r/SmallMSP

Hi everyone. I currently work as IT manager at a healthcare company managing Google workspace, MDM, and entire IT infrastructure that i built from scratch. The job is flexible where i work remote most of the time. The company has been acquired last year and tbere has been some leadership cuts, and the COO from the bigger company recently became a CEO (because the previous CEO got fired). This new CEO wanted to cut me because they already have an MSP that does basic IT Helpdesk and account creation (but thats it, IT support basically). I did not want to live with this fear of when I'll be fired so i applied to different jobs as my plan B, and well... plan B worked. I got a job offer as an engineer at a MSP company (12ish people so small business). Congrats right? Not quite. The CEO that wants to fire me is getting fired.

So im in this weird situation where i dont know what the new new CEO will view me as valuable or not, should i say dont take the risk and take that job offer, or I have more interviews so should I not rush anything. MSP position is a good practice for me since I'll be jumping into MS 365 and learn more about how MSP operates (because I also started a side msp business which i only have 2 small clients).

My gut is saying don't do anything and see how good/bad the new new CEO is. I never knew that I would be blessed with this type of joyful situation but its also a difficult decision.

We've had a client for ~15 years that recently has become quite hostile towards us. They've started asking for administrative rights to everything, taking issue with how we've been managing things, complaining about our cost, the owner stating "there's no way in hell I would have signed your contract" (his previous ops manager did).

I am planning to offer him a "break glass" global admin account if he agrees to not use it except in cases where we have violated our SLA with prior notice in writing.

In addition to this, I'd like to just get out of our contract with them. It's not worth this current headache. The complicating factor is they have a few open invoices.

I'm willing to let them out of their contract without having to pay it out (as it is written in the termination clause), but I don't want to offer this until we've received or are sure we'll get payment for those open invoices.

They've also asked for documentation and passwords to all other infrastructure. This was requested in the name of business continuity, which I understand. Would you wait until the termination of the agreement to turn this over as well?

How would you handle this?

Hey everyone,

I’ve been really interested in how you started MSPs and wanted to hear some real stories from people here.

How did you start your MSP?
- What were you doing before?
- Did you come from corporate IT, helpdesk, sysadmin work, another MSP, etc.?
- Did you start solo or with partners?
- What services did you offer at the beginning?
- How did you get your first clients?
- If you could restart today, what would you do differently?

I’m especially curious about how people made the jump from being an employee to running their own business.

Would love to hear your journey and any lessons learned.

I bought a cheap 8 port KVM from Amazon and it SUUUUCKS. What is everyone using? What works, what doesn't?

I'd love to have IP so I could keep all the workstations in a prep room but still sit at my desk and work without all the white noise.

Ideally, I'd be able to do at least 8 at a time. More would be cool.

Recommendations?

had one of those days today where i spent more time fighting our own software than helping employees.

user opens a ticket because their laptop is slow.

ticket system says the machine is healthy.

monitoring dashboard shows storage issues.

patching tool says updates installed successfully.

windows settings on the actual laptop show updates failing for 2 weeks.

then the remote session disconnects halfway through because the employee closed the lid while i was working on it.

tbh feels like every tool we added over the years solved one problem but created two more.

couple things driving me insane lately:

duplicate alerts coming from different systems for the same issue.

devices randomly showing offline when they clearly arent.

stale warnings sitting in dashboards for days.

patch statuses not matching across tools.

jumping through 5 tabs just to troubleshoot one laptop.

onboarding new technicians taking forever because every workflow touches different systems.

integrations quietly breaking until somebody notices something missing.

maybe this is just what internal it looks like now after remote work exploded but it really feels messy as hell sometimes. the weird part is none of the tools are technically bad on their own. the problem is stacking all of them together until the entire workflow becomes confusing.

half the time nobody even knows which system is telling the truth anymore. id rather have fewer tools that sync properly than another dashboard with 200 extra settings nobody touches anyway.

would really love to know if other teams found a way to simplify all this without completely losing track of whats happening across devices.

Hey all, I've been reading both smallmsp and msp subreddits and I think I have everything ready but thought I'd toss it out here for any tips or anything. A friend of mine who owns a fire alarm company had asked I help maintain her machines. Realized MSP is really what I've been workin towards building my business. She also has customers looking for similar and is going to send me the work now knowing this is something I can offer. So I'm gearing up to give this a go and again was just curious if I am over thinking or have a solid plan.

Tech Stack:

Started out with using level.io as I was using TacticalRMM locally for some family but after reading the hate towards it and for good reason I looked around. I so far really do like their offering. I used their new machine setup they offer and was able to customize it and ran it on a new machine they just bought. I have created some power scripts to disable the USB as that was a request and also to set a custom background I generated for them. I also preinstalled some of the software they use like adobe and drop box. I didn't dig to deep into if I could have the account setup automatically but again overall I'm happy with level.io except I think having to use Tags to organize customers seems a little odd but I get it.

I was looking at using ESETs MSP offering for MDR / Antivirus. They have a 25 endpoint minimum at around $4 per device. I'm thinking of just paying for this up front as the cost seems doable. I've already met and spoke with one of their people and the ESET Protect Complete seems to check a few boxes that I can offer.

Backups I've looked at NovaBACKUP. I don't have any pricing on them yet but something like acronis with a 500 monthly minimum is currently not in the cards. I would like to offer backup as a service so if you have any additional suggestions of platforms I'd love to hear them.

Email, this one I seem to see a lot of back and forth on. I've seen people say pax8 and then it seems there was a shift from pax8 to sherweb for reselling Microsoft and office 365 licensing. I've also requested to join the Proton MSP as I've been using their email for a while now and think its a good service. If theres an argument against this I'm all ears as well.

One thing I've not 100% decided with was either using Atlassian free tier with Jira and confluence. They have a service desk that seems to be decent for ticketing. I'm familiar with Jira from the past 7 years of using it at my current employer. However I have recently heard of IT Flow and this actually seems to also cover Ticketing, CRM, and Billing all under one roof which makes it pretty attractive option as well. Though after kickin the tires the fact you setup products/services but you can't put them easily into an invoice just seems kind of dumb.

Lastly I did look at some RMM+PSA options, Syncro which seems to offer a plan of $160 and combines a few of the above as well and its unlimited endpoints. A bonus they seem to have a live chat agent which could help as a selling point to smaller businesses. I also see SuperOps offers similar it seems for $10 cheaper a month

Insurance pretty simple I got a decent quote from Ergo / NEXT insurance for General Liability and E&O. Anyone use these guys and have anything negative to say about them?

Contracts, is anyone using a template or just doing the AI thing to generate something? Lawyer friends? This is the only other part I'm really wanting to make sure is correct.

Overall my thinking is to offer a core package of $100 per endpoint. I believe this might be low but I'm starting out and this seemed to be a good starting point especially with small businesses. Then a premium package that bundles in ESET and Backups at $150. Do you find it easier to offer packages or a base packages and then additional items piece meal?

Again I feel its a decent start off but again I feel I might be over thinking it. However I'd rather always error on the side of caution.

We just wrapped a Google Workspace to Microsoft 365 migration for a 350-user company — mail, shared drives, Google Drive, documents, the whole stack. Finished two weeks ahead of the original deadline and were fully ready for MX record cutover.

To give you a sense of the scale involved:

• 350 user mailboxes
• 50+ shared mailboxes with over 1 TB of mail data
• 50+ shared drives with over 200 GB of data
• Hundreds of shared drives with multiple terabytes of files

This wasn't a simple lift-and-shift. Getting all of that migrated, mapped, and verified was a serious effort. We're done. Everything is staged and ready.

At the last minute, the client requested a 6-month delay before cutover. Now we're stuck in a gray zone where we have to maintain both environments in sync for half a year:

• Ongoing delta mail syncs across 350 user mailboxes and 50+ shared mailboxes
• File delta across hundreds of shared drives — new files, renamed files, modified content, deletions
• New hires provisioned, departed employees offboarded on both sides
• Calendars, meeting invites, and email signatures kept current
• Any org-level policy or config changes mirrored across both platforms

This is a sustained managed migration service that was never scoped. Keeping a migration of this size in sync for 6 months is not a trivial background task — it's ongoing engineering work. The client is pushing back on any additional cost, arguing the migration "should already be done."

Our position: we were ready. The delay is entirely on their end. We're drafting a new Statement of Work to cover the extended sync period.

Questions for the community:

• Have you dealt with a client-initiated delay post-completion on a migration this size? How did you frame the commercial conversation?
• What's the cleanest way to structure a delta-sync SOW — fixed fee, T&M, or retainer?
• Did you get the delay in writing, and did that help when re-negotiating scope?

Appreciate any experience here.

P.S: We are fairly small MSP, and have only done dozens such migrations previously.

Company went from 50 devices to over 500 in six months. Everyone started installing their own SaaS crap, shadow IT everywhere, no centralized anything. Support tickets exploding, I am firefighting nonstop, no time to set up proper MDM or RMM. Finally snapped yesterday and wrote a quick PowerShell script to remotely uninstall a bunch of duplicate security tools people installed themselves. Tested it on my machine, worked fine, pushed it via PDQ to what I thought was our test group.

Except I fatfingered the group name. Hit the entire production fleet. Every laptop, every desktop, every server with AV accessible via WMI. 400+ endpoints, all of them. Wiped CrowdStrike, Defender, Malwarebytes, everything. Reboots started cascading because systems detected no protection and freaked out. Phones ringing off the hook, sales team cant access CRM because something broke, finance yelling about payroll server offline.

Spent 12 hours straight manually reimaging priority machines and pushing fresh AV installs via login scripts. We are back up but holy crap the embarrassment. Boss pulled me into a room this morning, face like thunder, but said recoverable if no breach happened overnight. I cannot believe I did this. No sleep, stomach in knots checking threat logs.

How did you claw back control when device count 10x'd and everyone went rogue with tools?

I like the self hosting side of it but there's not a lot of info out there about it in the professional sphere. Wondering if any of you guys have used it and keen on your thoughts.

Thanks

Been noticing more and more problems lately that arent even complicated security stuff. Its usually basic things nobody caught for a long time.

Had one employee last week complain their laptop was super slow and when I checked it the machine hadnt restarted in almost a month. updates kept failing in the background the whole time and somehow windows still showed everything as successful.

Another laptop completely stopped showing up in monitoring for days and nobody noticed because the employee kept working on it like normal. Also found antivirus disabled on a different machine because the user thought it was making chrome lag. Thats the part thats been frustrating me lately. Feels like a lot of security issues now come from devices quietly getting worse over time instead of one big obvious problem.

Remote work definitely made this harder too. people ignore restart prompts forever, old laptops stay around longer than they should, and sometimes dashboards look completely fine until you manually check the actual device. Starting to feel like keeping laptops healthy all the time is half the security job now. Curious if other small IT teams are running into the same thing.

I am looking for advice on moving out of state from my current clients.

I made friends with 4 local techs that own a small business and they say they will try to be available same day if needed.

I am nervous about the random times I will need reliable on-site help being its rare and no one is around.

So anyone doing this? If so, any suggestions on ones that won't break the bank for small and micro businesses?

EDIT: You all are taking my question a little incorrectly. I wasn't asking for some phantom cheap pen test. I know that doesn't exist. I know it's a thorough process. I was just asking what everyone uses.

Msp salary and growth

So I've been at an MSP fresh out of college for 3 years now. We are a small team of 4. I am very grateful for having been exposed to so many different technologies throughout and have learned so much.

At this point I am pretty much a jack of all trades master of none lol, which I suppose is normal being that our shop has no specific titles, we are all support technicians. I do the basic tasks from password resets and user setups, to project work such as new server/network setups, file/email migrations, email security implementation (proofpoint/duo), etc.

I started at roughly 48k three years ago and probably sit around 73k now, this is near Toronto, Ontario. I would like to think that's good but I'm not sure how to measure my worth lol. Not sure if I should be getting more or right where I should be. I am for sure something of a yes man which doesn't help my situation.

Being at year three now I'm really starting to feel the burn out. We have maybe 60 clients I think, over 1000 endpoints, so most days I don't even take a full lunch it's so busy. I really feel like I should start specializing in something but not sure what. I do like sysadmin work like server setups and infrastructure. Thing is I'm always so burnt after work to even look at a screen and study.

I just wanted some insight from fellow IT peers on what I should be focusing on at this stage in my career and how I can overcome burnout, and stop feeling stuck.

Thanks!

We are looking to switch to a different RMM, but I was hoping to find something that had an integrated billing module with easy setup that also allowed for direct credit card processing via Stripe or Square with minimal setup (no API integration required). I know Synchro has something like that but we haven't had a chance to dive into it yet, but any recommendations would be greatly appreciated (not looking for QB integration), but more a web billing module that allows to charge customers credit cards for either single invoice items or reoccuring monthly invoices.

Been reworking our pricing lately and realized ROI is harder to estimate than I expected once support time and onboarding get involved.

How are you guys usually evaluating whether a new vendor/service is actually profitable before rolling it out to clients? Flat margin target? Hour estimates? Something else?

Given how terrible the new Google Partner agreement is, I'm considering alternative options for providing basic email capability to my clients. Has anyone tried Apple Business and wants to share their experience?

Been looking at different ways MSPs handle pricing and profitability lately. Curious how most people here figure out ROI before taking on new vendors or services.