Josh Peterson can name the moment he realized he had been selling the wrong thing. He was walking a longtime client through the Vision platform, a friend running a fourteen million dollar MSP, and he expected the usual enthusiasm followed by a start date. Instead the client told him there was nothing to start, because he had been doing this for ten years already, in his head, without a tool and without a consultant. He was right. He had been running a strategy his entire career while Bering McKinley was being hired for time entry and dispatch. That is an uncomfortable thing for a consultant to discover, and it points directly at what separates a two million dollar MSP from a five million dollar one. The tactics are identical on both sides of that line. Why MSPs stall at two million is not a question of which tools are running. It is a question of whether those tactics are being pulled through a destination or pushed into a business that does not have one.
That destination has a name in most operating systems: the company goal. And here the industry converges on one sentence with remarkable consistency. Sell the business. Hit the valuation. Ten million by 2029. It is specific, it is measurable, it is exactly the kind of statement engineers turned owners are good at writing, and it satisfies every rule about what a goal is supposed to look like. It is also, as Gary Boyle puts it in this conversation, a sentence nobody else in the building will follow you toward. The gap between a technically correct goal and a goal that moves people is the leadership problem worth solving, and it does not get solved by making the number bigger or the deadline nearer. It gets solved by deciding what the goal statement is for, who it is addressed to, and where the reason for it lives. Goals are math, not dreams covers the arithmetic side of this well. What follows is the part arithmetic cannot do on its own, which is translating a business goal into performance targets a leadership team will recognize as their own work.
One of Josh's clients wrote a company goal with no money in it at all. It said, in effect, reduce or eliminate the business's dependence on the owner. Josh describes building the plan underneath that goal as the most straightforward planning work he has ever done, and the reason is not that the goal was easier. It is that the goal was addressed to somebody. A goal that reads sell for ten million is addressed to the owner and the owner's bank. A goal that reads the business should be able to run without me is addressed to every person who would have to absorb what the owner currently carries. Sales, marketing, service, management, leadership. Each of them reads that sentence and finds their own name inside it.
This is the working test for a company goal, and it is a harsher test than SMART. Read the sentence aloud to a service manager who holds no equity. If the honest reaction is indifference, what you have written is a personal financial objective wearing a company goal's clothing. That is not a reason to abandon it, and the number probably still belongs in the plan. It is a reason to be clear that the sentence will not do the job a company goal exists to do, which is to make a hundred small decisions across the business point the same direction without the owner in the room for any of them.
When Josh admits that most of the operating systems he builds carry some version of sell the business for ten million at the top, Gary's response is blunt. Try to rally anyone besides yourself around that, he says, and you will find nobody is coming with you. He allows one exception, and it is worth naming precisely because it proves the rule. If there is broad profit sharing, or a liquidity event that actually reaches the people being asked to build the thing, then the number is genuinely their number too. Absent that arrangement, a team is being asked to care about a transaction in which they are the asset being sold.
MSP owners tend to come up through engineering, and engineers write goals in units. Dollars, dates, percentages. That instinct is not wrong, and the numbers have to live somewhere in the plan. The error is treating the unit as the destination rather than as the measurement of the destination. Gary's read on this particular group is that MSP owners are among the least money-motivated business owners he deals with. They want something from the business that a pile of money only partly describes. When the goal statement captures only the pile, the owner ends up under-motivated by his own goal, which is a strange place to be and a common one.
Josh puts a hypothetical on the table. Suppose the owner, call him Bob, says what he actually wants is to spend seventy percent of his time digging wells and bringing water to communities in sub-Saharan Africa. The business is not the point. The business is the vehicle. Work the finances backward and it turns out an exit at ten million is what makes that arithmetic hold. So where does the goal go? Is the company goal put Bob in Africa, with the ten million recorded in the description underneath? Or is the company goal sell for ten million, with Bob's reason recorded underneath that?
Gary's answer is that the placement matters less than the presence, and then he gives the rule anyway. The headline is the why. The description is the how, or a further definition of the why. Both pieces have to be written in the same place, because the failure mode here is not choosing wrong. The failure mode is recording only the number and losing the reason. Six months later something material shifts in the business, the leadership team comes back to the goal, and nobody in the room can reconstruct why that number was chosen in the first place. Most MSPs run a real strategy session once a year at best. A goal with no recorded why does not survive the gap between sessions, and what decays is not the number itself. It is the ability to judge whether the number still deserves to be there.
About ten years into running his own business, Gary kept noticing the same man on a treadmill at ten in the morning, at an expensive gym attached to a hotel. Gary was there at the same hour, and the difference between them was entirely internal. Gary felt like he was getting away with something. The other man looked like he was doing exactly what he was supposed to be doing. On no evidence at all, Gary decided that man had figured something out, and that it was what he wanted. He turned out to be right. The man was in the same entrepreneur organization, had exited his business for several million dollars, and was five years older. Gary set a goal to exit by forty, and did.
The reason that story belongs in a conversation about goal setting is that it explains the most common non-answer owners give. Ask an owner where he is headed and roughly seven times out of ten the first response is that he cannot see himself not working. Josh used to hear that as lazy thinking or an unwillingness to engage. Gary hears it as information about who the person spends time with. Nobody in that owner's orbit has demonstrated a version of the outcome he is being asked to imagine, so the answer he gives is the only honest one available to him. Which means the goal-setting problem is often not a goal-setting problem at all. An owner cannot write down a destination he has never watched anyone reach.
It should say why the business exists in a form somebody other than the owner can act on. The financial target belongs in the plan, but the headline works better when it names the outcome the money is for. The practical check is whether a department leader reading the sentence can identify what changes in their own work because of it.
It is not wrong, and the number has to exist. The limitation is that a valuation target only motivates the people who receive the proceeds. If profit sharing or a liquidity event reaches the broader team, the number genuinely becomes shared and works fine as a rallying point. Without that, expect the goal to organize the owner and nobody else.
Longer than five years. Gary's position is that a small business needs five to ten years to build and flourish, and that the two starting questions are how long you are willing to run the business and what you want at the end of it. Both questions take minutes to ask and often weeks or months to answer honestly.
Because everything up to that point can be reached tactically. Good execution, a likeable owner, a strong local network, and the right to-do list will carry a business to roughly two million. Past that, growth requires deciding where the business is going and pulling tactics through that decision, rather than pushing more tactics into a business with no stated destination.
It converts directly into work every function can see. If the owner steps back, someone has to hold sales, someone has to hold service, someone has to hold leadership. Most people want that kind of ownership over a function more than they want a share of a number, and the goal hands it to them explicitly.
More often than once a year, which is the realistic cadence at most MSPs. The risk is not that the goal becomes wrong. The risk is that circumstances change and the team can no longer reconstruct why the goal was set, which makes it impossible to judge whether it should still stand. Recording the reason alongside the number is what makes a mid-year review possible.
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 built and exited his own business at forty, and co-hosts the BMK Vision Roundtable alongside Josh Peterson.
Connect with Gary 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 →
Most MSPs have a plan for the next quarter and nothing written down about the decade. The Vision Operating System exists to make the long horizon explicit and then work backward from it, so the tactics you are already good at finally have something to be pulled toward.