Every MSP owner has said it at least once: "I found an amazing person — let's figure out where to put them." It feels like progress. It feels like momentum. But in practice, it's one of the most expensive decisions an MSP leader can make — because it reverses the sequence that actually works. The discipline of designing critical roles like dispatchers before filling them is what separates MSPs that scale from those that churn through people. When the seat isn't built — when outcomes aren't defined, authority isn't scoped, and success isn't measurable — even the best hire becomes a liability. The pattern repeats in service management, in sales, and in every operational layer where urgency overrides design. And the owners who've learned this lesson the hard way, including the team at Bering McKinley, will tell you the cost isn't theoretical. It's six figures, minimum. If you've already made the hiring mistakes most MSP owners don't see coming, this is where the correction starts — not with better candidates, but with better architecture.
Role design is not an HR exercise. It's a leadership discipline that determines whether a new hire compounds value or compounds chaos. The question isn't "who should I hire?" — it's "what does this seat owe the business?" When an MSP owner can define the outcome a role is responsible for, the authority it carries, the boundaries it respects, and what measurable success looks like at ninety days, the hiring process transforms from a gamble into a system. Without that clarity, every new team member absorbs the owner's ambiguity and reflects it back as underperformance. The owner blames the person. The person blames the lack of direction. And the business pays for both. The real cost of a bad hire in a fifteen-to-twenty-five person MSP isn't the salary — it's the disruption to clients, the erosion of team morale, and the twelve-to-eighteen months of scar tissue that delays the next attempt. Designing the seat before filling it isn't cautious — it's the only version of hiring that actually protects your margin, your culture, and your ability to scale.
There's a seductive logic to opportunistic hiring. A talented person appears — through a referral, a networking event, an internal recommendation — and the owner's instinct says move fast before they're gone. The problem isn't the instinct. The problem is that the business has no container for this person. There's no defined outcome, no scoped authority, no measurable success criteria. The owner is hiring a human being into a feeling, not a function. And feelings don't produce gross profit.
Promoting the longest-tenured technician into a service manager role is one of the most common structural errors in MSP operations. The logic feels airtight — they know the systems, the clients trust them, and the team respects their technical depth. But the service manager role isn't a technical role. It's a financial role. The job, reduced to its essential output, is one number: fifty-five percent service department gross profit. Can this person convert labor costs into margin? That's the entire mandate. Everything else — client satisfaction, team retention, escalation management — serves that number or it doesn't belong in the job description.
Most MSP owners believe they're communicating clearly. Their teams disagree. The evidence is in the phrases that echo through every under-designed organization: "I don't even know what's going on here. Everything's changing all the time." That gap between the owner's perception and the team's experience is where role failures originate. It's not that the hire was bad. It's that the hire walked into an environment where nobody — including the owner — had articulated what success looks like for the business, let alone for a single seat within it.
MSPs between one and three million in revenue share a structural vulnerability: they haven't planned their year in enough detail to anticipate their hiring needs. Growth arrives — sometimes through good sales execution, sometimes through inbound momentum — and the owner is suddenly scrambling to support revenue they didn't prepare the organization to deliver. The hire becomes urgent. Urgency eliminates design. And the cycle begins again: wrong person, wrong seat, six months of disruption, twelve months of scar tissue before the next attempt. Bering McKinley learned this internally. A talented person was brought on without a fully designed seat. When the original role didn't materialize as expected, they were moved into a dispatch function that also hadn't been architected. Two undefined seats, one good person, and a outcome that cost both sides. The rough math on that sequence — salary, disruption, client impact, morale damage, management distraction, and the delayed timeline to try again — landed at approximately six hundred thousand dollars. Not theory. Not a case study from someone else's business. A direct, traceable cost from skipping the design work.
It means defining the outcomes the role is responsible for, the authority the person carries, the boundaries of what the role does and does not include, what measurable success looks like at thirty, sixty, and ninety days, and who manages the person and how — all before writing a job posting or interviewing a single candidate.
Because it usually signals three things: the owner is in pain and wants immediate relief, there's no onboarding plan, and the role hasn't been clearly defined. The owner is hoping the new hire will figure out the job on their own — which means the hire will impose their own structure, which may not match what the business actually needs.
Because the service manager role is a financial role, not a technical one. The job is to deliver fifty-five percent service department gross profit by converting labor costs into margin. Most technicians, no matter how skilled, have never managed to a financial outcome — and the skills that made them great at resolving tickets don't transfer to managing profitability.
Far more than salary. In a fifteen-to-twenty-five person MSP, a misaligned hire creates client disruption, team morale erosion, management distraction, and opportunity cost. The compounding effect — including the scar tissue that delays the next hiring attempt — can reach six figures. In Bering McKinley's own experience, one sequence of misaligned hires represented roughly six hundred thousand dollars in total impact.
Delegation means transferring responsibility with clear expectations, defined outcomes, and ongoing management. Abdication means handing off work with relief and disappearing. Most MSP owners who hire to "get something off their plate" are abdicating — and the new hire, without guidance or structure, is set up to fail from day one.
Check for these indicators: your sales manager also carries a personal sales quota, your dispatcher is handling first-level support calls, your service manager carries more than one hour a week of billable work, or you have a business partner collecting equity who isn't contributing operationally. Any of these signals a role that was filled reactively rather than designed intentionally.
Gary Boyle is a Partner for Strategy & Business Development at Bering McKinley. With a background spanning network engineering, entrepreneurship, and strategic consulting, Gary brings real-world operator experience to helping MSP owners build stronger, more profitable businesses. He has navigated hiring failures and role design challenges firsthand — and brings that perspective directly to every conversation about building teams that actually scale.
Connect with Gary Boyle on LinkedIn →
Josh Peterson is the CEO of Bering McKinley and host of The BMK Vision Podcast. Since 2004, Josh has worked with hundreds of MSP owners to build operationally sound, profitable businesses through consulting, peer teams, and direct coaching.
Connect with Josh Peterson on LinkedIn →
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