Why Commercial Growth Must Become a Team Sport in Your MSP
Over our thirty years of building, operating, and scaling Australian MSPs, Nick and I have witnessed a recurring pattern that caps the growth of even the most technically capable businesses. In the early stages, commercial growth is almost entirely dependent on the founder. You hustle, you build personal rapport with clients, and you close the deals. However, as the organisation expands to ten, twenty, or fifty staff members, that centralised model breaks down. The founder becomes an operational bottleneck, while the wider team remains completely detached from commercial reality. When MSP leaders attempt to fix this bottleneck, they often make the mistake of treating sales as an isolated department or hiring an aggressive salesperson who operates completely outside the delivery engine. In our experience, sustainable profitability and scaling only happen when you dismantle that divide and make commercial growth a shared team sport. In this episode of MSP Mastery: Ctrl Alt Deliver, we sat down again with our longtime friend, former sales coach, and EOS implementer Nicky Miklos to explore how mature MSPs build a high performance culture where every department contributes to client value and commercial success.
MSP Mastery
8/10/20265 min read
Over our thirty years of building, operating, and scaling Australian MSPs, Nick and I have witnessed a recurring pattern that caps the growth of even the most technically capable businesses. In the early stages, commercial growth is almost entirely dependent on the founder. You hustle, you build personal rapport with clients, and you close the deals. However, as the organisation expands to ten, twenty, or fifty staff members, that centralised model breaks down. The founder becomes an operational bottleneck, while the wider team remains completely detached from commercial reality.
When MSP leaders attempt to fix this bottleneck, they often make the mistake of treating sales as an isolated department or hiring an aggressive salesperson who operates completely outside the delivery engine. In our experience, sustainable profitability and scaling only happen when you dismantle that divide and make commercial growth a shared team sport. In this episode of MSP Mastery: Ctrl Alt Deliver, we sat down again with our longtime friend, former sales coach, and EOS implementer Nicky Miklos to explore how mature MSPs build a high performance culture where every department contributes to client value and commercial success.
Redefining Commercial Awareness Across Service Delivery
One of the most persistent hurdles MSP owners face is getting their technical staff to engage with commercial opportunities. In Australia and New Zealand especially, technical professionals often view the concept of sales with deep suspicion. Over three decades of managing technical teams, Nick and I have learned that you cannot simply command engineers to sell or dangle individual financial commissions in front of them. Technicians are problem solvers by nature, and individual sales commissions often feel unnatural, transactional, and counterproductive to client trust.
The secret lies in reframing the conversation entirely. Identifying a client need is not selling; it is the highest form of service delivery. As Nicky Miklos highlighted during our conversation, human behaviour is driven by core beliefs and mindset. When an engineer believes that suggesting a solution is pushy or self serving, they will resist it at every turn. When leadership reframes that action as protecting the client from business downtime or productivity loss, the perspective shifts completely.
The practical breakdown often comes down to internal education. Nick pointed out a classic example from our own journey: an engineer noticed a client needed thirty two new laptops and recommended they visit the local retail store because he genuinely did not realise our business supplied hardware fleets. Technicians cannot connect the dots for a client if they do not know what services and products their own company delivers. Educating your service desk on your solution catalogue empowers them to identify operational bottlenecks on site, such as mismatched monitors slowing down staff or outdated firewalls causing recurring ticket noise, and pass those insights directly to the commercial team.
Transitioning from Cowboy Chaos to Operational Playbooks
During the early growth phase of an MSP, operational agility often looks like pure chaos. We refer to this as the cowboy culture, where every individual approaches tasks, proposals, and client management in their own unique way. While that pioneering mindset helps a startup survive, it creates massive vulnerabilities as you attempt to scale. The business becomes entirely dependent on a few isolated high performers, quality becomes inconsistent, and customer experience suffers.
To build an enterprise that functions smoothly without the founder holding every piece together, the sheriff must come to town. As Nicky explained, introducing structured playbooks and defined guidelines establishes the rules of the land. However, implementing structure must never mean crushing the team spirit or micromanaging your talent. When we transitioned our MSP away from founder led sales and ad hoc delivery, our goal was not to turn our people into rigid robots, but to create reliable guardrails within which they could express their unique strengths.
The leadership lesson here is to avoid bursting through the saloon doors and tearing everything down on day one. A seasoned leader assesses the genius already present in the room, identifies what is working, and collaborates with the team to replace crumbling legacy processes with repeatable frameworks. When you implement standardised ticketing templates for internal lead passing or clear account review structures, you remove ambiguity. Performance becomes consistent across the board rather than resting on the heroic efforts of one or two individuals.
The Power of Financial Transparency and Strategic Alignment
A major barrier preventing MSP teams from acting as a cohesive commercial unit is the secrecy surrounding company performance. Many founders keep their financial numbers, targets, and strategic vision locked away, fearing that staff will misinterpret top line revenue as personal profit. Over thirty years in the industry, we have seen that when leaders withhold the truth, employees simply invent their own narratives.
Nick openly admitted that he initially felt nervous about opening up the financial books and sharing performance data with our entire team. Yet once we began educating our staff on how MSP economics actually work, the dynamic transformed. The average Australian MSP operates on modest margins, often retaining only around four cents in net profit from every dollar invoiced after covering heavy technical payroll, vendor licences, facilities, and taxation. When your team understands this reality, they stop viewing revenue as an abstract figure and start appreciating the vital importance of operational efficiency, billable utilisation, and recurring service agreements.
Sharing both the wins and the losses at monthly and quarterly company wraps builds profound alignment and collective ownership. As Nicky noted during our discussion, pairing commercial targets with an impact metric, such as the total number of client businesses protected from cyber threats, grounds financial targets in a shared mission. When a deal is lost, transparent leadership prevents finger pointing by treating the outcome as a learning experience, using industry benchmarks to show that setbacks are a normal part of healthy business growth.
Strategic Altitude: Stepping Away from the Daily Grind to Scale
The operational engine of an IT service provider produces relentless daily noise. Tickets arrive continuously, project deadlines loom, and clients demand immediate attention. If business owners and leadership teams spend all their time reacting to operational brushfires, the business will eventually stagnate. Scaling requires intentional discipline to step out of the daily grind and elevate your strategic thinking.
Nicky shared a compelling real world example from an offsite growth session she recently facilitated with an MSP executive team. By dedicating uninterrupted time away from the office, the leadership team was able to reflect on their historical growth, confront uncomfortable operational bottlenecks, and map out their strategic goals projecting toward 2032. Nicky described this discipline as the difference between standing on the balcony to view day to day operations and ascending to the penthouse to chart long term industry positioning.
This strategic perspective validates what Nick and I have implemented through our two day executive planning rhythms for decades. When you change the physical environment, choose a room with expansive natural light, and give your leadership team permission to think expansively, the conversation shifts from immediate survival to sustainable market leadership. Making tough, proactive decisions during dedicated offsite sessions ensures that your future business self will look back with gratitude rather than regret.
Building Your High Performance Commercial Culture
Transforming sales into a genuine team sport requires a deliberate fusion of mindset, education, process, and leadership transparency. When you bridge the divide between service delivery and commercial growth, your engineers evolve into trusted client advisors, your operational playbooks ensure consistent quality, and your entire staff unites behind a clear, shared vision for the future.
Scaling a mature and highly profitable MSP does not happen by accident or by relying on founder heroics. We invite you to listen to this episode of MSP Mastery: Ctrl Alt Deliver to hear the full conversation and discover more practical frameworks for commercial growth. If you are ready to evaluate your service delivery systems, elevate your commercial alignment, and build an MSP that delivers exceptional enterprise value, Nick, Jeni, and Nicky Miklos welcome the opportunity to connect with you. Reach out to the MSP Mastery team today to reflect on your operational roadmap and start the conversation.
