Every MSP owner gets the same email. Someone would like to talk about acquiring your company. Most go straight to the trash, and the rest get filed under one mental category: private equity, roll-up, spreadsheet, faceless. Mitch Pulver is the person on the other end of one of those emails, and he is none of those things.

Mitch is the CEO of Quality Network Solutions, a managed services provider supporting more than 200 K-12 school districts across Illinois and Missouri. A Naval Academy graduate and former surface warfare officer, he spent two and a half years searching for a business to buy, moved his family to a town where he knew nobody, and has run it ever since. In this conversation he explains what a search fund actually is, how it differs from the institutional capital everyone pictures, and what he sees coming for owners of smaller MSPs.

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What We Cover in This Episode

- Distinguish a search fund from the institutional private equity most owners imagine

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Guest Links

Guest LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mitch-pulver-10739b13b/

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- MSP acquisitions

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Credits

Host: Josh Peterson

Josh Peterson is three billing cycles into a licensing dispute. His team submitted cancellations four months ahead of renewal, in writing. The renewal date passed without acknowledgement, the next invoice came back larger because the annual increase had been applied to seats that should have been gone, and the eventual resolution was a credit rather than a refund.

Gary Boyle declines the villain reading and offers a mechanism instead. Bundled low entry pricing built an installed base too cheap to grow into, which left price on existing customers as the only lever, and longer contracts followed to protect it. From there the two work toward the question an owner can actually act on: whether an MSP should build its own software instead of paying for it, and the tool spend threshold that decides the answer.

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- Trace how a correctly filed cancellation becomes three billing cycles of dispute

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Josh Peterson: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joshdpeterson/

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- MSP software costs

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Host: Josh Peterson

Ask an MSP owner what a good per user rate is and watch what happens. Most of them will not say a number. They will contextualize, credential themselves, and explain the whole methodology before the answer ever arrives. Andrea Lipton has spent thirty years studying why we do that, and she has a framework for stopping.

Andrea Lipton is Director of Delivery for Training as a Service at ISG (Information Services Group), with a career that runs from JP Morgan to Harvard Business Publishing to NIIT. In this conversation we explore why explaining before answering costs you trust, how to build rapport without running an interrogation, and AEIOU, the self-coaching framework she built and now teaches to her teams.

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What We Cover in This Episode

- Trace the habit of explaining first back to school, credentialing, and the fear of being challenged

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Guest Links

Andrea Lipton on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aflipton/

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SEO Keywords

- MSP sales calls

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Credits

Host: Josh Peterson

Most MSP strategic plans do not fail because the goal was wrong. They fail because the plan carried more initiatives than the company could ever execute.

In this BMK Vision Roundtable, Josh Peterson and Gary Boyle take apart a real example: a client plan Josh built that Gary told him was overbuilt. The goal was sound. The volume underneath it was not. What follows is a working definition of an initiative, the reason most owners misfile efficiency work under a revenue goal, and a hard number for how much a six month plan can actually hold.

Gary Boyle is a Partner for Strategy & Business Development at Bering McKinley and co-hosts the roundtable with Josh.

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What We Cover in This Episode

- Why excitement in a planning session reliably produces an unexecutable plan

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SEO Keywords

- MSP strategic planning

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Credits

Host: Josh Peterson

Most MSP owners think the risk in a contract is the part the client might sue over. The real damage is quieter: the work you never priced, the increase you never took, and the invoice you let age past ninety days. Tom Fafinski has spent 35 years as an attorney to managed service providers, and Alexander Caplan runs an international MSP out of London. Josh Peterson puts the two of them in a room and works through the agreement from first handshake to final collection.

Tom Fafinski is co-founder of Virtus Law in Minnesota, a firm he describes as a general counsel's office for MSPs, covering master services agreements, mergers, governance, and estate planning for owners. Alexander Caplan is founder of Synergy Associates, a London-headquartered MSP running for more than twenty years with teams in Paris, New York, Los Angeles, Hong Kong, and the UAE. Between them they see the same contract from both sides of the table.

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What We Cover in This Episode

- Diagnose why a small managed services agreement now gets routed to a client's legal team

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Guest Links

Tom Fafinski LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thomasfafinski/

Alexander Caplan LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexandercaplan/

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SEO Keywords

- MSP contracts

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Credits

Host: Josh Peterson

Most MSP company goals say the same thing. Hit a valuation, sell the business. It is an honest goal and a reasonable one, and it satisfies every conventional rule about how a goal is supposed to be written. It is also a goal nobody on your leadership team will ever get out of bed for.

Josh Peterson and Gary Boyle, Partner for Strategy & Business Development at Bering McKinley, work through what a company goal is actually for, why MSPs stall at two million, why identical tactics build very different businesses depending on what they are pointed at, and where the reason for a goal belongs once you finally write the goal down.

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What We Cover in This Episode

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Host Links

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Credits

Robert Weber has run Weber TC in the Kansas City market since 2003 and has never once used a termed contract. His reasoning is not about trust. A term contract does not hold a client, it schedules the exact moment that client is required to decide whether to leave. Month to month clients could go any day, so they never do.

Robert Weber is the CEO of Weber TC, and in this conversation we explore contract structure, the blend of hourly and managed services inside one client base, and what recurring revenue is actually earning. Josh Peterson brings the margin side that most owners have never measured.

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- Why managed services fails on execution rather than design

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Guest LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/robert-weber-7b48b216/

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- MSP term contracts

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Host: Josh Peterson

Most MSP owners can name the exact week they first borrowed money to make payroll. Josh Peterson and Gary Boyle treat that moment as a diagnosis rather than a cash flow event, and work backwards from it through gross profit, spending discipline, and the reason a new revenue line almost never rescues a business that is already unprofitable.

Gary Boyle is Partner for Strategy and Business Development at Bering McKinley, and this roundtable is drawn from a client conversation that Josh recognized as his own situation two years earlier. We get into what to check first, what to stop spending, and what a healthy MSP net profit actually looks like.

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What We Cover in This Episode

- Read borrowing to make payroll as a structural signal rather than a timing gap

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Host Links

Josh Peterson LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joshdpeterson/

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SEO Keywords

- MSP payroll debt

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Credits

Host: Josh Peterson

The connector economy is under real pressure for the first time, and the numbers behind that are uncomfortable. Josh Peterson has spent about $12,000 over twenty years on one piece of middleware. Rob Miller rebuilt a $20,000 website in an afternoon for roughly $2,000 in tokens. This conversation sits in the gap between those two facts.

Rob Miller is the founder of VIP IT, Inc., a Los Angeles managed IT services and cybersecurity provider, and one of the most AI-forward operators in the MSP channel. We explore what MSP owners should actually build, what they should keep buying, and where the production line has to be drawn.

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What We Cover in This Episode

- Separate the subscription price from the cost of not owning the roadmap

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Guest Links

Guest LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/robmiller73/

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SEO Keywords

- MSP middleware

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Credits

Host: Josh Peterson

Every MSP owner who hires a salesperson eventually hears some version of the same complaint: I hired you to sell, so let me sell. This roundtable puts that argument under real pressure.

Josh Peterson and Gary Boyle open an unprompted email from a sales manager titled "Your Activity Tracking Obsession Is Killing My Soul," and use it to separate two questions owners usually collapse into one. Is activity tracking worth doing, and has anyone actually built a quota worth tracking against?

Josh makes the case that data is what makes coaching and firing decisions possible at all. Gary agrees, then argues that most owners bolt tracking onto a quota they never designed, and that paying a setter only for appointments quietly buys the wrong behavior. Josh gives ground on a position he has held for years.

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What We Cover in This Episode

- Diagnose why a quota you've never enforced isn't a standard

Plus: why this conversation needed a companion episode on the full sales-rep role.

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Host & Co-Host Links

Josh Peterson: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joshdpeterson/

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SEO Keywords

- MSP sales activity tracking

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Credits

Host: Josh Peterson