Stop Skating on Thin Ice: The MSP Mistake That Looks Like Growth

Have you ever said yes to a project you were pretty sure you could figure out, and then halfway through realized it was costing you far more than it was ever going to make you? Not just money: time, energy, your team’s focus, your sanity… But by that point you were already in it, so you kept going. You told yourself you’d figure it out.

From the outside it still looked like growth, but I reality your team was stretched thin and you were spending more time fixing things than building anything!

That’s what I want to talk about today.

What Thin Ice Feels Like

The reason so many MSPs end up here is that it doesn’t feel like a problem at first. Every yes seems fine. Every project feels manageable. So you keep going. You take on a little more, move a little faster, and the whole time you’re thinking: we’ve got this.

What you don’t see is how thin the ice is getting.

Thin ice doesn’t give you a warning. It doesn’t crack a little so you can back up slowly. It holds and holds and holds until it doesn’t. And when it breaks, it’s not one small problem you’re dealing with, it’s a:

• Client relationship going sideway
• Team that’s overwhelmed
• Five fires you’re trying to put out at the same time.

You’re sitting there wondering how it got to this point! It didn’t happen all at once: it happened one yes at a time.

What It Looks Like in an MSP

This is where a lot of MSPs miss it: thin ice shows up as opportunity.

A client asks if you can handle something new. You pause, think it through, decide you can probably figure it out, and say yes! Then it happens again with another project just outside your wheelhouse. Then again… Before long you’ve got a mix of work that doesn’t fit together: different environments, different expectations, different problems that each need a different solution.

Nothing is standardized, which causes everything to take longer than it should.

And here’s the part that hurts: you priced it based on what you thought it would take, not what you actually knew, because you’d never done it before! So now you’re working harder and not making more money. Your team is constantly trying to stay ahead of problems instead of executing what they already know well.

You as the owner start jumping back in just to keep things from slipping. Suddenly, you’re working IN the business when you should be working ON it.

We Lived This. More Than Once.

I won’t pretend this only happened to us one time, because it didn’t. It happened again and again before we understood what we were doing to our MSP.

We had a client come to us with a project that was just outside what we normally did. Not completely foreign, but something we’d never really handled before. I remember thinking we could figure it out, so we said yes. Sound familiar?

It took far longer than we expected, and because we didn’t fully understand the scope upfront, we priced it wrong. We were deep into the project with a promise we probably shouldn’t have made, pulling resources we didn’t really have, and our expected margin had evaporated completely.

The worst part is that it didn’t just affect this singular project. Other clients waited longer as a result, and we found ourselves getting pulled into things we had no business being involved in just to keep the client happy.

Skating on thin ice is how you go nowhere fast.

The Pattern Nobody Warns You About

This isn’t typically a one-time issue. The more you say yes to work you don’t fully understand, the more your business gets built on guesswork instead of a repeatable process. And when that happens, your MSP turns into chaos, and you stop making money.

So, how do you stop it?

Before you say yes to anything new, ask one question: have we done this before, and do we know exactly how to make money doing it?

If the answer is no, I’m not going to tell you to automatically say no. That’s your call. But price it honestly and make sure your team isn’t already on ice so thin that one more yes puts you all through it.

What If You’re Already On Thin Ice?

If you’re reading this thinking, “Jeanne, I’m already in this situation!”, here’s what to do.

First, stop adding to the pile. No more yes to work you haven’t done before. Stabilize what you have with your current clients and standardize on what you already know.

Second, find where you’re bleeding time and money right now. Which projects are causing the most pain? Which clients are taking more than they should? Where are you getting pulled into the work instead of leading the business?

Third, fix those things one at a time. Not all at once; it won’t work. Pick one problem, fix it, then move on. Stop saying yes to the unfamiliar and price your known work correctly!

Your Challenge This Week

Take an honest look at your business. Are you saying yes to things you haven’t figured out yet, and is it causing you real problems? If the answer is yes, you already know what to do.

Today, I’ll leave you with this quote from Benjamin Franklin: “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.”

Stay off the thin ice. And as always, have a great week and weekend!