MSP Mentor, a leading blogger in the space of reporting about our industry posted a blog that there were a limited amount of Master MSPs at the recent CompTIA conference.
In my humble opinion, the Master MSPs really can’t sustain themselves in the long term and compete in the SMB space. The bigger the MSP gets the more difficult and complex they become to work with smaller and less complex clients. At a certain size a Master MSP has to standardize it’s offering so much that they limit “customization” because they won’t be able to scale. That’s not the SMB space…
There is a breaking point of getting too big and we’re seeing it in the field where clients that were chasing the cheaper solution with a bigger player are changing their mind. In the past month we have converted two clients that were former clients of a large Master MSP and both expressed disappointment with the level of service.
Compuquip has the benefit of a large engineering team that allows us to scale and have a deep bench. But we’re still nimble enough to provide a customized solution to our clients in order to meet their needs.
I think we’ll see a significant consolidation as small MSPs struggle to make ends meet. However when those consolidations grow TOO big we’ll see a shift back to the middle (which we are starting to see now). Finding the sweet spot in size and scale is the real challenge for the MSP industry…especially while providing a high level of support at all times.
We feel we’re in that zone right now, especially because of our growth. But we are certainly watching our growth very closely!
