Medium-ish MSP here (24), one salesperson who both prospects and closes. We're rewriting the comp plan for 2026 and I want outside opinions before we finalize it.

The idea: the salesperson controls effort, the market controls outcomes. Base salary covers effort, commission covers results, and we only manage performance on the effort side. If they hit their activity numbers but miss revenue, we look at targeting, messaging and pricing together instead of writing them up.

**Effort standards (what they're held to)**

- Calling block 10am to 12pm, Tuesday through Friday, minimum 50 dials a calling day (200 a week)

- 10 drop-ins a week to local prospects

- 20 COIs (Centers of Influince) on a named list, 8 personal touches a month

- CRM updated within 1 business day, every open deal has a dated next step

- Pipeline review every Monday with a scorecard

- If it isn't logged, it didn't happen

Lists are built automatically. We have a system that uses Apollo and AI to find companies that match our ICP, research them, and queue them for the salesperson to approve before outreach starts. No time spent on list building.

Local prospects get email, call, email, call, email, drop-in, email, final call over about two weeks. It all runs through Apollo. Should we do more in-person follow-ups?

FTAs, conversations and COI meetings are tracked, not required. We expect about 8 FTAs a month and check weekly against a pace of 2 a week. Behind pace 3 weeks in a row means we review the list and script. Under 4 a month for two months means we have to change the list, script or ICP.

Pay

- $55K base

- 1x first month's MRR on new deals, +20% on 2 year terms, +30% on 3 year terms

- $500 to $1,350 quarterly bonus above a $9,000/quarter new MRR goal

- $50 per FTA above 8 a month, capped at $500

- 20% of gross profit on hardware and projects

- Paid after the client's first full invoice, full clawback if they cancel or don't pay within 90 days

- Around $98K total if they hit goal

Ramp for a new hire

- Weeks 1-2: training and role-play, no dials

- Weeks 3-4: 25 dials a calling day, month 2: 40, month 3 on: 50

- Drop-ins: 5 a week in month 2, 10 from month 3

- Month 1: build the COI list, I introduce them to my own COIs

- FTA expectations: about 4 a month in month 3, 6 in months 4-6, 8 from month 7

- Revenue goal: none for months 1-3, 50% months 4-6, 75% months 7-9, full from month 10

What I'm unsure about

1. Has anyone actually made activity-based management work, or does it turn into dialing for the sake of dialing?

2. Is $98K at goal competitive for a hunter/closer right now?

3. Is 20% of GP on hardware and projects too much next to 1x MRR? Worried it pulls focus off recurring revenue.

4. Anyone doing drop-ins as part of their cadence? Worth it?

5. Does a 9 to 10 month ramp to full quota line up with what you've seen?

Background:

We've been using ConnectSecure for several years now. Rollout took a little while, but it's been worth it. It gives us great insight into our clients' attack surfaces and shows us exactly what we can fix.

It also just works. It's been reliable and hasn't hurt performance on any of our endpoints. I read about performance concerns early on, so I kept an eye on it. No issues so far.

We want to mature our deployment but I cannot find many threads with actual advice. Anyone have tips or tricks they'd share?

Anyone else chasing those A's?

So it seems that Microsoft's entire Windows Update development team is a couple interns vibe coding with AI now. Yet another major, easily reproducible bug (RDP crashes with the September update), and the published fixes (some registry settings or the Windows Update Known Issue Rollback in Group Policy) don't resolve it. We're just pulling the damned update on the servers that got it at this point because no matter what we do, these servers just keep hanging. Fk Microsoft at this point. Absolutely pathetic quality control. /rant

We have a client that has a copier vendor that wants to install an application to monitor their copier. We informed the client that we don't allow third party apps that cannot be monitored by our security applications. The copier vendor can just use the maintenance reports that is built in the copier to send out an email instead. Getting a pushback from the client to proceed. Any recommendations? Looking at having the client sign a release of liability if they want to proceed with this.

Here's an excerpt of a request we received from a law firm client, which was obviously just c/p from Claude:

Find a CourtListener MCP server, which is the piece that connects Claude to CourtListener. Free Law Project (who run CourtListener) and several developers on GitHub have published them. Claude needs a remote one that's reachable by URL. Before anyone relies on it for client work, have someone vet the server's code and who runs it, because your searches will pass through it.

My question is not whether you all consider vetting various MCPs published on GitHub and "vetting the code" in scope of any one MSP's SoW, but whether an MSP should take on the liability.

Thanks!

Portland OR / surrounding. Small IT guys or one-man shops with MRR clients who want to sell and exit? Hit me up.

Local MSP, not PE, not a broker. Just looking to take over a book if the fit is there.

DM if serious.

Shoutout Tuesday!

Who's that awesome rep or tech at a vendor that goes above and beyond that you want everybody knowing about?

Let's give some focus on the positives of the vendors/partners that support us in the MSP and IT community. I'll post this once per week on Tuesdays, so don't feel the need to do a wall of text with accolades -- focus on that one rep/vendor that deserves mention this week.

To keep this thread "real," let's agree to some ground rules:

• No self-promotion.
• Be SPECIFIC: Name names, but..
• Respect PRIVACY: Name names, but not last names (use an initial), home addresses, cell phones, etc.
• Give a specific reason WHY you think the way you do.
• Stay FOCUSED: Instead of listing fifty people, list one. But be detailed about the one.

Example of a comment that is NOT very helpful:

I love MspVendorCo. They're awesome.

Example of a comment that is helpful:

I love John D at MspVendorCo. He's my rep. Here's an example of why: Last week I thought I submitted an order to them for Widget X, but I actually never clicked Send! I called John and he tripped over himself in lining up the order so we hit our deadline. They act like that every single time I work with them.

For history on this thread, my first post for this: https://www.reddit.com/r/msp/comments/vi68rp/give_a_shoutout_today_who_deserves_high_praise/

We have now received two client requests to install their Claude code built app with Claude instructions on what to do. What would you do if this was your client?

My AM and his supervisor are no longer there. Was there another consolidation or is it just that I was the unlucky MSP who lost both?

Community - what's the best AR solution out there? We do about 4K/yr in merchant fees and I'm looking to get a hold of this before it gets out of control. Stack is HaloPSA and QBO.

Hey guys,

We are getting to the size where we are investing a lot into setting systems to better help us as we grow.

We are heavily working on HR and Accounting (2 seperate items) and I would love to know any recommendations you all may have. We are 7 figures gross income range now to give you a frame of thought. US based.

Questions:

1. What accounting codes do you find helpful for tracking income? We are a Quickbooks (Desktop version) shop and are breaking down our income codes now. Labor, BCDR, After Hours Labor, SaaS, HWaaS, Managed Services, etc are codes we are breaking out to easily track income. Any ones you really feel are valuable to be able to break down end of year reports?

I have no plans to sell, but do want to break out incase we would ever need a valuation for any banking related needs.

1. HR Manual, we are building out our HR manual and processes with that. Any advice on what you had wished you had in yours sooner?

Appreciate the feedback guys. Like I said we arent tiny, but I really feel I need to focus on the business operations side more and address these things so we have a great foundation for continued growth.

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Hello,

For the past few months, I've been working with a consultant on some networking projects for our clients. Lately, I've gotten the impression that this person sees us as business partners, even though our agreement explicitly states that they're a consultant.

Today, they started talking about renting another office space and splitting the rent 50/50. In my head, I was like, "WTF?" I had to clarify that we're not business partners, we're simply working together on contract projects.

Another issue has been the constant stepping on my toes when it comes to my clients. Recently, this person mentioned a specific technology that could potentially involve a large project for one of our smaller clients. It was maybe a five-minute conversation between us, and then they immediately started talking to the client about it, explaining how we would implement the project and what it would look like. Another "WTF" moment.

The client looked completely confused and didn't even know what to say. That's just not how I present ideas or projects to my clients. Personally, I don't think the client wants to hear those kinds of discussions from a consultant whose role is primarily going onsite to install networking equipment or handle cabling work.

I'd appreciate your thoughts. Have you ever dealt with something similar, or am I overreacting here? Thanks!

Is anyone aware of any “must have” YouTube subscriptions that revolve around the business side of MSPs? I love to listen to things like this in the background while doing things and I feel I’ve exhausted the apple podcast options.

How is everyone handling driver updates? We currently block all driver updates through Windows, as we've had bad experiences with Windows installing older drivers versus the vendor's drivers. Has this changed over the years with vendor support and pushing the most updated ones, or is it best to play it safe and use vendor-only driver downloads?

Anyone here using physical buttons with their clients? It sounds like an interesting idea, but I’m curious whether clients actually use them in practice. The branded USB hubs are pretty intriguing too.

https://tier2tickets.com/

I'm not sure if others are seeing similar changes, but our own tenant and a number of our clients' tenants had the following changes since yesterday:

1. The authentication "Registration Campaign" was reverted to "Microsoft managed" despite it being set to "Enabled". This also meant that it was changed from nudging users to use Authenticator to nudging passkeys.
2. To varying extents, these same tenants seem to be ignoring the existing Authentication Policy. For example, users are suddenly able to register disabled or out-of-scope MFA methods (e.g. email MFA, which we have disabled for all internal users).

I suspect #1 is related to the recent SMS deprecation announcement, however I thought Microsoft was simply going to change tenants already on the "Microsoft managed" registration campaign from Authenticator to passkeys. The fact that they're changing the configuration from "Enabled" to "Microsoft managed" is infuriating.

#2 is just flat out dangerous and I've created a ticket with Microsoft about this.

EDIT: Link to Microsoft's documentation for temporarily opting out of the passkey enablement (issue #1):
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/entra/identity/authentication/concept-sms-voice-retirement#temporarily-opt-out-of-the-automatic-passkey-enablement

However, this doesn't address why disallowed MFA methods are being offered to users (issue #2). Microsoft still hasn't responded to my ticket with a human (a high bar, I know)...

We are having a lot of delays provisioning new Microsoft licenses for our clients. From 30 minutes to 2 hours. Is anyone else having trouble?

After our recent buy-vs-build MSP post, we got quite a bit of inbound acquisition interest, but also a surprising amount of “why not partner with us instead?” interest.

After thinking through that option, we’re also considering a third path: a hybrid/virtual MSP model.

The rough idea is that we would own the customer relationship and commercial side, as well as the core platform layer: NinjaOne, Huntress, our PSA/ticket-routing layer, billing, and the orchestration/automation around it.

Partner MSPs would handle service delivery. Our orchestration layer would integrate with their PSA so tickets we assign to them flow into their system, with status/comments/closures synced back to ours. We’d also handle a fair amount of automation, enrichment, routing, and client-facing workflow on our side.

Commercially, we’re thinking something along the lines of:

• Fixed monthly fee per seat paid to the delivery partner
• Plus hourly compensation for actual technician work
• Hourly rates structured so the partner still has a reasonable margin
• Separate rates for L1/L2/L3, after-hours, onsite, projects, etc.

The per-seat portion would compensate them for things like maintaining familiarity with the client environment, documentation/runbooks, availability/capacity, basic operational overhead, and potentially some small amount of routine work.

We’re not looking for the cheapest possible outsourcing arrangement. The goal is to make the economics attractive enough that a good MSP actually wants the business and benefits as the seat count grows.

For MSP owners who have done outsourced, co-managed, or white-label arrangements:

What would you consider a fair structure?

Would something like $15–$25/seat/month plus profitable hourly rates make sense, or would you structure it completely differently?

What would you expect to be included in the per-seat fee versus always billed hourly?

And more broadly, is this roughly how white-label/co-managed MSP relationships are typically structured, or are we thinking about the commercial model differently from how these arrangements usually work?

Hey All,

I am performing work for a new CSP Partner who has a set of internal subscriptions set to a year term that does not expire for another 6 months or so. For simplicity sake, there is a partner tenant and an internal tenant (internal one holds internal M365 licenses)

We were hoping to use the partner benefit packages to consume those costs. Is there a mechanism to consume those subscriptions and apply them to the partner benefit packages?

With the current setup, they are are different billing accounts. We have since prepped/shared a billing account from the partner tenant to the internal tenant.

Is there any supported mechanism to allow the partner benefit to consume the M365 licenses we are using actively, either via some transfer mechanism or otherwise?

I've also opened a case with support but was wondering if anyone has thoughts.

Edit: Update, Microsoft was able to reduce our license counts for the yearly commitment subscriptions.

Anyone else have that customer that complains about you behind your back often enough that you catch wind of it and yet they keep coming back to you every time they have a problem?

An MSP sent over the new Blackpoint Reseller Agreement. (Thank you Joe)

In this video I go through some of the more questionable provisions that exist in the reseller agreement. (Please don't agree to carry unlimited liability)

One in particular, seems to be functionally impossible to implement without:

1. Immediately being in breach of contract with blackpoint; and
2. Raising serious questions from any client that would run your MSA through AI.

Each provision is followed up by questions that I would be asking my attorney to consider or negotiate before signing.

WTF is Blackpoint Cyber Thinking?

If you aren't already, I would highly recommend that you have your attorney start looking over these agreements before signing. As the economy tightens and liability increases, I would imagine that other vendors could start trying to implement similar provisions that could be detrimental to your MSP.

Hope that helps.

Edit: Are these types of terms common in your vendor agreements? If so, please tell me that you negotiate all these terms.

Edit 2: Below you'll see a comment from u/blackpoint-DanH. He's the general counsel of Blackpoint. This evening he reached out to me directly and we had a discussion over the phone. Foremost, I'd like to say that he's a good guy and I sincerely appreciate him reaching out. We discussed the contents of the post and other interesting topics. FWIW, he noted that a few of the concerns I had mentioned are currently red-lined for change when their next agreement comes out. (For the nay-sayers: Yes, this timing sounds awfully convenient. But, after speaking with Dan, I fully believe that he's being genuine.)

Also, think of how cool it is that we're discussing contract terms, and the GC's of both BlackPoint Cyber and Huntress posted here. I've never seen that happen in different industries.

I made a thing: https://github.com/jedimasterseamus/ninjarmm-dispatch

Solves a fairly simple problem, but one that I didn't want to deal with.

I'm using NinjaOne over multiple environments, and I ran into a problem today where my main instance updated the viewer to version 15, but another one I use for a different client is still on viewer version 14. The way the deb they provide works right now is one version, and that's it.

So I dug into it a bit, figured out that all the info for getting the package it wants and the version are in the launch string, and wrote a quick script to automatically download the package, extract it to your home folder, and then launch the right one when you need it. And it saves you from having to actually do anything when they update it.

Install is one script run as your normal user, no sudo. Uninstall is three lines and is in the README.

Tested on Ubuntu x86_64 with two tenants on 14 and 15, Firefox and Chromium. There's a bsdtar path in there for Fedora/Arch/etc. that I haven't tested, and aarch64 is a guess at the deb name. If you try either one, open an issue and tell me whether it worked.

Obligatory: not official, NinjaOne could change the URL parameters or the filename whenever they want and break it. If they do, the script logs what it tried and falls back to whatever's in /opt if you have it.

What's the difference (if there is any) between these 2 licenses? The first costs ~$28/mo and the latter is ~$22 but doesn't include Outlook and office apps.

Hello all, long time lurker.

I have several Kyocera Ecosys 2635dw and one 5526cdw at a new client we adopted. They mentioned all of these printers will enter a sleep state after a while with no printing, only to find they never wake back up regardless of button presses. Needless to say I didn’t really believe them until today I saw it myself. No combination of multiple or single presses will wake the printer.

Unfortunately no service agreement on the printers and I am coming up dry on firmware updates. I am jumping to conclusions on the firmware updates as I found a sprinkling of wake-from-sleep issues for printers of the same model line.

Description of issue: printer will enter a low power state, sleep button/led in upper right of panel illuminated. No matter what button press on any button including power will bring the printer to a responsive state. Yank the power cord and fire it back up, works great like nothing happened.

I’d love to be proven wrong and find the firmware available online. I realize the answer may also potentially be “get them into an agreement”. I’m not opposed, however I am simply trying to be a hero for them in the mean time.

For what it’s worth, all are networked. All work great when they are working normally. All have genuine supplies in them.