Most MSP owners don’t avoid the “money conversation” because they’re irresponsible; they avoid it because naming a number can feel like exposing your soul. Declaring a revenue target or a valuation invites judgment from your spouse, your team, and even yourself. Yet hiding from the conversation doesn’t create neutrality—it creates drift. In this article we explore why effective planning starts before the spreadsheet: it starts with a vivid, personal post-business picture strong enough to survive a bad quarter and specific enough to force strategic trade-offs. This tension shows up repeatedly in how MSPs approach goal setting and long-term planning , and why many firms stall when vision isn’t translated into structure. Drawing on evidence from high-performing team research and leadership studies, we show that when you clarify your desired outcome and share it appropriately, it becomes the anchor that aligns decisions across the company—and ultimately determines whether your MSP develops operational maturity .
A clear, lived goal doesn’t just sit on the strategy whiteboard: it drives operations. Research on team dynamics shows that information-sharing, collective memory, and challenging team-level goals significantly improve planning, cooperation, communication, and morale. Decades of work in organizational psychology and operations research—including foundational goal-setting research by Locke and Latham and later work on psychological safety and team learning from institutions such as Harvard Business School—help explain why clarity and constructive challenge improve coordination under pressure. Similarly, leadership research on accountability shows that when accountability is framed as an ongoing, developmental conversation rather than a one-time event, it cultivates growth and performance across the organisation. We pair those findings with practical MSP benchmarks—grounded in The 5 Key Metrics Every CEO Should Monitor for Long-Term Business Success —such as maintaining service gross profit margins of around 50% and overall margins of 65–75%—to show how operational discipline and personal clarity can coexist. By the end, you’ll see why the “goal beneath the goal” matters more than any number on your income statement, and why avoiding that clarity often leads to the same execution breakdowns that surface later as operational friction around time and utilization .
Many leaders can recite a revenue number (“$10 M,” “40% EBITDA”), yet struggle to explain why that number matters beyond vague ideas of freedom or security. Across hundreds of MSP leadership engagements, we’ve seen the same pattern repeat: when the outcome behind the number is unclear, the organization defaults to habit instead of design. Without an outcome that resonates, a numeric goal becomes negotiable—easily shrunk during a downturn or expanded in a boom. The work of leadership is to translate ambition into a post-business picture that is both stable and specific. For example, one mid-size MSP owner we worked with ran a $3 million firm while raising a five-year-old child. His real desire was to spend six months of the year coaching youth soccer by 2031. When he named that aspiration, his leadership team could design the business—delegating service oversight, building middle management, and increasing margins—to support a timeline that freed him without harming the company. The $7 million valuation he sought became a milestone, not the purpose.
Goal visibility is a strategic choice. Some owners may share only the valuation target publicly while keeping personal motivations—like retirement timing or family commitments—private. Tools such as Vision allow you to toggle goal visibility so that principles or directors can understand the “why” behind a number while the broader team rallies around operational milestones. Research on high-performing teams suggests that challenging and specific team-level goals enhance planning, cooperation, communication and morale. By explicitly considering your shared goals and reflecting on progress, you give your team a destination worth organizing around.
Metrics turn subjective judgments into shared language. One common maturity trap is expecting managers to “improve profitability” while withholding the numbers that define success. Leaders cannot improve what they cannot name, and they cannot name what they have been trained to treat as burdensome. Start by defining the operational metrics that matter: gross profit, utilization, effective hourly rate, and service gross profit. Service gross profit—the difference between revenue from your service offerings and the direct costs of delivering those services—is a particularly important indicator. Industry benchmarks suggest that a good gross profit margin for an MSP is at least 50 percent on service offerings, with 65–75 percent overall and healthy net profit margins of 20–30 percent.
Once outcomes and metrics are clear, assign ownership to the role that can actually move the number. Accountability, when framed as an ongoing conversation rather than a one-time event, cultivates growth. To make this practical, use the following mini-framework:
Used together, this framework turns high-level aspirations into operational practice. It also helps resolve the false trade-off between culture and accountability: clear metrics free people to focus on results rather than guessing what matters.
There is a popular story in business that “culture first” means fewer rules, fewer metrics and less structure. In practice, that story only works when the company has enough margin to subsidize ambiguity. Research on accountability highlights that when accountability is used as a tool for growth rather than punishment it unlocks employee potential. Accountability becomes a long-term conversation between manager and employee; the result is improved performance, self-regulation and shared ownership of outcomes. If you want flexible policies, lower utilization pressure and high employee experience, the trade-off is simple: you must charge more and deliver consistently. Otherwise, you lose on multiple fronts—thin pricing, rising complexity and a team that eventually burns out in the fog.
When employees say “we don’t know what’s going on,” more emails or longer meetings rarely fix the problem. Volume is not clarity. Research from healthcare operations and team effectiveness literature shows that short daily huddles improve communication, increase accountability, and foster collaboration by providing a fixed time to share information, review performance, and proactively flag concerns. Studies and operational guidance from healthcare quality organizations have shown that these brief, structured check-ins reduce downstream interruptions and surface risks earlier in the day—long before they become costly distractions. Similarly, high-performing team research finds that information-sharing and collective memory (knowing who knows what) predict performance and build trust. Teams that periodically reflect on their shared goals and processes benefit from improved planning, cooperation, and morale.
In practice, this means complementing your monthly all-hands with a brief, high-touch cadence. In a 15-minute huddle, each person can name their top priority, celebrate a client win, recognize a teammate and share a personal note. This creates rhythm and belonging without turning the day into meeting theatre. It also surfaces operational blockers early, enabling leadership to address them before they snowball.
Gary Boyle is a strategic operator and entrepreneur with deep experience building service businesses around repeatable process, disciplined execution and financial clarity. He brings an owner’s lens to the leadership tensions MSPs face as they mature—especially the trade-offs between time, money, accountability and culture. In this conversation, Gary emphasizes that the “right” goal isn’t always a number on the income statement; it’s the lived outcome that makes the hard operational work worth doing. Gary has seen these patterns play out across hundreds of MSPs through his roles at GB3 | CO and Bering McKinley, giving him a unique perspective on what truly drives success.
Josh Peterson is the CEO of Bering McKinley, a management consulting firm that helps MSPs build operational maturity through clear standards, financial discipline and leadership systems that scale. As host of the BMK Vision Podcast, Josh focuses on the decisions behind the numbers—how owners think, how teams execute and what it takes to build a durable MSP that can perform without constant heroics.
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Because the number feels like a public declaration of worth—and it often triggers fear of judgment, failure or conflict at home and inside the business. The solution is to connect the number to a real outcome (time, security, impact) that the owner can defend through inevitable volatility.
No. A valuation goal can be a meaningful milestone, but it is incomplete on its own. Pair the financial target with a clear post-business outcome that forces strategic trade-offs and guides operational decisions.
Service gross profit is the difference between revenue from your service offerings and the direct costs of delivering those services—primarily labour and software subscriptions. Industry research suggests aiming for at least a 50 percent gross margin on services and 65–75 percent overall. Healthy net profit margins for MSPs often fall in the 20–30 percent range.
Goals clarify what “winning” looks like. Without them, technicians and managers may still do tactically sound work, but the team won’t feel progress—and confusion will show up as frustration, turnover and the recurring complaint that communication is “bad.” Challenging and specific team-level goals are proven to improve planning, cooperation, communication and morale.
Yes. Accountability is not a personality; it’s a system. When expectations are clear and metrics are shared, the work becomes less political and less stressful. Accountability becomes a developmental conversation that fosters growth.
A short daily huddle with consistent prompts: each person’s top priority, a client win, recognition of a teammate and a personal note. Research in healthcare and team dynamics shows that such huddles improve communication, increase accountability and foster a culture of collaboration. They surface blockers early and reduce confusion without creating meeting fatigue.
If this article surfaced an uncomfortable truth—like “we don’t actually know what we want” or “our team is executing without a destination”—that’s a good sign. Those are solvable problems, but they require structure. If you want to join the podcast as a guest, apply below. And if you want to see how we turn goals, metrics and accountability into an operating system your MSP can actually run, explore Vision.
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