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#27 - From The Trenches - Pick a Lane - Account Management & MSP Focus (John Snyder)

Picture of Josh Peterson Josh Peterson : Oct 16, 2025 12:00:00 AM

From the Trenches

Most MSPs don’t fail because they lack effort. They fail because the business quietly becomes an ungoverned collection of “yeses”—yes to every service line, yes to every procurement deal, yes to every one-off client expectation, and yes to every internal exception that feels small in the moment but becomes permanent over time. The owner tells themselves it’s diversification. In reality, it’s identity drift. And identity drift is expensive: it fractures delivery, erodes margins, confuses your team, and leaves your market unsure of what you actually stand for.

In this From the Trenches episode, Josh Peterson sits down with John Snyder, CEO of Net Friends, to unpack what it really means to “pick a lane”—not as a branding exercise, but as an operating decision that determines whether an MSP can scale without losing itself. John shares his uncommon path from technician to non-founder owner, how “primary business model confusion” shows up in real businesses (and why it often feels profitable until it suddenly isn’t), and why account management becomes a single point of failure the moment it turns into a human inbox. The throughline is leadership discipline: saying no early, building systems that keep client communication trackable, and treating marketing as a strategic investment—not a reluctant expense—because it shapes customers, recruiting, and reputation all at once.

“Pick a lane” is not advice. It’s a governance mechanism.

When John describes the early Net Friends model—break/fix, staffing, projects, software development adjacency, even a white-labeled SOC motion—he’s describing a familiar MSP condition: the business becomes a patchwork of revenue streams that all feel rational in isolation. The danger is not that each line is “bad.” The danger is that none of them is dominant enough to define how you hire, how you price, how you deliver, and how you say no.

John’s turning point came when he encountered the blunt diagnostic that many owners avoid: a primary business model assessment that couldn’t classify the company. The message behind that moment is the leadership lesson—if your business model cannot be named, it cannot be improved. Clarity is not branding. Clarity is operational leverage.

Focus is how you protect margin and reduce internal context switching
“Diversification” without identity becomes decision fatigue at scale
A lane creates standards—standards create a business that can run without heroics

Why VAR revenue feels good—and quietly taxes the whole company

One of the most practical segments in the conversation is John’s explanation of procurement revenue and the hidden cost of VAR motion. The headline numbers can look strong. The problem is the “mindshare tax”: meetings, deal registrations, margin haggling, vendor coordination, and interruptions that land at the worst possible time. These aren’t just annoyances. They are organizational disruptions that steal focus from the operating system you’re trying to build.

The implication for MSP owners is simple: not all revenue behaves the same. Some revenue compounds clarity. Some revenue compounds noise. A mature MSP learns to evaluate revenue not only by gross margin, but by operational friction, interruption cost, and the long-term effect on identity.

Account management 2.0: when “a person” becomes the bottleneck

Account management is easy to describe and difficult to execute. John’s critique is not that account managers are unnecessary—it’s that a single human “front door” often turns into a single point of failure. The account manager becomes the place where randomness accumulates: free work gets promised, messages get distorted, and important requests lose trackability because they live in an inbox instead of a system.

John’s interim solution is instructive: a distribution-list style entry point (account management as a shared channel) that creates a ticket automatically, assigns an ID, and keeps communication movable and visible. This is what “systems over heroics” looks like in practice. It’s also a reminder that account management isn’t a title—it’s a workflow design problem.

Trackability matters more than charisma
When everything routes through one person, “service” becomes improvisation
The goal is not more meetings—it’s clearer ownership and cleaner handoffs

Customer-facing automation starts where clients already interact with you

Automation becomes real for clients when it changes what they do day-to-day. John’s approach is a pragmatic one: use the customer portal as the gateway and start with forms that trigger standardized workflows. HR is often the most natural starting point because onboarding, offboarding, role changes, and leave events are process-heavy, time-sensitive, and easy to standardize.

The deeper takeaway is important for MSP leaders: clients rarely arrive with a backlog of “automation ideas.” Expecting them to ideate is a setup for disappointment. The MSP has to lead—propose, prototype, refine—then let adoption create the next wave of insight.

Most clients won’t “invent” automation use cases; they’ll react to what you show them
Portals and forms are not boring—they’re the scaffolding for repeatable service
Automation becomes a differentiator when it expands how existing tools behave

Marketing isn’t a necessary evil. It’s the visible surface area of your company.

John’s final “wish I learned earlier” is marketing—and his framing is the right one for MSP owners: marketing is not a campaign. It’s what people can see. That includes your website, your clarity of message, your consistency in content, and your credibility signals. It affects customers, referrals, and recruiting because every stakeholder forms their first impression before they ever talk to you.

He offers a tangible benchmark: roughly 8% of revenue directed toward marketing across staff and spend. Whether an MSP hits that exact number is less important than the leadership posture behind it: if you treat marketing as optional, you will consistently underinvest in the only part of your company the market is guaranteed to encounter.

Episode highlights

00:00:00 – From science burnout to IT support at Duke—and the accidental start of an MSP career.
00:02:00 – Starting as a field tech in 1999: “figure it out” delivery and learning under pressure.
00:03:01 – Non-founder ownership: why agency and influence can be the real motivator.
00:06:49 – The wake-up call: growth without profitability and what it teaches an owner.
00:16:38 – Primary business model confusion: when a firm can’t be classified, it can’t be governed.
00:17:14 – The VAR mindshare tax: procurement revenue that steals time, attention, and operating rhythm.
00:32:26 – Customer-facing automation: portals, forms, and HR workflows as the first leverage point.
00:42:09 – Account Management 2.0: eliminating the single-person bottleneck with trackable workflow.
01:01:34 – Marketing as strategy: recruiting, reputation, and the 8% investment benchmark.

About the guest: John Snyder

John Snyder is the CEO of Net Friends. He joined the company as a technician, later became a non-founder owner, and ultimately bought out the remaining majority stake—bringing a leadership perspective shaped by the hard realities of focus, governance, and operational clarity in the MSP business model.

Connect with John on LinkedIn →

Frequently asked questions

What does “pick a lane” mean for an MSP?
It means choosing a dominant business model that governs pricing, delivery, hiring, and client selection—so the company stops operating as a collection of exceptions.

What is “primary business model confusion”?
It’s when an MSP’s services are so scattered across categories (MSP, VAR, projects, consulting, staffing, etc.) that the business can’t be clearly classified—making operational improvement and accountability far harder.

Why can VAR/procurement revenue be harmful even when it’s profitable?
Because it often carries a high “mindshare tax”: meetings, vendor management, negotiation cycles, and interruption cost that disrupt leadership cadence and operational execution.

Why do account managers become a single point of failure?
When a customer learns “the account manager is the way to get things done,” work becomes untracked, promises become informal, and the business inherits a human inbox as an operating system.

What’s a practical first step for customer-facing automation?
Start with a portal and form-based workflows—especially HR onboarding/offboarding—so a client action triggers a standardized process with visible confirmation and trackable execution.

How should an MSP think about marketing investment?
Marketing is the visible surface area of your company—affecting customers, referrals, and recruiting. Many MSPs underinvest; a benchmark shared in the episode is roughly 8% of revenue across people and spend.

Related resources from Bering McKinley

About the host

Josh Peterson is the CEO of Bering McKinley and host of the BMK Vision Podcast. Through the From the Trenches series, Josh highlights MSP leaders who challenge default industry thinking and build durable, execution-driven businesses.

Connect with Josh on LinkedIn →