Tag
revenue-operations
10 posts
Your Liability Cap Does Not Cover the Sales Pitch
The liability cap in a managed services agreement limits what an MSP owes for bad work. It does not reliably limit what the MSP owes for a false statement made to win the deal. Eight court rulings across backup, software projects, cloud software, website builds, demos and security monitoring show the split, and seven checks tell an owner where the exposure sits.
The Missing Service Catalog
A founder-led MSP prices every deal by feel, and the industry never settled on a model, so a hired seller has nothing to quote from. The service catalog gets written before the job description does.
The Vertical He Never Named
A founder-led MSP's client book usually clusters in one industry by accident. The buyer's job is to name it, because a vertical pitch is the one sales motion a hired seller can run without the founder.
The Milestone That Counts the Wrong Thing
MSP platforms report how fast an acquisition was integrated and never what the acquired revenue did afterward. One platform published the number that would count, and most MSPs cannot report it.
Three Ways to Take the Sales Motion Away From the Founder
When a platform buys a founder-led MSP it buys a sales engine with one moving part. The industry runs three models for replacing him, from sixty days to never, and most platforms never chose one.
Satisfied and Leaving
The same clients who report near-total trust in their MSP report majority intent to switch providers. The satisfaction slide measures the wrong thing, and the industry publishes no number that would catch it.
Your Growth Plan Has a Client-Size Problem
Demand for outside IT help rises with the size of the customer. The average MSP's client book runs the other way, and most of it sits in the band that buys least and takes almost as much work.
The Business Runs on What Nobody Wrote Down
Diligence counts contracts, margins and the tool stack. Nobody checks whether the work is written down, and that is the part that decides whether an MSP can absorb a new hire, an acquisition, or a resignation.
Half the Industry Sells Through the Owner
MSPs are almost evenly split between having a sales team and having sales run strictly by the founder. The standard deal removes that founder within two years. If you bought recurring revenue, half the time what you bought was a seller.
The Growth Engine You Bought Was the Founder
Organic growth stalls at sponsor-owned MSPs because the pipeline was the founder's personal referral network: unwritten, unbudgeted, and scheduled to leave with him. The fix gets built during the hold.