built MSPs. We scaled them. We dealt with the 2 a.m. outages and the clients who won't pay their bills.
Because we’ve been there, we don’t just give you a checklist and wish you luck. We act as an extension of your team, handling the heavy lifting of systems consulting, strategic coaching, and even bookkeeping. By providing the tools and people to manage the noise, we help you step into the kind of MSP leadership that actually drives growth.
We want you to feel supported, relieved, and—for the first time in a long time—excited about your business again. If you’re ready to see what your MSP looks like with a veteran leadership team in your corner, let’s connect.