MSP consulting, also called managed service provider consulting or managed services consulting, is outside help with running an MSP as a business: the plan, the numbers, the people and, one day, the exit. It is not IT consulting. An IT consultant works on your clients' technology; an MSP consultant works on your company.
Bering McKinley is a consulting firm for MSP owners and their leadership teams, and all of its consulting runs through one offer, Vision: a one-year plan for your MSP, a consultant who works it with your leadership team every month, and the numbers that prove it works. This page covers what MSP consultants, coaches and peer groups each do, how Vision works, what it costs, and who it fits, from under $1M to $15M in revenue.
You've bought the PSA, the RMM and the dashboards. But margin that won't move, techs who are always busy and never profitable, and a pipeline that depends on the owner are not technical problems. They are business problems, and they need a plan, a cadence and someone who holds you to it.
An MSP consultant looks at the whole business, not one department: financials, service delivery, sales, leadership and ownership. The work comes down to four jobs:
Managed services consulting usually comes in three shapes: a project (one problem, a fixed scope), an ongoing engagement (a plan and a regular cadence), and hours on demand. Vision is an ongoing engagement, with the rest of the BMK team available by the hour when the plan needs a specialist.
MSPs rarely stall for lack of technical skill. They stall on friction in operations, no written plan, and a leadership team stretched too thin. Sound familiar?
All three help, and each solves a different problem. Choose by what's actually stuck.
| Compare | Project consultant | MSP coach | MSP peer group | Vision |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Works with | The owner, on one problem | Usually the owner or one leader, one on one | Owners or leaders from several MSPs | The owner and the leadership team, on one plan |
| How often | For the length of the project | A regular call | A set schedule, often quarterly | A plan meeting every month and a review every quarter |
| Works on | One fix: pricing, an org chart, a PSA cleanup | Decisions, habits and follow-through | Shared practices, perspective and peer accountability | Your one-year plan, your KPIs and your team's action items |
| Measures against | Whatever the project needs | Varies by coach | Often a group benchmark | BMK's standards, every month |
| Best when | You know the problem and want it fixed | The bottleneck is the owner's own role | You want perspective and have someone inside to execute | You need the plan, the cadence and the numbers in one place |
Many owners use more than one. A peer group and Vision fit together well: the group brings other owners' experience, and Vision turns it into your plan.
MSP coaching usually means a coach working one on one with the owner or with one leader. Business coaching works on decisions, habits and follow-through; financial coaching works on reading the P&L and acting on it. A good coach asks the questions nobody inside the business will ask, and holds you to what you said you'd do.
Consulting changes the system; coaching develops the person running it. Many MSPs need both. Vision includes the accountability a coach brings, with two differences:
There is a structural reason for outside help, too: the owner can't facilitate a meeting and take part in it at the same time.
Operations coaching is for the service manager or operations leader: how to run dispatch, hold techs to time entry, and read utilization and agreement margin every week. It works best when the coach measures against standards rather than opinions, such as billable utilization at 75% of paid hours. In Vision, your service leader owns the operations initiative, and your consultant works it with them every month.
An MSP peer group puts owners, or service and sales leaders, from several MSPs in a room on a set schedule, usually with a facilitator. The benefits of a good MSP peer group are real: you compare numbers, borrow what works, and answer to people who do what you do. As one owner told us, running the business can feel like dinner, night after night, at a table for one.
What to look for in a peer group:
Where peer groups stop: every member goes home to a different business. Peers can tell you what worked for them, but they can't build your plan or sit in your monthly meeting. And a group sorted by revenue mostly shows you MSPs like yours, which helps with tactics and limits ambition. For more on getting value from a group, read why peer teams matter for MSP growth.
Vision is not software you log into and figure out alone. It is an operating system for your MSP's business: a one-year strategic plan, a BMK consultant who holds your leadership team accountable to it every month, and the Vision platform that keeps everyone organized, on track and executing the plan. It runs in four beats:
The plan lives in the Vision platform, next to your numbers:
Both packages include onboarding with a baseline against BMK's standards, the Strategic Planning Session and your one-year plan, monthly plan meetings with action items, quarterly reviews of the plan and financials (BQR), and the Vision platform. They differ by the size of the leadership team working the plan:
Vision starts at $1,450 a month plus a one-time onboarding fee, on a one-year agreement. See Vision packages and pricing.
MSP strategy consulting turns where you want the business to be into a written plan that someone owns. Goals that live in the owner's head don't get worked. In Vision, every company goal breaks down until someone owns the next step:
Sample plan, for illustration.
Each goal has exactly one owner and a date. Each initiative belongs to one leader, and a good plan carries only a few of them: a short plan that gets done beats a long one that doesn't. For more, read how to write a company goal your team will actually care about and how many strategic initiatives an MSP should run at once.
MSP operations consulting works on the service engine: agreements, dispatch, time entry, utilization and the service payroll that runs them. The questions are concrete. Do your agreements make money? Is service payroll at or under a third of service revenue? How much of your techs' paid time is billable?
The answers start with time entry, because an agreement gross profit report or a utilization figure built on partial time looks trustworthy and isn't. And a new PSA, or a new set of ticket statuses, won't fix a broken service model. In Vision, service delivery is an initiative in the plan, owned by your service leader and measured every month against BMK's standards (see the benchmarking section below). More from the BMK Vision Roundtable: Ticket Statuses Won't Fix a Broken Service Model and Time Entry Is the Whole MSP Story.
In many MSPs, the owner is still the sales team, and you keep hiring your first salesperson over and over again. MSP sales consulting moves sales out of the owner's head and into a process: who you sell to, how a deal moves from first call to signed agreement, when to hire a salesperson, and how to manage one by activity, not only by quota.
It also keeps sales and service in step: promises your delivery team can keep, packages that are easy to sell and easy to deliver, and a forecast so service can staff ahead of new clients. In Vision, sales is an initiative with its own leader, goals and action items, reviewed every month. Read why MSP owners can't let go of sales and the MSP sales process that actually closes.
If you've worked with a consultant before, you probably have two questions. Isn't this the same playbook every MSP consultancy runs? And doesn't the value flatten out after the first year? Both are fair, and Vision's monthly loop answers both.
Partly, and that's not a weakness. What a healthy MSP looks like is well known, and BMK writes its version down: 191 standards in the Vision handbook, from agreement gross profit at 65% to service payroll at 33% of service revenue. The difference is what happens after the playbook. Your plan is built from your own numbers, in a planning session with your own leaders. Every goal has one owner and a date. And a consultant works the plan with you every month, so the standards turn into decisions in your business instead of advice you file away.
The loop runs every month:
It does when consulting is a fixed list of fixes. Year one usually goes to what is visibly broken: pricing, agreement margin, roles, the owner's job. If the engagement is that list, it runs out. Vision runs on the loop instead. Your numbers keep moving, so the plan keeps moving: every BQR resets the next ninety days, and each new year opens with a new Strategic Planning Session and a new one-year plan, built from the numbers you've built.
The work also changes as you grow. An MSP that moves from one revenue band to the next goes from a first real plan, to leaders who run their departments by the numbers, to the value a buyer can see.
Three MSP owners describe in their own words what changed when they worked with Bering McKinley.
Vision works with MSP owners and their leadership teams from under $1M to $15M in revenue. Where your MSP is today decides what the plan works on first.
You're growing on referrals and hustle, and nothing is written down about where the business is going. The owner is still the top tech, the salesperson and the bookkeeper; revenue is up, cash is tight and the next hire is unclear.
Year one works on numbers you can trust, a first real plan with a monthly rhythm, the owner's job and the next hire, and service you can repeat. After a year: revenue and profit growing together, on pricing that holds, and the next hire decided by the numbers. Usually Vision Essentials: the owner and up to two leaders working the plan.
Your service, sales and operations leaders are hiring under them, but without roles, standards or numbers to manage by. Margin slips as headcount grows, growth waits on referrals, and decisions still come back to the owner.
Year one works on one plan across the leaders; roles and standards for service, dispatch and sales, comp plans included; payroll that scales; and a sales process with a salesperson who works. After a year: each leader runs their department by the plan and the numbers, not by checking with the owner. Essentials or Strategic, depending on how many leaders work the plan. The Roundtable episode on why MSPs stall at $2M covers one common cause.
Your leaders manage managers now, and the growth that got you past $3M has flattened. A sale, a partner buyout or private equity is on the horizon, or the owner wants out of the day-to-day, and no one is sure what the business is worth.
Year one works on value a buyer can see (EBITDA, recurring revenue, and net profit toward BMK's 17% standard), one plan for the whole leadership team, and less dependence on the owner. After a year: a higher valuation, from stronger EBITDA and cleaner recurring revenue. Usually Vision Strategic: a leadership team of three or more, each running an initiative.
MSP benchmarking compares your numbers with a standard, and with MSPs your size, so you know which gap is costing you the most. The benefit is focus: the plan goes after the gap worth the most, not everything at once. Vision reads your KPIs against BMK's standards every month. Here are six of them:
| Measure | BMK's standard | What it tells you |
|---|---|---|
| Agreement gross profit (AGP) | 65% | Whether your managed services agreements are priced and delivered at a profit |
| Service salary to service revenue (SSSR) | 33% or lower | How much of each service dollar goes to service payroll: wages, bonuses, benefits and payroll taxes |
| Billable utilization | 75%, about 1,560 of 2,080 hours a year | How much of a tech's paid time turns into billable work |
| Effective hourly rate (EHR) | 112.5% to 125% of your rack rate | What your agreements actually earn for each hour your team spends on them |
| Revenue mix | 30% hourly, 40% recurring, 30% project | Whether service revenue is balanced across the three ways you bill |
| Net profit | 17% | What the business keeps after every cost |
More on two of these: does a 33% payroll benchmark just mean fire people? and effective hourly rate vs standard rate.
Whether you sell in two years or twenty, a buyer pays for a business that runs without the owner. BMK is not an M&A firm and doesn't run the sale. It is the readiness partner you work with before you hire an M&A advisor, on what decides how much there is to sell:
When you're ready to go to market, an M&A advisor runs the sale, and the plan you've worked gives that advisor a cleaner business to sell. Two questions to start with: which buyer is emailing your MSP and whether you need customer contracts to sell.
Plenty of MSPs run EOS, and many run it well. If yours does, Vision isn't a restart. Your work carries over: annual goals become Vision company goals and milestones, quarterly priorities become monthly initiative goals with owners, and to-dos become action items. Your team keeps its weekly rhythm and the discipline it has built.
What Vision adds is what a general operating system leaves to you by design: MSP numbers read against BMK's standards, 191 MSP operating standards, and a consultant in your plan every month instead of a facilitated session every quarter. Hear the case in the Roundtable episode EOS vs MAP: Why Self-Run Operating Systems Stall and in Jeff Wynn's exit and EOS lessons on From the Trenches.
Bering McKinley has spent twenty years inside hundreds of MSPs: implementing their software, teaching their teams, running their peer groups and working their plans. Each Vision client gets a dedicated consultant who works the plan with the leadership team every month, and the rest of the team is available by the hour when the plan needs a specialist. Meet the team.
In thirty minutes, Josh Peterson, BMK's CEO, walks through your numbers with you: where your MSP stands against BMK's standards, where the biggest gap is, and what a Vision plan would work on first.
Walk through your numbers with Josh
An MSP consultant helps the owner and the leadership team run the MSP as a business. The job is to measure your numbers against a standard, turn the gaps into a plan with owners and dates, and work that plan with you until it shows up in the financials. At Bering McKinley, that work is Vision: a one-year plan, a consultant every month, and KPIs measured against BMK's standards.
It depends on the shape of the work: projects are usually priced by the project, coaching and ongoing engagements by the month, and extra help by the hour. Many MSP consultants don't publish their prices. Vision starts at $1,450 a month plus a one-time onboarding fee, on a one-year agreement.
Choose by what's stuck. A coach fits when the bottleneck is the owner's own role, a peer group fits when you want perspective and have someone inside to execute, and a consultant fits when the business needs a plan, the numbers and someone to hold the team to both. Many owners combine them: Vision covers the plan, the numbers and the monthly accountability, and a peer group adds other owners' experience.
Onboarding connects your financials to the Vision platform and gives you one readout of your numbers against BMK's standards. Then one to two days with your leadership team produce your one-year plan, with an owner and a date on every goal. From there, each month brings a plan meeting with action items your team works weekly, and the first BMK Quarterly Review (BQR), in month 3, scores the quarter and resets the next ninety days.
A peer group is several businesses meeting on a set schedule to share what works; Vision is one business, yours. You get your own one-year plan, your KPIs read against BMK's standards every month, and a consultant in your plan meeting every month and at every quarterly review. The two work well together: the group brings perspective, and Vision turns it into goals with owners and dates.
Every month, with a deeper review every quarter. Weekly meetings suit action items but sit too close to the ground to manage the business, and ninety days is long enough for clients, people and priorities to change under the plan. In Vision, your team works its action items every week, your consultant works the plan with you every month, and each BQR reviews the plan and financials and resets the next ninety days.
Give every goal exactly one owner and a date, and review it on a fixed rhythm with the numbers in front of you. Accountability shared by everyone belongs to no one. In Vision, action items come out of each monthly plan meeting, your team reviews them weekly, and your consultant scores your KPIs each month, so a slipping goal shows up before the quarter ends.
Now, even if a sale is years away. The work that makes an MSP sellable (clean financials, strong recurring revenue and EBITDA, a leadership team that runs without the owner) is the same work that makes it worth owning, and many exits are forced early by health, partners or an unexpected offer. BMK is the readiness partner before the M&A advisor: Vision builds the value, and an M&A advisor runs the sale when you're ready.
EOS is a trademark of EOS Worldwide, LLC. Bering McKinley is not affiliated with EOS Worldwide.