Last week we told our North American members that peer group pricing goes up on January 1. It’s our first increase in a couple of years. We tell MSPs to review their pricing every year so small increases don’t pile up into one ugly one, and it was time we took our own advice.
A price increase email is a decent test of whether something is working. People who feel lukewarm about a service go quiet, or they ask for a call. Instead, an owner in one of our in-person groups wrote back four words: “10000% worth it.” An owner at another member MSP thanked us for the effort that went into making the groups more valuable for them.
We’ll take it. But “worth it” is a claim, and MSP owners should be skeptical of claims. So this post covers what happens inside a group and why members keep showing up.
You can’t get honest answers from people who depend on you
Running an MSP puts you in an odd spot. Your techs report to you. Your vendors want to sell you something. Your clients pay you to have the answers. Your spouse has heard enough about the PSA migration. Almost nobody in your life can tell you, with full context, that your pricing is wrong or your service manager isn’t working out.
A peer group gives you a room of owners who run the same kind of business, have made the same mistakes, and have no reason to tell you what you want to hear.
Nobody in the room competes with you
That honesty only works if people can open up. We seat one MSP per market. You will never sit across the table from the shop down the street. Groups cap at 12 MSPs, small enough that everyone talks and big enough that you hear a range of answers.
The person running the room has run an MSP
Plenty of peer groups are led by consultants who have never signed the front of a paycheck. Ours aren’t. I grew a 12-person VAR into an 85-person MSP and sold it, co-wrote Profit and Growth for MSPs with Robert Wilburn, and have worked with thousands of MSPs around the world. Our coaching team brings the same operator background. When a facilitator pushes back on your plan, it’s because they’ve watched that plan work, or fail, in a real shop.
The numbers are mandatory
This is where most peer groups go soft. In our groups, members submit financial and operational data every quarter. Not optional, not “when you get to it.” The one exception is a group we run for smaller MSPs, where members don’t submit numbers.
Each member gets compared two ways: against their own peer group, which runs a comparable model, and against industry targets. Metrics like LLGM (Labor Loaded Gross Margin), true net profit, tickets per device, and hours per device stop being abstractions. If your LLGM is 45% and many others in the room are north of 55%, you have a specific gap to close and a table full of people who’ve already closed it in their own shops.
The first submission is real work, especially if your books need attention. We coach members through it, and when the books are a mess we’d rather fix that first than benchmark bad data. Submissions go through our benchmarking portal, and every member gets access to both our quarterly revenue and operations benchmark and our annual salary benchmark.
Hot seats make it real
In our in-person groups, a member takes the hot seat each quarter. They start by stating what they want to get out of it, then lay out the whole business: their numbers, org chart, history, goals, and quarterly priorities. The room pressure-tests all of it against what they said they wanted. It’s uncomfortable. It’s also where a lot of the biggest changes start, because you can’t hide problems from 11 owners who see the whole picture without any of the history that makes it hard to see from the inside.
Commitments carry forward
Good advice is cheap. What changes a business is acting on it. We track the commitments members make at each meeting and bring them back at the next one. Knowing your peers will ask whether you actually raised prices or restructured your service desk gets things done that a to-do list never will.
Meetings worth the trip
In-person groups don’t meet in an airport hotel conference room. Groups have met in cities like Charlotte, Nashville, Vancouver, Denver, and Cleveland, in settings that get owners out of the day-to-day long enough to think about the business instead of in it. Each Q1, groups head somewhere warmer for our Winter Getaway meeting, with spouses and significant others invited. Recent and upcoming getaways include Cabo San Lucas and Sanctuary Cap Cana.
The group doesn’t stop between meetings
Members share a Teams channel. Someone asks about a contract clause, a vendor renewal, or a tough hire, and gets answers from people who dealt with the same thing last month.
Pick the format that fits what you need
- In-person groups meet quarterly for two full days, with an online session in each off month.
- Online groups meet monthly, with optional in-person meetups, usually once a year.
- Service and Operations Groups give your service leader their own seat: 11 online sessions plus one two-day in-person meeting. These are typically for MSPs whose owners are already in one of our owner groups.
Groups run in North America, the UK, the EU, and AUS/NZ. Membership is a 12-month commitment, and not every MSP gets a seat. We place each member by hand, looking at size, business model, and market, and a group only works if every owner at the table both gets value and adds it. If there isn’t a seat where you’d fit, we’ll tell you.
What to look for in any peer group
Whether you join ours or someone else’s, hold it to a standard. Real numbers on the table once your business is big enough to benchmark. No competitors in the room. A size cap. An experienced facilitator who was once in your shoes and is willing to tell a member they’re wrong. And people you actually want to be around, the kind you’d happily spend a weekend with even if there were no agenda. And an agenda the members set, built around the problems they’re actually working on, not a lineup of vendor pitches dressed up as a meeting. Without those, you’re paying for a networking dinner, and you can get those for free.
If you want to see whether one of our MSP Advisor peer groups fits your MSP, talk to us. We’ll tell you straight if it isn’t the right time.
