MSPs in Conversation

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A show where you can listen to your peers as they talk about real-life takes and advice on how to run and grow your MSP.

  1. 6 days ago

    Mind the Margin: The Financial Metrics That Decide Where Your MSP Goes Next

    Most MSP owners know their revenue off the top of their head. Ask about effective hourly rate or true cost to serve and the room goes quiet. That gap is where profit hides, and in a tight year it separates the businesses that are coping from the ones quietly bleeding. We get into the numbers that actually run an MSP: which clients are worth keeping, and whether you are building something a buyer would ever want to touch. In this episode, we're talking to MSP leaders who already run their business this way: what they track, what it's changed for them, and what it took to build the discipline.

  2. 18 Aug

    Running an MSP Across Two Generations

    Mark Pace started Sterling IT in 1995. Thirty-one years on, his son Nathan runs the business day to day as General Manager (a role he never planned on) having come to IT from real estate. In this conversation, recorded live at Catalyst, they talk openly about what generational handover actually looks like inside a working MSP: the fear of letting go when your clients have been with you for 25 years, the arguments over changing a logo or moving an office, and why the friction between old-school experience and new-generation thinking is the thing that makes it work rather than the thing that breaks it. There's also some practical wisdom on client retention, treating the one-man band like your biggest account, and why partnership beats price every time.

  3. 31 July

    Beyond Efficiency: How Smart MSPs Are Using AI to Build New Revenue and Better Margins

    MSPs are meeting clients who want more than they used to, and AI is a big part of why that's possible. The same tools that reduce ticket volume and lower support costs are also opening up whole new conversations: advisory work, automation projects, AI implementations that simply weren't on the table a few years ago. The MSPs doing this well aren't just using AI to do the old job faster. They're using it to build a different kind of business: lower operational cost, higher-value client relationships, and revenue streams that didn't exist before. For MSPs that stay in the same lane, the everyday work AI makes cheaper is already worth less, and clients are starting to notice. But the businesses leaning into it aren't just surviving the shift, they're using it as the reason to build something better. In this episode, we're talking to MSP leaders who are already doing exactly that: what they're building, what it's unlocking, and what it took to get moving.

  4. 9 July

    Marketing That Scales With Your MSP

    Most MSPs start with a great story. The founder is the brand, the salesperson, and the evangelist all rolled into one. For a while, it works. Then growth stalls, the founder burns out, and marketing activities run on gut feel with no way to measure what's actually working. In this episode, recorded live at the Catalyst conference in Sydney, we sit down with Anita Sheridan-Roddick, CRO at Baidam, and Vivienne Winborne, Senior Marketing Manager at One Little Seed. Together they unpack what it really takes to transition from founder-led sales to a scalable, measurable marketing function, and why the brand itself eventually needs to grow beyond the person who built it.

  5. 25 June

    What Being an MSP Actually Means Now

    The role of the MSP is changing. AI is levelling the playing field, break-fix work is shrinking, and Australian MSPs who keep positioning themselves as "the IT company" are going to feel it. In this episode, recorded live at the Catalyst conference in Sydney, Daniel Butt, Director of Danet Technology, shares what it really takes to stay relevant as a managed service provider in 2026. From using AI to go deeper with clients, to escaping the race to the bottom on MSP pricing, to making the shift from IT support to strategic technology partner, this is a conversation every Australian MSP owner needs to hear.

  6. 17 June

    The Vertical Advantage

    For years, "we support all businesses" was a perfectly good MSP pitch. Mark Whittington took the opposite path. As CEO of Ozdoc, he's built a business focused almost entirely on healthcare, a vertical where the stakes, the language, and the definition of "critical" are unlike anything a generalist MSP deals with. We caught up with Mark live at the Catalyst conference, two years on from his first MSPs in Conversation appearance, to see how his thinking on verticalisation has evolved. He shares why the niche only works if you genuinely care about it, how Ozdoc is now extending into governance and compliance, what he's learned building a sales team from scratch, and his grounded take on the gap between AI hype and real business value. A short, honest conversation about committing to a vertical and the discipline it takes to do it well.

  7. 9 June

    Buy, Build or Partner: How MSPs Are Growing Through M&A

    The MSP acquisition market has never been more active. Private equity is rolling up providers at pace, strategic acquirers are hunting for specialised capabilities in cybersecurity and compliance, and many long-standing MSP owners are having serious conversations about exit for the first time. Meanwhile, some of the most interesting growth stories in the market right now aren't coming from winning new clients, they're coming from buying them. The problem is most MSPs are either not prepared to acquire or not prepared to be acquired. They haven't thought seriously about valuation, they haven't done the operational work that makes a business attractive, and they haven't mapped out what integration actually looks like after the deal closes. When the conversation comes, they're not ready for it. In this episode, we're talking to MSP leaders who have been on both sides of the table. They've bought businesses, sold businesses, and in some cases done both. They'll walk through what actually drives deal activity, what buyers are looking for in, and what you need to do now if you want to be in a position to act when the opportunity arrives.

  8. 4 June

    The Rise of Managed Intelligence Provider

    Every few years our industry reinvents itself, and the gap between each reinvention keeps getting shorter. Box pusher became break-fix, break-fix became the MSP, the MSP became security-led, and Milan Rajkovic reckons the next shift is already here. In this episode, recorded live at the Catalyst conference in Sydney, the founder of Otto IT traces his path from hacking his high school network at 14 to building a security-led managed service provider, then lays out where he thinks the industry goes from here. He makes the case for the Managed Intelligence Provider, explains why security stays the one constant no matter what the label becomes, and gets into the business acumen and judgement that AI still cannot replicate. A candid, fast-moving conversation for any MSP owner trying to work out what comes next.

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About

A show where you can listen to your peers as they talk about real-life takes and advice on how to run and grow your MSP.

Information

  • Creator
    Hosted Network
  • Years Active
    2024 - 2026
  • Episodes
    42
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © Hosted Network
  • Show Website
    MSPs in Conversation