Growth sounds exciting… until it doesn't.
You start your MSP because you love tech. You fix nan’s laptop, your mate’s Wi‑Fi, a few local businesses. Word spreads. You do a great job. Clients pile in.
Then one day you look up and realise:
- You’re working more hours than ever
- You’re glued to tickets again
- Your team is tired and snappy
- And somehow, even with growth, you feel worse
The problem isn’t getting bigger.
The problem is getting bigger without knowing where you’re going or why you’re going there.
As Chris Cooke from Ethikai puts it:
- “When we say we’re working towards the horizon, guess what? When we look up in five years, that horizon’s still there. Let’s put a pin in the horizon and say that’s where we’re working towards and that’s what good looks like.”
In this blog, we’ll walk through how to grow your MSP on purpose, not by accident, so growth stops making things worse and starts making life better.
Contents:
FREE Download: Strategies to Scale Your MSP
When growth starts to hurt
Think back to the early days of your MSP. It was simple. You were the tech. You knew every client by name. You fixed things, they paid you, everyone was happy.
Then you did what good people do when they care about their work: you did such a good job that more people wanted in.
So you took the calls. You said yes. You hired your first engineer. Maybe a second. Suddenly your weeks looked very different: You’re still jumping into P1s, signing tax returns, picking tools and dealing with vendors, then you’re trying to run payroll and manage cash while ‘mentoring’ a team and answering every ‘tricky’ ticket
At that moment, your job quietly changed. You stopped being just the tech and became the owner.
But no one ever taught you how to be an owner.
Chris sees this play out again and again:
- “They say, ‘I want to do this as a career.’ They set the business up, they’re doing a great job… and before they know it, they’ve got no capacity. They go and recruit people. And from that moment is where their job changes, and nobody’s taught them how to be a leader.”
So what do you do when you don’t know how to be a leader?
You go back to what you know.
You dive back into the tech. You chase the new tools. You hide in the comfort zone.
That’s how growth can start to make your world smaller, louder, and more exhausting.
Why ‘more’ isn’t a strategy
In the MSP world, ‘more’ is everywhere.
More tools. More vendors. More AI. More clients. More MRR. It’s easy to believe that if we just had more, things would feel better.
You go to an event. You walk the vendor hall. Every stand promises to save you time, cut your tickets, boost your MRR.
And then you come home with a stack of brochures and three new monthly subscriptions you couldn’t say no to.
On their own, none of these tools are evil.
The problem is why they’re in your stack.
Chris asks MSP owners one simple question when they want to add something new: what problem are we actually fixing with this?
Often, there’s no clear answer. It just felt exciting. But over time, that excitement turns into:
- Tool sprawl your team can’t fully use
- A bigger bill you don’t really understand
- Engineers expected to be experts in everything
- A service desk that feels like it’s drowning in dashboards
The same thing happens with clients.
Saying yes to every prospect looks like growth. But the wrong clients:
- Drain your best people
- Demand custom everything
- Blow up your evenings and weekends
- Make it hard to say yes to the right ones
Without a clear plan, ‘more’ becomes your default. And ‘more’ without direction is the fastest route to burnout.
Strategy is simply this: deciding what you won’t do, who you won’t serve, and what you won’t buy so the things you do say yes to actually move you forward.
Strategy that starts with you
People love to talk about “strategy” like it’s a thick document.
In reality, your strategy starts in a much smaller place: you.
If we stripped away the LinkedIn noise, the podcasts, the event talks, and just sat you down with a blank page, could you answer these three questions in one or two sentences?
Why do you exist as an MSP?
Who are you really here to help?
What does “good” look like for you, personally?
Chris spends a lot of time here:
- “I’m trying to help people understand what it is that they’re trying to work towards, and then we’ll work a path out as to how to get there. The key element is understanding what good looks like to that person, not to everybody else.”
That last part matters.
If you copy someone else’s version of success, the £5m figure, the big exit, you can easily build a business you don’t actually want.
So, take this out of your head and onto paper:
- Why did you start this business, really?
- If it all went well, what would life look like for you in 5–10 years?
- How much do you want to work?
- What kind of work do you want to do?
- What kind of work do you never want to touch again?
Once you’re honest about that, you can shape the business to fit you, not the other way round.
Then you layer on values. Real values are not aspirational slogans. They’re how we already behave when we’re at our best.
Look back at moments you were proud of yourself or your team. What did you do? Why did it feel right? That’s your raw material.
Put those into simple, plain-English phrases like:
- ‘We keep our promises.’
- ‘We tell the truth, even when it hurts.’
- ‘We turn complexity into simplicity.’
Now you’re no longer chasing generic growth.
You’re building something that fits who you are, serves people you actually care about, and does it in a way you’re proud of.
That’s strategy.
One team, clear jobs: who does what
Once you know why you’re here and what good looks like, another problem shows up:
Everyone is doing everything.
When nobody is sure who owns what, important things fall through the gaps. That’s when growth starts to feel messy and heavy.
Think of your MSP like a simple jobs chart on the fridge.
On the left are the jobs that must get done:
- Sales
- Marketing
- Service desk
- Projects
- Finance
- People / HR
- Operations
On the right are the names of the people in your team.
Most MSPs fall into one of two traps:
- No chart at all: Everyone helps out. No one is clearly responsible. Work gets dropped because nobody is truly on the hook.
- Two names on the same job: Two people own the same thing, so you get: “I thought you were doing it” or “oh, I did that as well, now we’ve both spent time on it.”
Either way, you lose time, money, and trust.
The fix is simple, but not always comfortable:
- Write down the jobs: Forget fancy titles. Just make a list of the key jobs that must happen for the business to run: New Sales, Marketing, Finance, Service Desk, Projects, etc.
- Put one name next to each job: It’s okay if your name is on lots of lines.
It is not okay if two people share the same line. One job, one owner. - Believe what the page is telling you: If your name is on eight jobs, that’s why you’re exhausted. If some jobs have no name at all, that’s why things keep slipping.
This isn’t about who is more important. It’s about everyone knowing the part they play, and where they might need help.
With a clear jobs chart, you know what you are responsible for, your team know what they are responsible for and you can see exactly where you need to hire or delegate next
Put simply: one team, clear jobs, one owner per job.
That’s how you make growth feel calmer and more controlled, instead of heavier and more chaotic.
Meetings that make life easier, not heavier
Most people groan when they hear the word meeting, and in MSPs, it’s understandable.
Since COVID, everything became a meeting that used to be a quick chat. So now the reaction is, ‘we don’t need more meetings, we need less.’
But the answer to bad meetings isn’t no meetings. It’s short, useful meetings that keep everyone pointed in the same direction.
Here’s the simple rhythm Chris uses in MSPs.
- Daily huddle: the 10-minute reset
Same time every day. Cameras on if you’re remote. Everyone answers three questions:
- What did I do yesterday?
- What am I doing today?
- Where am I stuck?
That’s it. No problem‑solving in the room. If something needs a deep dive, you park it and have a smaller chat later.
This does two things:
- Stops small issues turning into big fires
- Builds a habit of talking to each other, not just firing tickets into the void
- Weekly “rumble strip” meeting: early warning, not blame
Chris uses a great analogy here. On a motorway, rumble strips are those noisy bumps when you drift off course. They don’t crash the car. They warn you so you don’t crash the car.
A weekly meeting is your rumble strip.
Once a week, leadership sit down and ask:
- Are we on track for the things we said we’d do this quarter?
- Where are we drifting?
- What’s the single most important issue we need to fix this week?
Not ten things. Not twenty. One or two. Properly.
Above that you have:
Monthly sessions to check projects and trends
Quarterly sessions to set the next 90‑day priorities
Annual sessions to check you are still heading towards the business’ long-term goals
The key idea is simple:
Your annual and quarterly meetings decide where you’re heading as a business.
Your monthly, weekly and daily meetings make sure you don’t drift off course on the way there.
When they’re done well, meetings won’t steal your time.
They will give you time back, because you stop fighting the same fires over and over again.
Stop working in the business, start working on the business
‘Work on the business, not in the business.’
You’ve heard it on stage, in books, at every event. You’ve probably said it yourself. You do what everyone says you should do:
Go to an event, sit in a workshop, take pages of notes, you come home feeling fired up, you’ve worked on the business.
Then Monday happens.
Tickets. Escalations. A client outage. An engineer off sick.
Your notebook doesn’t even make it out of your bag. Nothing changes.
Chris sees this all the time, especially with leadership teams who think they’re working on the business: Four people in a room, ninety minutes of good chat, forty actions, all owned by those same four people.
Next week: half of it isn’t done, and everyone feels worse
He’s very clear about the real problem:
- “We talk about in the business and on the business quite a lot. You go to an event, that’s ‘working on the business’. Absolutely. But then where does that go? How do we do something with that? After every event, there should be a cascade, there should be a takeaway, there should be something that we go and do.”
Your job in those moments is not to collect work. Your job is to create movement.
Here’s a simple way to tell if you’re actually working on the business:
- After every big meeting or event, write a one‑line message.
Ask yourself: ‘If we could only tell the team ONE thing from this, what would it be?’
That’s your cascade. Share it with everyone, in plain English. - Give every action one owner and one deadline.
No ‘we should’. No ‘the team will’. One name. One date.
If nobody is willing to put their name next to it, you probably don’t care about it enough. - Stop hoarding all the work at the top.
As Chris sees with so many MSPs, leaders walk out of meetings with a huge list, try to do it all themselves, then ‘don’t have time’. Your real job is to make sure the right things get done, not to personally do everything.
If your team don’t even know the actions exist, they can’t help you.
When you do this, working on the business stops being a feel‑good box you tick at events.
It becomes a habit of deciding what really matters, sharing the ‘why’ and the ‘what’ with your team and pushing ownership down, instead of dragging it all up to you.
That’s when strategy stops living only in your head, and starts showing up in your calendar, your team’s behaviour, and the way the business actually runs day to day.
Lifestyle business or asset: pick your path
There’s a quiet myth in the MSP world that everyone’s building the same thing, hit £1m, £2.5m, £5m, £10m, sell, ride off into the sunset…
Chris hears these numbers thrown around at events all the time. His response is to ask a much more awkward question: “What does success look like for you?”
He tells a story that catches people off guard.
He was on a call with an MSP owner working 70‑hour weeks. The owner had a wife and three kids. Chris, assuming like most of us would, said:
- “Would I be right in assuming that, if you could spend more time with your wife and more time with your kids, and watch them grow up and be part of it, that would be a level of success for you?”
The owner said: “No. I’d hate that. I don’t want to be involved in that.”
Chris doesn’t agree with him personally, and you might not either. But that’s not the point.
The point is: that owner was honest.
He wasn’t pretending he wanted a balanced lifestyle while secretly chasing an empire. He knew what he cared about and was willing to pay the price.
Most owners are not that clear. They tell the world they’re building an asset, but pull out every spare pound as if it’s a lifestyle machine and then they get upset when the valuation doesn’t match their dream.
Or, it’s the reverse and they say they just want a nice little lifestyle business but beat themselves up for not hitting peer‑group numbers designed for full‑on growth.
There is nothing wrong with either path:
Wanting a calm, tidy, lifestyle MSP that funds your life
Wanting a larger, systemised MSP designed to be sold
But both come with different costs.
Chasing a big exit often means:
- Saying no to more cash in your pocket now
- Hiring ahead of the curve
- More time on sales, events, partners, structure
- Less time with your hands in tickets
Choosing a pure lifestyle play often means:
- A smaller team
- A tighter client base
- Less complexity
- Lower risk
- And peace of mind over prestige
The strategy here is not about which one is right. It’s about being brave enough to say which one is the price you are willing to pay and standing on your decision.
Once you’ve done that, you can build accordingly and stop beating yourself up for not playing a game you never actually wanted.
Putting a pin in the future
So where does all of this leave you?
You’ve got:
A sense that growth without purpose is risky
A clearer view of your own “why”
A feel for how values, seats, and meetings fit together
A choice to make about lifestyle vs asset
Now you need something simple you can look at every week that tells you where you are going, who you are and what you are going to do next to drive those things forward.
Chris talks about avoiding the ‘endless horizon’ problem:
- “When we say we’re working towards the horizon, guess what? When we look up in five years, that horizon’s still there.”
His answer is to literally put a pin in it. Here’s a simple way to do that on one page:
Step 1: Describe ‘good’ like it’s already true
Imagine it’s five years from now. Write a short paragraph starting with “It’s [year] and…”
- How big is the business?
- What kind of clients do you have?
- What does your day look like?
- What are you not doing anymore?
Example:
‘It’s 2031. We’re a £3m MSP with around 20 staff. Almost all our revenue comes from standard packages. I spend three days a week on strategy, coaching, and key relationships, not tickets. The team know what ‘good’ looks like and don’t need me in every decision.’
Keep it simple. You’re not sending this to a bank. It’s for you and your team.
Step 2: Set 3-5 clear targets for the next year
Now ask yourself what would have to be true a year from now to make that five‑year picture realistic.
You might end up with things like:
- We’ve standardised on one RMM, one PSA, one backup solution.
- We’ve hired a head of service and a finance lead.
- We’ve moved 70% of revenue onto three clear packages.
These are your yearly anchors.
Step 3: Choose your quarterly priorities
Break those down into 90‑day chunks.
For the next quarter, pick 3-5 priorities that move you towards those yearly anchors. For example:
- Agree final tool stack and turn off unused tools
- Redraw the role chart, one owner per seat, and communicate it
- Launch daily huddles across the company and run them for 12 weeks
These are the things your weekly ‘rumble strip’ meetings should keep checking against.
Step 4: Keep it alive in your rhythm
This is where everything joins up:
- Your annual session updates the five‑year ‘good’ picture and yearly anchors
- Your quarterly sessions set the next 3-5 priorities
- Your monthly sessions check project progress
- Your weekly sessions look for early warning signs
- Your daily huddles keep everyone aligned and unblocked
And underneath all of it, your values act like guardrails. When a decision comes up, you ask ‘Does this fit who we said we are, and where we said we’re going?’
If it doesn’t, you say no. Even if it’s tempting.
This is not complicated. It is hard, because it asks you to be clear and consistent when the world is noisy. But the payoff is big.
Growth stops feeling like a runaway train. It starts to feel like a journey you chose.
FREE Download: Strategies to Scale Your MSP
-
Turn Messy Growth Into a Clear MSP Plan
Get a simple, one‑page strategy that shows where you’re heading, what 'good' looks like, and the steps to get there. -
Give Every Part of Your MSP a Clear Owner
Clean up overlapping roles so tickets, projects and cash don’t fall through the gaps and your team know exactly what they’re responsible for. -
Use Meetings to Save Time, Not Waste It
Install a light daily/weekly rhythm that stops surprises, keeps everyone aligned, and frees you from constant firefighting.
scaleUP Podcast: Listen to the Full Episode
This blog pulls together the main ideas from our scaleUP podcast episode with Chris Cooke but there’s more in the full conversation than we can ever fit on a page.
If you’re growing, but it doesn’t feel good, this episode is worth an hour of your time.
We dig deeper into:
- Real‑world stories of MSP owners on the edge of burnout
- How to use meetings as a safety net, not a time‑sink
- Practical ways to build values, not just print them
- Frameworks that help you put people in the right seats
