MSP operations consulting
Nobody ever wrote down what better looks like.
So a year later you are arguing about whether it worked. We start by putting success in writing — five named priorities, the criteria each one is judged on, dated deliverables — and then we stay until the numbers meet it.
Three weeks, fixed fee. You keep the charter either way.
The honest part
Improvement programmes die of vagueness, not difficulty.
The work was never the hard part. Agreeing what done means, and who it belongs to, is.
Everyone agreed to improve
Sales heard growth, service heard speed, finance heard cost. All three delivered on that. None of it added up to a better operation.
No baseline was taken
Nine months of effort comes down to a debate about whether things feel better. Nobody wins that argument, and the budget does not come back.
The plan never reached a Tuesday
Written in January, buried by March. Not because it was wrong. Because nothing anyone actually did that week connected to it.
The charter
We put success in writing before we touch anything.
Three weeks in, you get one document. Short, specific, and the thing we are both held to for the next 180 days.
It is not a proposal and it is not a deck. It is the agreement about what we are trying to make true, written plainly enough that your service manager and your accountant read it the same way.
If we cannot write a criterion you would recognise as met or not met, the priority is not ready and we say so.
- Five priorities. Named, ranked, never more than five. Ranked so that when two of them conflict — and they will — there is already an answer.
- Success criteria. Under each priority, the terms it is judged on. Sentences you can hold something against, not adjectives.
- Dated deliverables. Each station ends with artefacts that either exist or do not. No percentage complete, ever.
- One scorecard. Twelve metrics, one name against each, baselined before anything changes.
- A review rhythm. Twenty-five minutes a week against the same page. Red is allowed. Unowned is not.
What we work on
Five priorities. Never nine.
Yours will be worded differently. The shape rarely changes: what must not break, who owns what, what falls over if one person leaves, what the client is owed, and what the desk costs to run.
Protect what already works
Growth is the most likely thing to break the thing that got you here.
- The service your best clients buy is unchanged
- New hires are held to the bar the first ten were
- Accountability rises without another layer of management
- Anything you acquire adopts your standard, not the reverse
Put a name on every number
The largest gap in most MSPs is not capability. It is ownership.
- Every metric has one owner, not a committee
- Expectations are written down and measurable
- Managers run to a scorecard, not to memory
- The weekly review names people, not departments
Remove the single points of failure
The riskiest thing in your business is usually a person, not a system.
- No process depends on one individual’s recall
- Client knowledge sits with a team, not a technician
- Every internal audit has an owner who runs it
- You can be unreachable for two weeks
Give the client something to sign
Clients cannot accept risk they have never been shown.
- Every managed client has a current posture review
- Recommendations are standard, not improvised per account
- Approved, deferred and declined are all recorded
- The record survives the account manager leaving
Make the desk cheaper to run
Service delivery is the engine. It is also where the margin leaks.
- Less noise reaches a human at all
- Time entry is complete without anyone chasing it
- More of the week is proactive work
- Load is visible before it becomes an escalation
The 180 days
Four stations. Each ends with something you can hold.
Not a status percentage. An artefact, dated, with a name on it. Fifteen of them, fixed at the charter.
Assess
Understand who runs what, and what happens when they stop.
- Deliverable: Manager capability assessment
- Deliverable: Operational baseline scorecard
- Deliverable: Owner dependency map
Diagnose
Score the operation and rank the gaps by what they cost you.
- Deliverable: Operational maturity assessment
- Deliverable: Ranked gap list
- Deliverable: Staffing and capacity read
- Deliverable: Alerting and noise review
Design
Build the future state and the accountability that holds it up.
- Deliverable: Future-state structure
- Deliverable: Accountability framework
- Deliverable: Build queue, sequenced
- Deliverable: Improvement roadmap
Execute
Institutionalise it, then hand back the chair.
- Deliverable: Operational playbook
- Deliverable: Scorecard your leads run
- Deliverable: Scalability roadmap
- Deliverable: Next-year operating plan
Deliverables are fixed when the charter is signed. If one changes, you sign that off too.
The scorecard
A charter you cannot score is a wish list.
Operational maturity level is the number underneath all five priorities. One score, five levels, eight dimensions. It is the difference between “we tightened things up” and “we went from 1.8 to 3.4”.
How criteria get met
Most criteria are closed with software, not with a coordinator.
Write a criterion like “time entry is complete without anyone chasing it” and the usual answer is a person whose job is chasing. That is a cost you carry forever to fix a gap that lasted a quarter.
Your gaps are rarely between departments. They are between systems — the PSA that does not know what the RMM sees, the contract that does not match the agent count, the QBR that takes a day to assemble.
We build on Kultiv.ai, so a build is measured in days rather than quarters. Small enough to throw away when it stops earning.
Compares RMM agents against billed PSA contracts every night. Posts the delta to a channel with a name attached.
Reads the inbound ticket, sets category, priority and queue, and flags the ones that should never have been a ticket.
Builds the client pack from your own data. Account managers edit the narrative instead of chasing the numbers.
Proof
Proof comes from the charter, not from a deck. When we publish a named case, it will sit here with the baseline and the delta.
Real attributed quotes replace this the moment a client clears them.
We do not put illustrative percentages on this page. If a number is here, it came from an engagement and the client said we could show it.
Book a diagnostic if you want to see what your own baseline looks like.
Start small
Three weeks, then you decide.
Book the diagnostic and you get the charter: five priorities with criteria, the OML baseline, the ranked gap list and the deliverable dates. If the answer is that you are already fine, we will write that down instead.