Your website is having conversations on your behalf because that’s its job… it’s there to explain who you are, what you do, and why someone should trust you. The question is, what’s it saying? Also this week, why most MSP reporting to clients is ignored, and huge mistakes you’ll make today that’ll damage your exit.

Welcome to Episode 337 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green, powered by the MSP Marketing Edge.

Your MSP’s website is talking behind your back. So the only question is, what’s it saying? While you’re out at dinner, walking the dog, in a meeting, or even having a sneaky kip at three in the afternoon, yeah, I know what you get up to. Your website is having conversations on your behalf because that’s its job, right? It’s there to explain who you are, what you do, and why someone should trust you.

The problem is that for a lot of MSPs, your website is having the entire conversation with the prospect, because if they don’t very quickly find something on there that engages them and makes them think, “Oh, right. Yeah, this is the right place for me,” then they just move on. They go back to Google or AI or however they got to your website in the first place, and they go looking at other MSPs.

And do you know what? You never even know that they were there because you don’t know their name, you don’t know what they were looking for. All you know is that another invisible conversation just died. So what is your website saying behind your back?

From what I see, most MSP websites accidentally deliver one of four damaging messages…

The first message is this: We don’t really want to tell you much about us. You see this everywhere in kind of vague written content, which of course we call copy. You see generic service descriptions or a homepage that says almost nothing specific or uses very generic text like proactive IT support, trusted partner, cyber security solutions. And here’s my favourite. We keep your business running. Now, there’s nothing technically wrong with those phrases until you realise that every other MSP within like a 25 mile radius is using the exact same words or the same intentions at least.

And when everything sounds the same, you sound the same as all of your competitors. And when everyone sounds the same like that, the prospect has no reason to choose you. So the silent message becomes, we don’t really know what makes us different, so we’re going to hide behind safe language. And prospects really feel that. If you don’t give them something distinctive that they can hook onto, then they will go looking for someone else who does.

The second damaging message is: Lack of transparency. Many MSP websites avoid talking about price. They avoid explaining how their services work. And they avoid spelling out what’s included and what isn’t included. Instead, everything funnels towards contact us to find out more. So put yourself in the buyer’s shoes. They’re already nervous about switching MSP and they don’t want mystery, they want clarity. If your website withholds really basic information like pricing, then the message it sends is that they have to speak to a salesperson before they can even decide whether you are relevant to them or not. And in 2026, that just kills momentum.

Buyers want to research quietly. They want to understand what you do, roughly how you price and how you think before they ever talk to you. And your website either supports that research or it blocks it. As a side note, if you know that’s a problem and you want an easy way to fix it, I’ve partnered with bestselling author Marcus Sheridan to create msppriceguide.com. You can get an interactive price calculator on your website that not only has transparency about pricing, but actually it also acts as an insanely good lead generation tool. Go to msppriceguide.com.

The third damaging message is: There are no real humans here. You’ve got stock photos, very polished, but bland language, no real opinions, no stories, no sense of personality. Essentially, there’s no proof that you’ve ever helped anyone like them, like the person who’s reading your website. And the result is that you feel like every other faceless IT company.

Buyers these days are asking themselves very simple questions. Who are the people behind this MSP? Would I enjoy working with them? Do they care? Do they have an opinion? Do they have a point of view? In an age where AI can generate endless, generic content, it’s humanity that really stands out. And that means real photos, real voices, real stories, written and crafted by humans. So if your website feels sterile, you’re missing a massive opportunity to build connection before the first conversation.

And then the fourth and most damaging message is: Lack of social proof. No case studies, no reviews, no testimonials. There are no client stories on your website. Now, you know that you’re excellent, but if there’s no evidence on your website, then the message becomes we say we’re great, but you’ll have to take our word for it. And when someone’s considering switching from one MSP to another, that is a big decision. Humans trust other humans more than they trust marketing claims. So proof reduces perceived risk for them. Without it, doubt creeps in.

The good news is this is all fixable. Go through your homepage, your About Us page and your key service pages and ask yourself a few honest questions. Is this specific or could it belong to any MSP? Are we open about how we work and what things cost, at least in principle? Do real humans show up here with personality and perspective? And is there clear proof that we’ve helped businesses like the one reading this?

Your website doesn’t need to be perfect, but it does need to be clear and transparent and feel human. And of course it needs to prove what you claim because whether you like it or not, it is having conversations about you every single day and night. And the better those conversations are, the more likely the prospect is to book into your live calendar and start a real conversation with you.

This one is going to be relevant to you if you do any kind of reporting for your clients. Perhaps you have clients that insist on having regular reports and updates on their tech setup, but you sometimes get that sneaky feeling that they never actually read it, which probably drives you crazy right.

Side note on this, once I worked for a big, big radio company and we had to do a big report at the end of each week to go off to our boss, I had that feeling that my boss wasn’t reading the report. So I started inserting random sentences and even swear words in the middle of that report and he never ever mentioned it. So I just sort of made it up from that point on. If he’s not reading it, there’s no point spending time on it. Anyway, side note over.

I know that if you’re doing these reports, it is work for you. Even if you’re just generating a report from your PSA, you probably just double check it, just read it through, right? And just like it was for me back when I worked in radio, anytime you’re doing some work that you don’t think actually adds value, it creates frustration and makes you not want to do the work.

I believe the problem here is not the information that you’re generating, but the format in which you’re sending it. Let me explain that.

If you think of the average report that you might produce for your clients, it’s probably just pages and pages of data, right? Charts and metrics and ticket volumes and analysis of response times and security alerts, maybe even their backup status, all of that kind of stuff. And again, I know all of this is in your PSA, but you press a button, you turn it into a PDF and you send it through to the client and maybe most of the time you hear nothing back. In fact, maybe you’ve even tracked whether or not they even open the email and maybe they don’t. Maybe they pass it onto colleagues if it’s a bigger business or lodge it somewhere. But if you really are getting that feeling that no one’s reading it and absorbing it, then here is a better way of doing this.

Now, by the way, this bit of the podcast was inspired by Jason Morales, who’s one of the MSPs I work with inside the MSP Marketing Edge. He does something so much smarter. This is his idea, which I’ve happily stolen because it’s a great idea. Instead of forcing clients to consume information in the format that suits him, he presents the data in the format that they’re already consuming. In other words, Jason adapts the delivery to the specific client, and that small shift is so powerful because here’s the thing, the data on its own doesn’t drive retention… understanding the data drives retention. So if your client doesn’t even look at the report you’re sending them, they can’t absorb the information, so it won’t affect their behaviour or strengthen your relationship. It’s just a bit of admin for you and a bit of admin they ignore for them.

So what does it look like in practice to deliver it in a different format? Well, one really good example is to turn reporting data into audio. If you think about it, many business owners already consume content via podcasts. So instead of sending a 10 page report, you send them a 10 minute private audio summary. You could say something like, “Hi Mr or Mrs Client. Here’s what’s happened this month. Here’s what you need to know and here’s what we’re watching. And also at the end, there’s some recommendations that I’ve put. There’s only a couple of them, but I think they’ll make a big difference to you.” And suddenly, even though that’s taken 10, 20 minutes of your time to read that and produce that report, it suddenly feels really personal and human. And they are going to consume a 10 minute audio file from you way more than they are some kind of PDF.

You could record that yourself or you could use an AI to do a summary of it. You could get the AI to voice it if you wanted. I personally would use the AI to do the summary of the report from your PSA and then you record that. They’re much more likely to listen if it’s your voice and not an AI voice. And I know that you can clone your voice with AI these days but I really don’t think you want to go down that route. I know 11 labs and a couple of other services do it but I really don’t think you should go down that route. As long as you hear my voice in a podcast or a video, as long as I’m alive, it’s the real me. I really don’t believe in cloned voices. Maybe the technology in the future will be so, so good you can’t tell, but today you can kind of tell. Anyway, rant over.

Another format, of course, is short video. You could record a 5 minute Loom or a Teams video where you just talk them through the highlights. The beauty of doing it as a video, not an audio, is you can show one or two key charts up on the screen and you can explain what matters and ignore what doesn’t. Most people will watch a 5 minute video. I think maybe audio is slightly better because they’ll probably listen to it in the car, but at least with the video, they’ll see your face, they’ll hear your voice. And again, that increases trust. I guess you could just ask each client, “Would you like a short video on this or would you like a short audio file on this?”

As I’m thinking about this, I’m thinking you could also turn data into a simple infographic. So instead of overwhelming them with lots of printed numbers, highlight the three metrics that matter the most. So this could be, I don’t know, your uptime percentage or the number of threats blocked, or maybe even the number of tickets resolved within your SLA. Again, it depends on what’s most important to your client or what stands out most to you that you want to shout about. But as an infographic, it’s a visual thing. It’s very simple, it’s very obvious. It shows where the good news is and it shows them what needs attention.

Business owners and managers love clarity, don’t they? You must see this in the dealings that you have with them. So another approach is to turn reporting into a short written narrative instead of a massive 10 page report. This could literally be a one page story of the month and you write it as a story. You don’t just do it as a list of facts. You tell them what went well, what nearly went wrong, but you intervened, what you’ve improved, and what you’re going to be working on next. Humans are wired right at the core of our brains to engage with stories far more than facts and tables of data. In fact, you could even adapt this based on the client’s personality because some will want detail and some will want summary. Some want dashboards, some want conversation.

The point is you don’t default to the format that’s easiest for you and you just bang out the reporting once a month. You choose the format that’s easiest and most pleasant for them. Because the goal of reporting is not to prove that you’ve been busy. The goal of reporting is to demonstrate value in a way that strengthens the relationship. So why not ask them? Ask them what kind of format they consume. Offer them choices. For example, if I was your client, I’m not really a super heavy detail person. I just want a quick overview and I want to know that everything’s okay. But I do also love audio books and podcasts. So I would actually love a 5 or 10 minute audio report that I could listen to once a week, once a month, whatever. That would be absolutely perfect for me.

When clients actually consume and understand your reporting, a number of things are going to happen. They’re going to appreciate what you prevent, not just what you fix. They’re much more likely to approve upgrades and investments. They’re less likely to question invoices because they know you’re doing stuff and they’re far more likely to renew at the end of their contract without hesitation. So this kind of really engaging reporting, it’s not compliance. It’s more like insight, building the partnership between you and them. I love it. Such a great idea, Jason. Thank you so much for the idea.

So maybe it’s time to ask yourself a very simple question. If you were your client, how would you prefer to consume this?

If you’re a member of the MSP Marketing Edge, have you joined me yet at one of my drop-in marketing clinics? I do these normally every Tuesday and Thursday. It’s just a 30 minute group Zoom where you can literally drop in, just say hi to me, chat to me about your business, or ask a specific marketing question. Now, this isn’t designed as somewhere for you to come and lurk and listen to what other people are talking about. It’s very much if you’ve got an active question or you just want to talk to me about a specific subject. You can see when the next clinic is and also what time it is in your time zone. Just go into the portal and head to the support page.

Oh, and if you’re not yet a member of the MSP Marketing Edge, we do only work with one MSP per area. You can check to see if your area is available. Go to mspmarketingedge.com/membership and enter your postcode or zip code.

Featured guest: Adam Borst helps business owners grow through acquisition and helps founders exit the right way. He sources opportunities, structures the deal, and quarterbacks the process through closing, creating a streamlined, high-certainty transaction for both buyer and seller.

There’s going to come a day when you’re going to exit your business. In fact, they’re either going to carry you out in a box, which is not really the exit you want, or better still, you’re going to sell your business. Now, if that’s years and years and years away, it’s still something that you need to be aware of now. In fact, I believe it needs to be sat in the back of your mind all the time, almost asking yourself, “The decisions I make today, how is that going to affect the exit that I might have in 5 or 10 years time?”

My special guest today is a real expert at this. He’s a business broker and sells an MSP on average every three and a half weeks. The thing is, he sees patterns of things that MSPs do today that make it harder for them to sell their business in the future and also directly affect how much money they’re going to get paid when they come to that exit. So you need this info right now and not when you’re 6 months away from selling your business.

Hi, I’m Adam Borst. I’m the VP of Acquisitions with Vista Business Group.

And I’m so excited to have you on the podcast, Adam, because we are going to talk about a massive subject. What is going to stop you from being able to sell your MSP for big bucks? And you’re clearly someone who knows a lot about selling MSPs because you sell, is it every four or five weeks you sell an MSP on average?

Every three and a half to four weeks.

Okay. So that’s a pretty regular routine of selling MSPs. So we’re going to explore today all the mistakes that will hold you back. So what you’ll do that makes your MSP unsellable or very difficult to sell, what you’ll do that would reduce the value, all the mistakes that you’re likely to make. And I’m going to guess that a lot of those mistakes are made years before the sales process even happens. And we’ll find out from you, Adam, as we go along. But let’s first of all just explore you. So how have you got to this point now where you’re selling an MSP every three and a half weeks or so?

Yeah, great question. So I joined the firm right before Covid started. We were very diversified as far as our industry focus goes, but we had an MSP listed for sale. Everything took it on the chin except for the MSP, so I told the owner of the firm like, this is pretty obvious. And then of course, Covid shined a gigantic spotlight on the need for MSPs. So that’s obviously good for the MSPs, but for private equity, they had these big diverse portfolios going into Covid, a lot of their portfolio companies took it on the chin, except for their MSPs. So we made a hard pivot and that’s 99% of what we focus on these days. So that has been for the last 5 plus years.

That’s amazing. I love hearing a positive stories of things that happened in Covid and how people discovered things that they didn’t know were right there in front of them, which is really cool. So, without giving away any kind of secret sauce or special techniques, because any business that’s been doing something for years and years and years has methods and things that work and that give it a competitive advantage. But when you’re selling an MSP, we’ve all seen these websites listing businesses for sale… most of us have sat and dreamed, haven’t we, we’ve sat and looked at these and thought what would it be like if I own that kind of business or I might look at that. I assume you guys aren’t just listing them on websites. Do you do strategic work identifying who would be the perfect acquirer for this and how do we put that person and our seller together?

Yes. Excellent question. So that’s one of the areas where we shine very brightly is our ability to bring a gazillion buyers to the table. So to your point, you’re exactly right. We don’t just slap it up on a couple websites and call it a day. We have folks on our team that that’s what they do full-time is proactively reach out to potential buyers. All of our marketing is blind, meaning that there’s no identifying information about the business, but we send out a one-page highlight sheet. We call it a teaser because there’s no way that a buyer would be able to figure out who they are, but it gives them enough sense of whether it maybe be a good fit for them. And when they express interest, we have them sign an NDA and then at that point, then we provide them with the memorandum that we’ve put together or the big thick offering book. Our goal with that offering book is to provide them with all the information that they would need to put together an initial offer. So that’s the first major step in the process.

Yeah. I have a small insight into that world because I sold my first business in 2016, so 10 years ago. And the company I hired were so expensive but they were worth every penny because they did their own version of exactly what you said. And in the end, we had three offers to buy the business, which was crazy. And I successfully exited that business and it was worth every penny for them to go through this process. It was a marketing exercise and that was what attracted me to them in the first place. As a marketing obsessive, it’s like, hang on, here’s a company that is expensive because they’re going to invest all of that money into people and processes and they were hitting the phones for five or six weeks, just literally drumming up demand, which was great.

So that’s turned into a bit of a free advert for you there. So let’s get away from the free advert and turn into value. So you’ve obviously spent five, six years then looking at MSPs. I mean, if you’re selling one every three and a half weeks, you must be talking to hundreds of MSPs a year. And I’m going to guess that people are coming to you, they’ve either got a finished business, as in the business runs without them, it’s got a management team, it’s got systems, it’s got processes, the owner has perhaps collected the money for a number of years and for whatever reason, they’re just ready to go. So I’m guessing you’ll get those kind of people that come in and you love those. And then I’m guessing you get people who come in and the business has taken a big dip, cash is starting to be an issue. They’ve lost a major client or the owner’s ill or the owner’s partner’s ill or someone’s ill somewhere or it’s generally a business that for whatever reason it’s going down rather than going up. Would that be a fair thing to say?

Let me make this a two-part question. We could all look at that and say, well, obviously it’s going to be harder to sell the, let’s call it distressed business, but actually is that the case or is demand so high for MSPs right now that you can almost sell any business?

I’m a broken record. Again, you’re asking good questions. So the answer is yes, demand is absurdly high these days. To give you some numbers to flesh that out, in years past, when we would bring an MSP to market, we would expect an average MSP to receive anywhere from 20 to 40 offers within a 30 day period. So not just people that are saying that they’re interested in reviewing the offering book, but actually out of all of them, out of the hundreds that have reviewed it, there’s in years past 20 to 40 that provide an initial indication of interest or an initial offer.

The last 10 to 12 MSPs that we’ve sold, the average number of offers is between 60 to 80 within a 30 day period.

And buyers are coming out of the woodwork, for lack of a better phrase. So to your point on the quality, for a distressed business, the beauty of bringing so many buyers to the table is that you’re going to have all sorts of different buyers. So there’s high demand for both is a short answer.

Yeah, I get that. So in that previous business that I sold, we worked within the veterinarian sector. And back then, at that point, it was where MSPs are today, where suddenly, and it was all being driven by Mars, as in the candy people, the chocolate bar people who now own more veterinary practices and clinics across the world than any other company. But because of that, there was this huge consolidation rush and suddenly even badly run, poor, unprofitable veterinary practices were worth money because there was just such demand. So it’s interesting. And that demand obviously has tailed off now because there’s a finite amount of people. So it’s really interesting to see that the MSP world is now at that stage, and I guess that will last for another five or six years, maybe longer, because of course MSPs being in technology, it’s a completely different ballpark than clinics where veterinarians fix animals.

Let’s talk then about what MSPs get wrong. So I’m sure you don’t have that many perfect ready to sell businesses turn up. What are the most common things you see that MSPs do, which either make a sale harder or just more likely reduce the amount of money they’re likely to be offered?

There’s a lot of different directions we go with this. So one thing that I tell everybody is some owners, they feel like that their employees are their family and they feel like they have to tell every little thing that’s going on. And we strongly encourage potential sellers to just keep it tightly under wraps. The time to tell your employees that you’re even thinking about selling the business is when you’re introducing them to the new owner. That is the time to tell them you’ve even thought about it. Because otherwise, I mean, put yourself in the shoes of the employee, it creates a lot of unnecessary angst. And so that makes it very difficult to sell is when the employees have been told, because again, they don’t know who their new boss is going to be in a couple months anyway. So from their perspective, it’s like, “Well, why wouldn’t I go out and look and see what else is out there?” So that’s one.

Another would be sometimes when owners are nearing an exit, when there’s light at the end of the tunnel for them, they back off the gas. They took their foot off the gas pedal, and that is the worst thing that an owner can do. The time to work the hardest is going into the exit. You would do yourself so many favours, first and foremost, just in terms of how much money you receive when you exit. Another would be, the best way I could say it is, the things that keep you up at night as an owner, those are the things that are going to decrease the value that you could otherwise extract from an exit. So buyers they pay for predictability that ultimately, the name of the game in M&A is predictability. That is how you command a premium. So the things that people get wrong are, I suppose there’s really no right or wrong approach.

Well, if I can jump in, Adam, are you saying in different words, why would someone else want to buy your problems and the problems that you can’t fix? Is that one way of looking at it?

Yeah. So if you were to step away from the business for 90 days, what’s going to break? Those are the areas you need to shore up if you want to command a premium. And what I was starting to say is, there’s different schools of thought on this. A lot of folks still aren’t completely sold on the idea that they need to have their clients on an annual contract, but in terms of commanding a premium when you go to sell, that is something that’s going to move the needle. And then just the quality of the contracts as well. You don’t have to go out and spend a crazy amount of money with an attorney, but when a buyer looks at an MSP that has annual contracts versus month to month, they’re looking at a business that has a much higher commitment level that the clients have with that MSP. Other issues that impact value would be, one of the big ones would be a client concentration. So then there’s really, there’s no magic line in the sand, but if there was, it would be right around 20% of revenue.

You mean in terms of whale clients, so there’s no one client that’s more than 20% of your revenue?

Yes, exactly. And obviously the way to fix that is just to dilute that concentration by getting more clients in the door. But anyway, those are some of the big factors.

Yeah. It’s interesting, and this validates everything you’ve just said, this is exactly the advice I was given 10 years ago when I sold my business, which was do not stop working hard. In fact, you keep working hard until the day you give the keys to the new owner. Do not tell your staff, do not have whale clients. And there were a whole bunch of other things around find your skeletons first before the buyer finds them during due diligence, which is that process of where you’ve accepted the offer and they get to see everything. And so if you know you’ve buried some bodies in the yard, you dig those bodies up and you move them to someone else’s yard before you sell the house is a slightly crude way of putting it, but that was how it was explained to me.

Let’s take, as a final question, Adam, a slightly longer term view. So for most MSPs listening to this or watching this on YouTube right now, the exit is in the future. It’s not today. I’m sure you might know what percentage of people are ready to sell at any one time. And we all have days where we think, “Oh, I’m done. I want to get out of this.” But then we wake up the next morning and we carry on. But I mean, everybody wants to sell their business at some point. So let’s say there’s someone, an MSP owner listening to this right now and they’re 5 years away from where they think they’re going to be ready to exit. What are some of the mistakes they’re going to be making today that are going to be much harder to fix down the line or things they could do today which is just going to make their life easier down the line?

The cleaner your books are, the easier life is going to be when the exit comes. And then to put a finer point on that, categorising your revenue. So knowing how much of your revenue is coming from actual MSP contracts versus projects. A lot of MSPs, it’s all just service labour. Making it a distinction between the two in your accounting, that’s going to help you a lot. Again, going back to the contracts, it doesn’t have to be some crazy overly complex contract that you have, but having a contract, that is very helpful. And again, the longer the period, the better.

You brought up a really good point earlier, if there are skeletons in the closet. The very first step in our process is to put together a valuation. We don’t charge people for that, there’s no strings attached. And the reason that we do that is, in an ideal world, we like to do that at least 24 months prior to when they sell. And the reason being is so that way, if there are any issues that we identify, then it gives them 6 months or more to implement whatever changes, and then still yet another 12 months of those changes being on the books. So as far as things that an owner can do, that is an extremely healthy exercise. Strongly recommend it.

Yeah. Amazing. Thank you so much. Adam, let’s finish off. Just tell us a little bit more about what you do to help MSPs. So we know you sell lots of them and we know this is a great time to be selling an MSP, but just tell us a little bit more about what you do and what’s the best way to get in touch with you as well.

Email’s best, it’s my name, [email protected]. So that’s the best way to get in touch with me. And then as far as what we do, again, the process, step one is always a valuation. When somebody decides that they want to move forward, then we package the business up and then we actively market it, as I outlined earlier, 60 to 80 offers within a 30 day period. We don’t expect the owner to interact with all of those, we ask them to narrow it down. We have all the offers gathered up and put together in a spreadsheet. And then we ask them to narrow it down to really the top five to maybe seven that they really like. And then those are the only ones that we allow through the gate, that way they’re not wasting their time with all the rest.

Once they have those picked, we set up video calls, individual video calls with the owner and the different buyers. And those are really important because it’s a chance for them to interview the potential buyers. So anyway, once they’ve interviewed everybody, then we ask them all the buyers to submit their letter of intent. We help the seller to leverage those offers against one another and negotiate until ultimately they pick the one that they want. Once they sign the letter of intent, then due diligence begins. We’re with them all the way through until closing. So start to finish, we’re a white glove service. And the website again is vistabusinessgroup.com.