Signed

MSPs sell their book. The vendors they're authorized on. The platforms they're certified on. The products they have margin on.
The infrastructure they're about to recommend for your business is shaped by all of that before you walk in the room.

This Playbook covers what that actually means for you: how to size the right MSP for your company, what security capabilities a small MSP genuinely cannot deliver regardless of what they tell you, why outsourcing IT decision-making to someone with a vested interest is one of the most expensive mistakes a growing company makes — and the one rule that keeps you from getting locked into the wrong stack for the next three years.

You should be leading the MSP. Not the other way around.

The Playbook
00:00 — The danger of outsourcing IT decisions to someone selling their book
00:45 — Why MSPs sell their book — and why that's the reality, not a criticism
02:00 — Deal registration: how your project gets locked in before you've decided
02:34 — Size mismatch: why a $100K project won't get attention from a large VAR
03:30 — The security capability gap: what sub-50-person MSPs can't actually deliver
04:47 — Platform-on-platform: the tools MSPs resell vs. real capability
05:40 — Truck rolls, multi-site support, and what to ask before you sign
06:10 — Rip and replace: the cost of getting it wrong while under contract
07:00 — The play: define your infrastructure needs first, then find the MSP that fits


Resources Mentioned

About the Show
Signed is the podcast for buyers in a market built for sellers. Playbooks are the solo format — 10 to 15 minutes, one trigger, one specific play. New episodes weekly at itbroker.com/podcast. If the trigger in today's Playbook is one you're facing right now, book an intro call at itbroker.com. We help buyers make the right call the first time. 
Buy tech without regret. 
Follow: @itbrokerdotcom 

Full Transcript

Creators and Guests

Host
Max Clark
Founder & CEO of ITBroker.com

What is Signed?

The IT market is built for sellers, not buyers.

That's why 80% of tech buyers regret their last major purchase. Deals take longer than they should. Teams get locked into platforms that don't fit, contracts they can't escape, and vendors they wouldn't choose again. The pitches, demos, and analyst reports are built to close deals, not help buyers make the right one.

Signed is the podcast for the buyers. Host Max Clark, CEO of ITBroker.com, talks with CIOs, CFOs, operators, and founders who've lived inside real enterprise tech deals — the ones who can explain what actually determined whether the deal worked.

Plus weekly Playbooks breaking down the moments that matter most: renewals, M&A, compliance mandates, office moves, budget cuts, and the specific plays that separate buyers who get it right from those who regret it.

If you're responsible for choosing, negotiating, or living with the consequences of enterprise technology, this show is for you.

New episodes weekly. An ITBroker.com podcast.

Max Clark (00:00)
It is exceedingly dangerous to outsource any sort of decision-making process

for your business to a third party, especially if that third party has any sort of vested interest in selling their book to you.

If you do not have somebody that is making IT decisions and is looking at this from a strategic planning for your business of what is the long arc? The infrastructure that's going to be selected for you by default by whoever you're engaging with may or may not be correct for you, and it might be a situation where you find yourself a year down the road.

looking for a different MSP because that MSP is not giving you the capabilities, the support, the care or the features, know, what the cost structure, whatever it is that you actually need.

Today's topic is MSPs. No fluff, off the cuff, here we go.

First thing you need to know is MSPs sell their book. That means what they're allowed to, what they're authorized to, what they have margin to. When you're looking at MSPs, you're gonna hear and you're gonna see what their...

what their business is built around. And this isn't a bad thing. This is just the reality. And whether or not it's being explained to you, you understand it, it's on the surface, or it's hidden, this is the reality of it. OEMs require MSPs and partners in their channels to do multiple things before they're authorized to work with them. They have to have certified engineers. They have to have certified salespeople. And they need to have volume. In a lot of cases, they can't sell competitive stuff.

So if you're trying to buy equipment from one OEM and that MSP reps a different OEM, what are you going to hear? You're going to hear about how their OEM is better. And the one you're looking at sucks. It is just the nature of the beast. The other thing that you're going to find if you dig into this is based on the size of the MSP and how much volume they have with different OEMs and different manufacturers of different software platforms, whatever it actually is, they're going to have different discount tiers.

What does this look like every process is going to go through deal registration deal registration is a first-come first-serve thing if if you as a Client are going out as a buyer going out and talking to multiple MSPs. They're all gonna deal read your deal They're gonna say hey, I'm so and so and this is my project and that's gonna protect them with that manufacturer with that vendor Can you displace it? Absolutely? You can does it require energy on your part? Absolutely. It does because now

You have to help the underlying manufacturer or vendor believe that this other MSP is the right one for you. Now we get into alignment with MSPs. A small MSP, let's call it 10-ish people, that MSP's capabilities versus an MSP that has 100 people and has sit scale is very different. If one MSP is selling, by the way, these things are also called VARs, right? If one MSP or VAR,

is selling $20 million a year with a vendor, and another one has crossed $100 million plus, who's going to have bigger margins and discounting leverage? Now, by default, those margins goes into the MSP's pocket. But if you understand what those margins actually look like and what they actually are, this becomes an advantage for you. Now, look, if you're a small business and you're talking to a very large MSP VAR,

You know, it's gonna be frustrating to work with them because they're just not equipped to deal with you and they also just don't care about your project It's not that they don't care about you know, no, they do actually probably not care about your project You know of our that is hit scale and is doing north of ten million dollars a month in any one vendor if you show up with a hundred thousand dollar project I mean, it doesn't move the needle for anybody. How much care and interest are they gonna really give to you? so ⁓ MSP var, know

Any sort of vendor alignment based on your size is really important. How big are you? What kind of organization and vendor can you work with? And how do you actually map this up is really important. Now, the other part of this becomes capability. We talk about what they're authorized to, what they're allowed to. MSPs add to their capabilities by going out and partnering with other companies. So ⁓ what's really popular right now, you see MSPs that say they can do security for you. I'm going to.

tell you straight up, if you are talking to an organization that is less than 50-ish people and they tell you that they have a sock and they can do security for you, they cannot. They don't have the team to do it. They haven't hit scale. And security specifically, you have education, continuing education, keeping up with what's going on, having volume in order to detect patterns on a larger basis, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Now, could they configure Intune for you? Could they configure Defender for you? Probably.

Could they make sure that Defender's actually doing what it's supposed to be doing? Maybe not. Do they have pattern and a team to be able to do investigation at scale? Absolutely not. So what becomes popular in the market is we have lots of software platforms that go out and sell the MSP specifically, whether this is

⁓ their itsm platforms the rmm platforms backup platforms security platforms. I mean you name it There's there's tons of platforms that sell specifically to msp's for the msp so then go out and sell to you Is that what you want to buy? I don't know Depends right. This is where we get into a lot of these conversations about it depends If you're talking to an msp and you have an expectation of them being able to show up in your office Is that msp geared to do it or are they outsourcing that truck roll?

What does that mean for you? How do you evaluate that? If you're opening offices in a different market, can that MSP support you there? Do they have to truck roll? What's the consistency of the experience and the quality of the experience that you receive as a result of that? These are all factors that you have to look into and consider. Now, this is where I see the wheels fall off the bus. It is exceedingly dangerous to outsource any sort of decision-making process

for your business to a third party, especially if that third party has any sort of vested interest in selling their book to you.

If you do not have somebody that is making IT decisions and is looking at this from a strategic planning for your business of what is the long arc? The infrastructure that's going to be selected for you by default by whoever you're engaging with may or may not be correct for you, and it might be a situation where you find yourself a year down the road.

looking for a different MSP because that MSP is not giving you the capabilities, the support, the care or the features, know, what the cost structure, whatever it is that you actually need. And now when you're actually going out to market and looking and trying to figure out who can fit the, you know, do this for you. That now we start talking about rip and replacing infrastructure. This is very disruptive in some cases is probably not possible because you're in contract, you can budget, you know, if you signed a three year contract and you're a year into it, now you want to rip that out and replace it with something else.

Guess what? That's probably not happening. having an understanding what your IT and technology needs are from a neutral standpoint that actually matches your business, start there. Then go out and talk to vendors. Go out to talk to MSPs. Go out to talk to VARs. Now, ⁓ I started my career working for a VAR. Now we'd call it an MSP.

We were really good. We were really good at what we did, but we were opinionated as well. You know, what was going on back then in those days, right? Compact was better than Dell. Was it really? We sold Compact. We couldn't sell Dell. For us, Compact was better for Dell. There was no way for us to support Dell infrastructure. If you were a company that had purchased Dell desktops and Dell servers, we could not help you. So yes, in our world, Compact was better than Dell. I wouldn't got Compact certified. I got a really nifty toolkit afterwards. So...

The point here is, is MSPs are valuable. MSPs do amazing work. Every company probably should be engaged with an MSP at some level. But what's important here for you is figuring out what's actually important for you, what infrastructure you want, and then finding the MSP that can support the infrastructure that you need for your roadmap, not the other way around. Don't let the MSP lead you. You want to lead the MSP. That's the playbook.

More is available at itbroker.com podcast. And if you're in the middle of a real tech decision and want someone in your corner, that's what we do. Book an intro call at itbroker.com and buy tech without regret. I'm X Clark. See you on the next one.