MSP Outpost is a free resource platform for people who run MSPs: templates, scripts, calculators, guides and tool comparisons, held to four editorial standards.

Q&A

Do I Need a SOC for My MSP?

You need the security-monitoring function; you almost certainly should not build the team yourself. A security operations center means someone watching security telemetry and acting on it continuously, and the continuous part is what makes

Q&A

How Do I Calculate Cost per Ticket?

Divide the total monthly cost of running your service desk by the number of tickets it handled that month. For an MSP, the cost side should include technician and coordinator pay and benefits, the share of your PSA, RMM and phone tools the

Q&A

How Do I Get My First Ten Clients?

Your first ten clients most often come from people who already know you: former employers and colleagues, your personal network, and referrals from them. Pick a niche you understand, package one clear managed offer at a fixed monthly price,

Q&A

How Do I Let Go of a Bad Client?

First confirm the problem cannot be fixed by repricing or a changed agreement. If it cannot, read your termination clause, give the notice it requires in writing, and run a clean, documented offboarding: hand over credentials, documentation

Q&A

How Do I Price Security Services?

Price security from your fully loaded cost upward: add up the per-seat cost of every tool in the stack, the vendor or SOC fees, and the labor to run, review and respond, then set a price that holds your target gross margin. A common approac

Q&A

How Do I Scope and Price a Project?

Scope a project with a paid or tightly limited discovery first, then write a statement of work that names deliverables, assumptions, exclusions, client responsibilities and acceptance criteria. Estimate labor task by task, add project manag

Q&A

How Do MSPs Price Their Services?

Most MSPs price on a recurring per-user or per-device basis, sometimes in tiers, with project work and hardware billed separately.

Q&A

How Does HIPAA Apply to MSPs?

It applies to you directly. Providing IT services to an organization that holds patient information makes you a business associate, which means a signed agreement before you touch anything, security controls you can evidence, and a breach p

Q&A

How Long Should a Sales Cycle Take?

Long enough for the buyer to make the decision and no longer. Small owner-decided deals move in weeks; deals with several stakeholders, a procurement process or a competitive bid move in months. What matters is not the length but whether it

Q&A

How Many Endpoints Can One Technician Support?

A commonly cited target is about 350 fully managed endpoints per technician, but surveyed MSPs report anything from under 50 to more than 750. The right number for your MSP depends on how standardized your stack is, how much automation you

Q&A

How Much Is My MSP Worth?

Most MSPs sell for a multiple of adjusted EBITDA, not revenue. Very small shops trade near 3x to 4x, a 2025 study of 120 MSP deals put the median near 8.9x, and the multiple rises with size, recurring revenue share, retention and how little

Q&A

How Much Should an L1 Technician Make?

Enough that they stay, and structured so that getting better is worth their while. Anchor the figure to your local market, with public wage data as a check, and remember that the shape of the package, and what it costs you when it is wrong,

Q&A

PSA vs RMM: What Is the Difference?

RMM is how you do the work; PSA is how you run the business. RMM monitors and manages client machines: alerting, patching, scripting, remote access. PSA handles tickets, time, contracts, billing and reporting.

Q&A

Should I Require Cyber Insurance From My Clients?

Yes, in most cases. Write a requirement for the client to carry its own cyber insurance into your agreement, ask for proof at onboarding and renewal, and get a signed acknowledgment from any client who declines. It protects the client from

Q&A

What Does NOC Mean?

NOC stands for network operations center, the function that watches infrastructure for faults and performance problems and responds to what the monitoring reports.

Q&A

What Gross Margin Should I Target?

Higher on the labor you deliver than on the hardware and licenses you resell, and high enough that overhead and profit both fit underneath. The number that matters is yours, and most providers who feel squeezed find the problem is what they

Q&A

What Is a QBR, and Why Does It Matter?

A quarterly business review is a scheduled meeting where an MSP and a client step out of day-to-day support to review how the service is going, discuss where the client's business is heading, and agree the technology work that follows.

Q&A

What Is an MSP?

A managed service provider is a company that takes ongoing responsibility for another business's IT (monitoring it, maintaining it, securing it and supporting its users) for a recurring fee rather than by the hour.

Q&A

What Is Co-managed IT?

Co-managed IT is an arrangement where an MSP works alongside a client's internal IT staff instead of replacing them, with responsibilities divided by written agreement.

Q&A

What Is the Difference Between an MSP and an MSSP?

An MSP runs a client's IT: help desk, devices, networks, backups and vendors, with security as one part of the job. An MSSP runs security as the whole job: continuous monitoring, threat detection, incident response and compliance, usually f

Q&A

What Should a Managed Services Agreement Include?

A managed services agreement should define what you support and what you do not, the service levels you commit to and what happens when you miss them, who owns each security control, how fees are billed and raised, how long the term runs, a

Q&A

What Should Technician Utilization Be?

Set utilization targets by role, not one number for the whole MSP. Service desk and field technicians should carry the highest share of time logged against client work, senior engineers less, and leads and dispatchers far less. Measure it o

Q&A

When Should I Hire a vCIO?

Hire a vCIO when strategy conversations are being lost because nobody has the time or the standing to have them. That is usually the point where the owner is still the one attending every client planning meeting and can no longer keep up.

Q&A

When Should I Hire My First Technician?

Hire your first technician when recurring gross profit can cover their fully loaded cost, and when your own time is the thing stopping you from selling or keeping clients happy. Waiting until you are completely buried usually means hiring i

Article

A Proposal That Gets Read and a Price That Holds

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Your Monday Morning Prospect List, and the 15-Day Sequence That Reaches the Owner

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Fix the 'My Computer Is Slow' Ticket With an Intake Form and a 15-Minute Diagnostic Bundle

Stop guessing what 'slow' means. Build an intake form and diagnostic bundle so performance tickets arrive with the details your techs need to act fast.

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Hand the Desk to Your Team, in Stages, Without It Falling Apart

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Priority Inflation: Why 'Just Mark It Critical' Breaks Your Queue and Your Vendor Escalations

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MSP Marketing a Business Owner Will Actually Read

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Onboarding a Client in 30 Days

The first month decides whether a client stays three years or one. Four weeks, one owner, a checklist the client can see, and a handover that ends with the desk knowing the account.

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One Record for Every Vendor Contract, so a Price Rise Doesn't Catch You Out

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Per User, Per Device, or Tiered: Choosing a Pricing Model for Your MSP

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Pick a Security Framework Your Clients' Insurers Will Actually Accept

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The SOPs Worth Writing First Are the Tickets You Fix Ten Times a Week

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Pick Your PSA, RMM, Backup, and Security Stack in the Right Order

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Price, Bundle, and Retire: Building a Service Catalog That Earns Its Keep

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Prove Your Backups Work Before the Day a Client Needs Them

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Raising Prices Without Losing Clients

The number comes before the date, the letter comes before the call, and the three objections you will hear are the same three every time. Here is the order that keeps the clients worth keeping.

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Read the Earn-Out Terms Before You Agree to How the Price Is Paid

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Renegotiating a Renewal When Seat Prices Rise

When Microsoft, your RMM or your security vendor raises the per-seat price, the cost lands on you the day it takes effect and on your client only when you say so. This is how to say so.

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Run a QBR That Renews the Contract and Sets Up the Price Increase

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Run Dispatch as a Shared Duty, Starting This Week

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After-Hours On-Call Rotations That Don't Burn Out Your Techs

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Shared Admin Accounts Are the First Thing to Remove

It ranks below MFA and EDR on every list because no prospect asks about it. The fix is not a policy memo. It is removing the account.

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Start Preparing to Sell Your MSP Years Before You List It

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A Billing Routine That Gets You Paid Without the Chase

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Set Priority and Ownership in the First Two Minutes of a Ticket

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Test an Industry Vertical Before You Bet the MSP on It

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Catch Desk Problems Before the Client Does: One-to-Ones, Checklists, and a Same-Week Flag

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The $52K Raise Request That Ended in a Farewell, and the Band That Would Have Kept It

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The Documents a Buyer Will Ask for, and the Ones That End Deals

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The Five Numbers on Your Monday Dashboard

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The One-Page Annual Plan and the Five Numbers That Keep It Honest

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The One Sentence That Tells a Prospect Exactly What Your MSP Does

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Three Years Out: The Numbers a Buyer Will Judge Your MSP On

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What Your MSP Is Actually Worth: The Multiple, the Earnings, and the Cash

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Your Best Tech Just Got Promoted, and Everything Is Worse

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What Every Client Needs Documented, and the Review That Keeps It True

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What One Ticket Really Costs You, and How to Find Out in 30 Minutes

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What to Check Before You Bid on a Book of Clients

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New Clients, More Per Client, or New Services: Which Growth Path Fits Your Numbers

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Which Tickets to Automate, and the Review Before a Script Runs Anywhere

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Write a Handover Note so the Client Never Repeats Themselves

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Write the Scorecard Before the Job Advert Goes Out

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Your First Hundred Days After Close: A Plan That Keeps the People Who Run Things

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Your Next Tech Starts in 90 Days. Here's the Plan You Write This Week.

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Your Tier 1 Tech Has Been Stuck on That Ticket for 30 Minutes

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The MSP Assessment

Eight questions about how your MSP runs give you a score out of 100 and the gaps worth fixing first. It takes about two minutes, with no account needed.

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Contact

Send MSP Outpost a question, feedback or a content suggestion, or ask about an industry specialist page. We aim to respond within two business days.

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Write for MSP Outpost

Write for MSP Outpost: turn what you learned running a desk, a sales team or a whole MSP into a guide other MSPs use, published under your own name.

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Editorial Policy

What MSP Outpost publishes, how figures are fact-checked and examples marked, how corrections are made, and how sponsored content is labeled.

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$10M+

For MSPs past $10M: lead through a team, plan a year ahead, keep financials a buyer will trust, and get the company ready for a sale or the next decade.

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Finance & Pricing

Set prices that hold, see your margin by client, get paid on time and know what your MSP is worth, with guides, calculators and KPIs for the money side.

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Billing and Collections

Invoicing that gets paid, terms that hold up, and the call that recovers a late account.

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KPIs and Dashboards

Effective hourly rate, gross margin by client, and the dashboard an owner reads on Monday.

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Margin and Cost per Ticket

Where the money actually goes, and the two numbers that tell you before the P&L does.

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Pricing Models and Packaging

Per user, per device, tiered and bundled, and how to move a client from one to another without losing them.

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Raising Prices

The increase, the letter, the timing per client, and the conversation that follows.

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Valuation and Exit

What a buyer pays for, what they discount, and the three years of numbers that decide it.

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Account Managers

For MSP account managers: plan renewals months ahead, send the price increase letter and handle the call, spot at-risk clients and run useful QBRs.

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COOs & Service Delivery

For whoever runs delivery at an MSP: set service standards your team can meet, staff to real ticket volume and build processes that survive a busy week.

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Dispatchers

For MSP dispatchers: schedule urgent tickets and project work, see each tech's real load before assigning more, and say no to a client without losing them.

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Finance & Billing

For the person closing an MSP's books: invoice agreements and project work accurately, collect late payments without losing clients, and report margin clearly.

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HR & Recruiting

For whoever hires at an MSP: write roles and scorecards, onboard techs in weeks, and set pay and career paths that give people a reason to stay.

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Marketing

For whoever fills an MSP's pipeline: position the business apart from the one down the road, plan content that brings leads and see which channels sign clients.

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NOC & SOC

For MSP NOC and SOC teams: tune alerts without hiding real incidents, follow runbooks for common alerts, and hand over a shift with clear escalation paths.

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Owner & CEO

For MSP owners: see margin by client and cost per ticket while you can act, raise prices, fix bad contracts, plan the next hire and step back from the desk.

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Project Engineers

For MSP project engineers: scope work and write statements of work that prevent overruns, run migrations with a checklist, and hand over to the service desk.

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Sales & BDR

For MSP sales and BDRs: find prospects who fit how you deliver, run discovery calls that surface the real problem, and write proposals owners say yes to.

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Service Desk Leads

For MSP service desk leads: set triage and escalation rules that stop tickets bouncing, run clean shift handovers, and report the desk's real workload.

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Tier 1 to 3 Technicians

For MSP technicians from tier 1 to 3: PowerShell scripts you can read before you run them, cheat sheets for common tickets, and what moves you up a tier.

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vCIOs

For MSP vCIOs: build technology roadmaps and IT budgets with your clients from their own numbers, and run QBRs that end with a decision and a renewal.

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vCISOs

For MSP vCISOs: map each client to a framework such as NIST CSF, run risk assessments, keep evidence for every control and write reports insurers accept.

Glossary

AR (Accounts Receivable)

Money clients owe you for work or services already invoiced and not yet paid. It sits on the balance sheet as an asset until it is collected.

Glossary

AISP (All-In Seat Price)

The average monthly recurring revenue an MSP earns per supported user seat, across every managed services client. It folds all recurring services into one per-user figure.

Glossary

AYCE (All You Can Eat)

An all-you-can-eat agreement bundles unlimited support for a fixed monthly fee, with no per-ticket or per-hour billing for work inside its scope.

Glossary

BAA (Business Associate Agreement)

A business associate agreement is the contract a healthcare client must have with you before you touch anything containing patient information, setting out what you may do with it and what you owe them if it leaks.

Glossary

Billable Utilization

The percentage of a technician's available working hours that are logged against client work. Available hours exclude holidays and approved leave.

Glossary

BYOD (Bring Your Own Device)

BYOD is an arrangement where staff use personal phones, tablets or laptops to do company work, rather than being issued equipment the business owns.

Glossary

CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost)

The total sales and marketing spend in a period divided by the number of new clients won in it. It is what one new client actually cost you to win.

Glossary

CMMC

CMMC is the American defense department's framework for proving that a contractor handling sensitive but unclassified government information has the security controls it claims, verified at intervals rather than asserted.

Glossary

Co-managed IT

Co-managed IT is an arrangement where an MSP works alongside a client's internal IT staff rather than replacing them, with responsibilities split by agreement rather than by default.

Glossary

CSAT (Customer Satisfaction Score)

The share of post-ticket survey responses that rate the support experience positively. It measures how clients felt about individual interactions with the service desk.

Glossary

DSO (Days Sales Outstanding)

The average number of days between sending an invoice and receiving payment. It measures how quickly billed revenue turns into cash.

Glossary

Dwell Time

How long an attacker is inside an environment before being detected. It runs from the first compromise to the moment someone notices it.

Glossary

EBITDA

Earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization. It approximates the operating profit a business produces, independent of how it is financed or taxed.

Glossary

EDR (Endpoint Detection and Response)

EDR is software on endpoints that watches process and system behavior, records it, and allows an operator to investigate and respond (isolating a machine or killing a process) rather than only blocking known-bad files.

Glossary

eNPS (Employee Net Promoter Score)

The NPS question asked of your own staff: how likely are you to recommend this company as a place to work. Promoters minus detractors, from minus 100 to plus 100.

Glossary

FCR (First Contact Resolution)

First contact resolution is the share of tickets resolved in the initial interaction, without escalation, a callback, or a second touch.

Glossary

Gross Margin

Revenue minus the direct cost of delivering it, such as technician labor, tools and resold product, expressed as a percentage of revenue.

Glossary

GRR (Gross Revenue Retention)

The share of last year's recurring revenue from existing clients that you kept, counting cancellations and downgrades but ignoring any expansion. It can never exceed 100 percent.

Glossary

HIPAA

HIPAA is the American health-privacy law that decides how patient information must be protected, and it reaches you directly the moment you provide IT services to anyone who holds that information.

Glossary

ITIL

ITIL is a published framework of IT service management practices (incident, problem, change and service request handling among them), used as a common vocabulary and a starting structure.

Glossary

ITSM (IT Service Management)

IT service management is the practice of running IT as a set of defined services with owners, processes and agreed levels, rather than as a queue of requests handled however whoever picks them up prefers.

Glossary

Logo Churn

The number of clients who ended their agreement in a period, as a percentage of the clients you had at the start of it. It counts clients, not dollars.

Glossary

LTV (Lifetime Value)

The total gross margin a typical client produces over the whole time they stay with you. It is usually estimated as monthly gross margin per client times average client lifetime in months.

Glossary

MDR (Managed Detection and Response)

MDR is detection and response delivered as a service, where an external team monitors the tooling, triages what it produces, and responds, rather than the software being handed over for someone in-house to watch.

Glossary

MFA (Multi-Factor Authentication)

A sign-in that needs two or more kinds of proof, such as a password plus a code from an app or a hardware key. A stolen password alone is then not enough to get in.

Glossary

MRR (Monthly Recurring Revenue)

Monthly recurring revenue is the predictable, contracted revenue an MSP bills every month, counted separately from project work, hardware resale and hourly labor.

Glossary

NPS (Net Promoter Score)

A loyalty score from one question: how likely are you to recommend us, on a scale of 0 to 10. It is the percentage of promoters (9 or 10) minus the percentage of detractors (0 to 6).

Glossary

NRR (Net Revenue Retention)

The recurring revenue your existing clients pay today as a percentage of what the same clients paid a year ago, counting expansion, price increases, downgrades and cancellations.

Glossary

PSA (Professional Services Automation)

PSA is the system an MSP runs its business in: tickets, time entry, contracts, billing and reporting, ideally connected to the tooling that generates the work.

Glossary

QBR (Quarterly Business Review)

A quarterly business review is a scheduled meeting between an MSP and a client to review service delivery, discuss the client's business direction, and plan the technology work that follows from it.

Glossary

RMM (Remote Monitoring and Management)

RMM is the software an MSP uses to monitor client endpoints and servers, apply patches, run scripts and access machines remotely, usually through an agent installed on each device.

Glossary

RPO (Recovery Point Objective)

The most data, measured in time, the business can afford to lose in a failure. An RPO of four hours means backups must run at least every four hours.

Glossary

RTO (Recovery Time Objective)

The longest a system can be down after a failure before the outage becomes unacceptable to the business. It sets how fast a restore has to be.

Glossary

SLA (Service Level Agreement)

A service level agreement is the part of a contract that states what response and resolution a client is entitled to, usually by severity, and what happens when you miss it.

Glossary

SOC 2

SOC 2 is an audit report in which an independent firm examines how you handle security, availability and confidentiality, and states whether your controls did what you said they did.

Glossary

TTFR (Time to First Response)

Time to first response is how long a client waits between raising a ticket and hearing from a human who has read it.

Glossary

TTR (Time to Resolution)

Time to resolution is how long a ticket takes from being raised to the underlying issue being fixed, measured end to end rather than by how long anyone worked on it.

Glossary

vCIO (Virtual CIO)

A vCIO is someone who provides technology strategy to a client that has no CIO of its own: planning, budgeting, risk and roadmap rather than support and remediation.

Glossary

XDR (Extended Detection and Response)

XDR extends endpoint detection by correlating signals from other layers (identity, email, cloud services, network) so that related events are assessed together rather than as separate alerts.

Glossary

Zero Trust

Zero trust is a security approach that verifies every request on its own merits (who is asking, from what device, for what) instead of granting access because the request came from inside the network.

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Growth & Strategy

Decide where your MSP's next stage of revenue comes from: new services, verticals or pricing tiers, the targets to set, and the numbers that show it works.

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Getting Yourself Off the Tools

The handover from owner-technician to owner, in stages.

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Partnerships and Channel

Vendors, referrers and co-managed IT, and the agreements behind them.

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Planning and the Operating Rhythm

The annual plan, the quarterly review and the weekly numbers.

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Where the Next Tier of Revenue Comes From

New clients, more per client, or new services, and which one your numbers say.

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Hubs

Practical guides for every part of running an MSP: finance, operations, sales, technology, people, growth and M&A, free to read with no account needed.

KPI

Adjusted EBITDA Margin

Earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization, adjusted for one-time and owner-specific items, as a percentage of revenue.

KPI

Aged Ticket Backlog

The number of open tickets older than 30 days, and the open ticket load each technician carries.

KPI

All-In Seat Price (AISP)

The average monthly recurring revenue earned per supported user seat across all managed services clients.

KPI

Backup Success Rate

The share of scheduled backup jobs that completed successfully in the period.

KPI

Mean Time to Identify and Contain a Breach

The average days from the start of a confirmed security breach to its identification, plus the days from identification to containment.

KPI

CAC Payback Period

The number of months of gross margin from a new client needed to recover the sales and marketing cost of winning that client.

KPI

Client Net Promoter Score (NPS)

The percentage of client contacts who would recommend the MSP (9 or 10 out of 10) minus the percentage who would not (0 to 6).

KPI

Client Satisfaction (CSAT)

The share of post-ticket survey responses that rate the support experience positively.

KPI

Days Sales Outstanding (DSO)

The average number of days it takes to collect payment after invoicing.

KPI

Effective Hourly Rate

The service revenue actually earned for each hour of technician labor delivered, across agreements, projects and hourly work.

KPI

Employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS)

The percentage of employees who would recommend the MSP as a place to work minus the percentage who would not.

KPI

Employee Turnover Rate

The percentage of employees who left the MSP over a year, voluntarily or not.

KPI

Endpoints per Technician

The number of fully managed endpoints supported for each service technician, a measure of delivery capacity and staffing efficiency.

KPI

First Contact Resolution (FCR)

The share of support tickets resolved during the client's first contact, with no escalation, callback or follow-up ticket.

KPI

First Response Time

The average time between a client submitting a ticket and the first human acknowledgment from the MSP.

KPI

Gross Margin

Total revenue minus the direct cost of delivering it (technician labor, tools, resold product), as a percentage of total revenue.

KPI

Gross Revenue Retention (GRR)

The share of recurring revenue from existing clients kept over a year, counting losses and downgrades but not expansion.

KPI

Average Hands-On Time per Ticket

The average technician labor time logged against each reactive ticket, as opposed to the calendar time it stayed open.

KPI

Logo Churn Rate

The percentage of managed services clients that ended their agreement during the year.

KPI

Client Lifetime Value to CAC Ratio

The gross margin a typical client produces over its lifetime, divided by the cost of acquiring that client.

KPI

Managed Services Gross Margin

The gross margin earned on recurring managed services agreements alone, after the labor and tools needed to deliver them.

KPI

Managed Services Revenue Growth

The year over year percentage change in managed services revenue, from new clients and from growth inside existing ones.

KPI

Mean Time to Resolve (MTTR)

The average elapsed time from ticket creation to resolution for reactive client tickets.

KPI

MFA Coverage

The share of client user accounts enforced to use multi-factor authentication, with admin accounts tracked separately.

KPI

Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR)

The total revenue billed each month under recurring agreements, such as managed services, security and cloud subscriptions.

KPI

Net Revenue Retention (NRR)

The recurring revenue from existing clients a year later, including expansion and price increases, as a percentage of what they paid a year ago.

KPI

Patch Compliance Rate

The share of managed endpoints with critical and high severity patches installed within the patch SLA.

KPI

Phish-Prone Percentage

The share of client users who click a link, open an attachment or enter credentials in a simulated phishing test.

KPI

Pipeline Coverage

The value of qualified open pipeline compared with the new revenue target for the same period.

KPI

Project Gross Margin

The gross margin earned on project work after labor and direct costs, measured per project and across all projects in a period.

KPI

Recurring Revenue as Share of Total

The percentage of total revenue that comes from recurring agreements rather than projects, product resale and hourly work.

KPI

Restore Test Pass Rate

The share of scheduled test restores or automated backup verifications that recovered data or systems successfully.

KPI

Largest Client Share of Revenue

The percentage of total revenue that comes from the single largest client, with the top three clients tracked beside it.

KPI

Service Revenue per Employee

Annual service revenue divided by total headcount, a single measure of pricing, productivity and staffing combined.

KPI

Sales Cycle Length

The average number of days from first qualified contact to a signed agreement for new clients.

KPI

Service Multiple of Wages

Service revenue earned for every dollar paid in service delivery wages.

KPI

SLA Attainment

The share of tickets where the MSP met the response and resolution times promised in the client agreement.

KPI

Technician Billable Utilization

The percentage of a technician's available working hours logged against client work.

KPI

Ticket Reopen Rate

The share of closed tickets that were reopened because the issue was not actually fixed.

KPI

Tickets Closed per Technician per Day

The average number of tickets each technician closes in a working day, reported by support tier.

KPI

Tickets per Endpoint per Month

The average number of reactive tickets each managed endpoint generates in a month, a measure of how noisy the managed estate is.

KPI

Win Rate

The share of qualified sales opportunities that close as won in a period.

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Library

Download templates, calculators and scripts built for MSPs, with version notes. Every file is free: enter your email and it is yours to download.

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M&A

Buy a client book, sell your MSP or merge with another: how MSPs are valued, what raises or cuts the multiple, due diligence, and the integration.

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Buying a Book of Clients

What you are really buying, and the diligence that finds out.

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Diligence

The questions asked, the documents requested, and the ones that end deals.

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Earn-Outs and Terms

How the price is paid, and what has to be true for all of it to arrive.

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Integration

The first hundred days after close, for the staff and the clients.

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Selling Your MSP

What a buyer looks at, what they discount, and when to start.

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Valuation

The multiples, the adjustments and the number a buyer actually pays.

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Operations & Delivery

Run an MSP service desk that keeps up: ticket flow, dispatch, documentation and SOPs your team will use, and the desk numbers that actually matter.

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Dispatch and Scheduling

Load, priority, and the board that stops two techs driving to the same site.

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Documentation Standards

What gets written down, where, and the review that keeps it true.

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Escalation and Handover

The path a ticket takes upward, and what travels with it.

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Onboarding a Client

The thirty days from signature to steady state, in order.

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Standards and SOPs

The procedures that survive a busy week and a new hire.

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Ticket Flow and Triage

What happens in the first two minutes of a ticket, and who decides.

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People & Hiring

Hire the right techs for your MSP, set fair pay bands and career paths, train new hires fast, and learn why techs leave and what keeps them.

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Careers and Progression

Tier one to tier two to team lead, and what actually changes.

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Hiring and Job Descriptions

The role written down before the advert, and the scorecard that hires against it.

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Managing the Desk

One-to-ones, standards, and the conversation about a missed one.

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Onboarding and Training

The first ninety days, and the desk they join.

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Pay and Comp Plans

What roles pay, how a comp plan works, and what happens at review time.

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Retention and Why Techs Leave

The reasons in their own words, and the ones a manager can change.

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Privacy Policy

What MSP Outpost collects when you join or subscribe, how your email and MSP profile are used, and our rule: your data is never sold or shared for advertising.

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Reference

Look up MSP terms in the glossary, get direct answers to the questions MSP owners ask most, and check how each KPI is defined and calculated.

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Review & Posting Terms

What a review or a thread on MSP Outpost may say: no outside links, nobody else's contact details, civil about people and companies, and read before it appears.

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Sales & Marketing

Win your MSP's next ten clients: who to target, what to say to a business owner, discovery calls and proposals, and how to close without cutting your price.

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Marketing That Produces Leads

Content, referrals and campaigns MSPs have actually got leads from.

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Positioning and the Offer

What you sell, to whom, and the sentence that says it.

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Proposals and Closing

The proposal that gets read, the price that holds, and the yes.

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Prospecting and Outreach

Lists, sequences and the calls that reach a founder who runs the place.

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Qualifying and Discovery

The questions that find the real problem before the proposal does.

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Renewals and QBRs

The meeting that renews the contract, and the one that raises the price.

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Under $5M

For MSPs under $5M: hire your first techs, put dispatch on a board, and get yourself off the tools without the service slipping, step by step.

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$5M to $10M

For MSPs from $5M to $10M: add a management layer, write down the processes that work, and build margin you can explain line by line.

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How mature is your MSP?

Eight questions about how your MSP runs, not what it sells: tickets, agreements, margin, security and backups. Two minutes, and the report is emailed to you.

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Scripts

PowerShell and automation scripts for everyday MSP work, each marked with what it changes, readable in full on the page and read by a person before listing.

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Audit local Administrators group members

PowerShell that reports who holds local admin rights on a Windows machine, highlights unexpected members and orphaned SIDs, and changes nothing.

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Disable stale Active Directory accounts

PowerShell for MSP technicians: find Active Directory accounts idle for ninety days, switch each off with a recorded reason and park it in a chosen OU.

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Starting an MSP

Go from technician to MSP owner: decide what to sell and what to charge, sign a real agreement, and have a stack and onboarding plan ready for the first client.

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Technology & Security

Choose a stack your MSP can support, apply the same security baseline to every client, and keep the evidence cyber insurers and auditors ask for.

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Automation and Scripting

The work a script should do, and the review before it runs anywhere.

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Backup and Restore

What is backed up, how it is tested, and the day it is needed.

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Choosing the Stack

PSA, RMM, backup, security and documentation, and the order to decide them in.

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Hardening and Baselines

The configuration a client gets by default, and the proof that they got it.

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Security Frameworks and Evidence

The framework a client's insurer accepts, and the evidence that satisfies it.

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Vendor Management

Contracts, renewals, price changes and the record of what changed.

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Templates

Letters, worksheets and checklists for running an MSP, from the price increase letter and renewal worksheet to a 30-day client onboarding checklist.

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Client Onboarding Checklist, 30 Days

A four-week client onboarding checklist for MSPs, one owner per week: discovery and access, the stack, the cleanup and the handover, shared with the client.

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Price Increase Letter

A one-page price increase letter for MSPs that states the number, the date and the reason, with rules for when to send it to keep the clients worth keeping.

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Renewal Cost Worksheet

A renewal worksheet for MSPs: every vendor line that moved, its monthly cost to you, what you have carried since the vendor's date, and the number to discuss.

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Terms of Service

The terms for using MSP Outpost, MSPBriefing and MSPBench: permitted use, the license on templates and scripts for your own MSP, and content you contribute.

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Vendor Watch

Vendor price rises, license changes, outages and end-of-life dates that cost MSPs money or time, each with its source and what to do about it.

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