Five Interesting Thoughts from…Nigel Moore
The CEO of The Tech Tribe explains why MSPs should think less and do more to make more.
Once a successful MSP in Australia, Nigel Moore is now founder and CEO of The Tech Tribe, one of the most trusted sources of managed services expertise in his home country and beyond. He’s also part of the team responsible for the ScaleCon MSP marketing conference, which takes place in September this year.
Moore joined co-hosts Erick Simpson and Rich Freeman on a recent episode of Channel Mastered’s MSP Chat podcast for a free-wheeling, wide-ranging conversation about the state of managed services today. Here are five of his most insightful—and characteristically colorful—observations.
1. MSPs are overthinking prices. Especially the MSPs just setting up shop.
“There’s 50 different types of hybrid models out there left, right, and center nowadays, and with all of that information, newer people or newer entrants that are coming into the market that are trying to figure out their pricing are getting pretty confused,” Moore says. Next thing you know, he adds, they’re stuck in “analysis paralysis,” a phenomenon Moore remembers well from his days as an MSP.
“I kept going for months and years at a time trying to perfect my plan and my offering and exactly what I’d include and how I’d bundle this cloud and this cyber stack or whatever it was. But I never got my plans out there, and not getting your plans out there is useless as, pardon my language, tits on a bull,” Moore says. Better to pick a model and fix it if you must later.
“If you make a mistake, just go cap in hand to your clients and say, ‘sorry, we’ve made a mistake on this pricing model. We’ve just got to adjust it,’” Moore says. “Once I became confident with having that conversation with a client where I’d made a mistake and was able to change a pricing model, things became so much easier.”
2. It’s not just pricing. MSPs are overthinking everything. That includes service delivery, compensation schemes, sales, marketing, and anything else you can name.
“Probably everyone in the MSP space is a perfectionist or recovering perfectionist in some way, shape, or form,” Moore says, adding that perfect is often the enemy of progress. Once you’ve got a good rough sense for what you want to do, go do it.
“Rough is enough,” Moore counsels. “You’ve just got to get something out there and run with it and learn the lessons from the trenches, not from inordinate amounts of research.”
3. Raising your prices to true market rates is a simple yet frequently overlooked growth driver. That’s a truth Moore learned the hard way during his MSP days following years of underpricing his services, and one he believes most MSPs have yet to digest.
“Even though we have inflation that’s blowing things out of the water like crazy, an MSP will sit on the same pricing model for three to five to seven years,” Moore says. Better to spend a little time figuring out what peers in your area are charging for comparable services and match them, Moore adds.
“You’ve already got the clients on your books, you’re already servicing them, you already assumingly have high trust with them, and you’re already giving them a good deal,” he notes. “It’s an easy win.”
4. MSPs should cross-sell existing services before adding new ones. Adding hot new technologies like AI and XDR to your current services lineup takes time and money. Simply selling more of the services you already offer to more of your existing clients is an easier way to add revenue.
“Our industry is a stickler for red shiny object syndrome,” Moore says. “The reality is they’ve got these books of amazing clients that they’re probably only extracting thirty to seventy percent of the value that they could be extracting out of those clients while still maintaining the extremely high levels of value that they’re giving in return.”
Create a spreadsheet, Moore advises, then make rows for each of your clients and columns for each of the services you currently provide. “Figure out what you’re not selling to your current clients that need it,” Moore says, and sell it to them.
5. Never say never about selling to private equity. But do be cautious. By and large, according to Moore, and especially in the U.S., private equity firms are paying good solid multiples. “It’s a fairly healthy-ish thing” for the industry, he says. But acquirers aren’t all created equal, and some know very little about the industry they’re buying into.
“They’ve gone and structured some sort of vendor finance deal with these smallish MSPs and then tried to bundle them all together with no domain MSP experience on board whatsoever, and all the owners exit and all the service delivery disappears,” Moore says, adding that such firms seem to think wrapping a bunch of companies with different cultures and tool stacks together is easy. “It is not very easy at all to wrap a bunch of MSPs together in any way, shape, or form.”
Moore said a lot more worth hearing on our show. Tune in here to enjoy the whole conversation.
