The MSP Growth Strategy Nobody Wants to Hear

Every January, the gym is packed. Everyone has a plan. This is the year of the new body, the new diet, the new me. Then February rolls around and the parking lot gets a little emptier, and by March you can park right by the door.

Why does that happen? We love the idea of transformation. We’re just a lot less excited about doing the same small thing over and over and over again.

I think MSP owners do the exact same thing with their businesses.

We Keep Hunting for the One Big Thing

We’re always looking for whatever is going to change everything. A new marketing campaign. A new salesperson. A new service. That one big client we’ve been waiting on. The latest AI tool, or the newest vendor program. We tell ourselves, “Maybe this is the one that finally takes us to the top.”

But when I look back at how we built our MSP, and at the MSPs I work with today, I can’t find that one thing. There wasn’t one client. There wasn’t one campaign. There wasn’t one big decision.

There were hundreds of little decisions, and most of them looked pretty unimportant when we made them.

Videos, Cloud, Education, and a Lot of Voicemail

Let me give you a few examples. Videos first. We made them consistently, and we kept making them well past the point where it felt productive. Plenty of those videos were watched by almost nobody, and I’m fairly sure a few of those viewers worked for us!

But we kept showing up, and eventually something happened. People started recognizing us. They’d seen the videos. They’d heard us talk. We became the experts people thought of first, and that didn’t come from one great video. It came from the pile.

Cloud worked the same way. We moved one client, then another, then another. Eventually cloud became a major part of what we did, but I never walked into the office one morning and announced that we were a cloud company now. It happened a little bit at a time.

Our sales approach changed slowly too. We started educating instead of always trying to sell. We wrote articles, we spoke, we ran seminars, and we explained the why behind the technology. Over time, our prospects started treating us differently. Sometimes we walked into a meeting as the expert they’d already been learning from, instead of the salesperson with a folder.

And then there’s cold calling. If you’ve ever done it, you know exactly what I’m talking about. You call and nobody answers. You call again and get voicemail. You call someone else and they’re not interested. Then one day you finally have a real conversation, and that turns into an appointment, and some of those appointments become clients.

Nothing about that process is exciting. It works because you keep doing it.

One Percent Doesn’t Sound Like Much

That’s the pattern I see when I look back. The things that changed our business were rarely the big things. They were the things we did over and over.

This is when I read Atomic Habits by James Clear, and something really clicked. He talks about how small improvements compound over time, and he uses the idea of getting just one percent better. One percent doesn’t sound like much, which is exactly the problem. We want the result now, and that’s usually not how growth works.

Reading it, I kept thinking, “That’s our MSP!” We didn’t suddenly become good at videos; we got better at them. We didn’t suddenly build a cloud business; we kept moving clients. We didn’t become great at educational marketing overnight; we kept teaching. And we never made one cold call that landed the perfect client. We kept calling.

The Plateau of Latent Potential

Clear has another concept I love, and he calls it the plateau of latent potential. It’s that frustrating stretch where you’re putting in the work and not seeing much happen.

You’re making videos and hardly anyone watches. You’re cold calling and nobody seems interested. You’re writing educational content and wondering whether a single person is reading it. You’re talking to clients about cloud and you can tell they aren’t ready.

This is where most people quit. They decide it isn’t working. But a quiet stretch doesn’t mean the work is failing, because a lot of the time it’s piling up.

The video you made today may not bring you a prospect tomorrow. Fifty videos might make you the name that prospect remembers when they finally need help. The cloud conversation you have today may go nowhere, and then six months from now something breaks and that client is ready. The prospect who ignored your call today might pick up on the fifth one.

That’s how momentum builds. You can’t see it until you can.

Small, Consistent, and Long Enough

If I had to boil all of this down, it would be three things: small, consistent, and long enough. You don’t have to reinvent your business. Choose something that matters, get a little better at it, keep doing it, and give it enough time to work.

I know that’s the part we don’t like. We want the breakthrough. But most breakthroughs aren’t really breakthroughs at all, are they? They’re 100 little things that nobody noticed along the way.

Your Challenge This Week

I’m not asking you to start something new. I want you to do the opposite!

Think about something you already know works but haven’t been doing consistently. Maybe it’s prospecting. Maybe it’s videos, or following up, or educating your clients, or networking. Pick one, and start doing it again this week.

Don’t worry about changing your entire business. Do one small thing, then do it again, and again, and give it long enough to work. In 40 years in this industry, and watching how the MSPs we work with grow today, I haven’t seen one giant breakthrough. I’ve seen hundreds of small improvements compounding over time.

Your business isn’t built by what you do once. It’s built by what you keep doing.

“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.” : Will Durant, summarizing Aristotle

Have a great week and weekend!