Take a look at your P&L. Now look at your "Strategic Stack."
You aren't a CEO. You’re a sharecropper.
Every month, you collect rent from your clients. Then, like a good little vassal, you immediately hand the biggest chunks of that gold to the Three Kings:
1. King Microsoft: Who keeps moving the goalposts on licensing, forcing you to play debt collector for their revenue. 2. King Kaseya: Who wants to "consolidate" your workflow until you’re so locked in you couldn't leave if the product stopped working. 3. King Insurance: Who now dictates your security stack more than you do.
The industry calls this "Strategic Convergence." I call it the Great Erasing.
When your stack is identical to the guy down the street, and both of you are reselling the same three vendors, you have zero unique value. You have a commodity.
We’ve become the "Last Mile" delivery drivers for Big Tech. We take the risk, we take the 2 AM calls, and we take the blame when the insurance claim is denied.
They take the recurring revenue.
You aren't a partner. You’re a franchisee without the brand recognition.Whoever came up with that name should be held accountable.
Vague. Pretentious. Tells you nothing about what actually happens. Could describe a hotel concierge, a staffing agency, or a mid-tier consulting firm that ran out of ideas. Three words that somehow managed to name an entire industry without describing it.
I use it because this newsletter is called The MSP Contrarian and for better or worse — mostly worse — the name stuck. We are all living with someone else's branding decisions.
Three words. Let's look at them.
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Provider.
The MSP doesn't make the technology. Doesn't write the software (except for some scripts that the techs love). Doesn't manufacture the hardware. Provides it, in the sense that a travel agent provides flights.
The travel agent industry saw what happened when the internet made it easy to go direct.
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Service.
What service?
Monitoring. Patching. Help desk. Incident response. License resale. Explaining to the client why their Microsoft bill went up and what Extended Service Term billing means and why nobody told them it was coming.
All legitimate. All under pressure. Most of it either automating, offshoring, or getting absorbed into the bundle of the vendor the MSP resells.
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Managed.
Here is where it gets interesting.
Managed implies intention. Someone deciding what good looks like for this client's environment and working toward it. Not just keeping the lights on. Knowing where the lights should be.
What actually gets managed is the gap between what the client has and what they need, using tools named after capabilities they approximate, certifications that prove completion rather than competence, and a pricing model the industry hasn't agreed on in twenty years.
The client calls this "paying for break-fix with a monthly invoice."
The MSP calls this "the customer doesn't understand the value."
They're both right.
The value was always in the knowing, not the managing. The name just never admitted it.
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The MSP Contrarian: Unstacking the Business Model
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