BMK Community Blog
BMK Community Blog is a place to share insights, expertise, and stories fostering meaningful engagement, learning, and growth for all MSPs.
BMK-Community
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Why MSPs Lose Money on Fixed-Fee Agreements and How to Fix the Margin
Fixed-fee agreements are one of the most important building blocks of the managed services model. They give clients predictable IT costs while giving MSPs recurring revenue that can be forecasted and used to plan staffing, investments, and growth. When structured correctly, a fixed-fee agreement can create a stable and mutually beneficial relationship between an MSP and its client.
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BMK-Community
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The MSP Sales-to-Service Handoff: What Happens After the Sale?
The salesperson understands what the prospect discussed during discovery. The technical team understands the environment they evaluated. The service team is responsible for supporting the client once the agreement begins. Finance needs accurate information for billing. Leadership expects the onboarding process to meet the commitments made during the sales process.
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BMK-Community
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The MSP Sales Qualification Process: Stop Chasing the Wrong Prospects
Growing an MSP requires a consistent pipeline, but having more opportunities does not necessarily mean having a better sales pipeline. Many MSP owners spend significant amounts of time pursuing prospects who were unlikely to become good clients from the beginning. The prospect may have a budget that is too low for the required level of service, expectations that do not align with the MSP’s delivery model, an environment that is difficult to support, or decision-makers who are not genuinely prepared to make a change.
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BMK-Community
min
Why Your MSP's Financials Are Probably Lying to You (And How to Fix It)
The chart of accounts sitting behind your financials was probably set up by a bookkeeper who works with restaurants, law firms, and retail stores. It was not built for a recurring-revenue technology business with distinct service lines, labor-heavy COGS, and multi-year managed agreements. And because of that, your financials are giving you a distorted picture — one that looks clean on the surface but hides critical performance data underneath.
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BMK-Community
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The Hidden Cost of Letting Your Techs Pick Their Own Tickets
There's a moment most MSP owners recognize. You look at the ticket queue on a Tuesday morning and something feels off. A few high-priority tickets have been sitting untouched for two hours. Three techs are deep in work, two are lightly loaded. A client called asking for an update on something that was submitted yesterday.
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BMK-Community
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5 MSP Service KPIs You Should Be Tracking Every Month (But Probably Aren't)
Most MSP owners know, at some level, that their service team could be performing better. Tickets take longer than they should. Certain clients seem to call more than others. A technician is always busy but never seems to make a dent in the queue. Client satisfaction feels fine until it isn't, and the first sign is a cancellation conversation.
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BMK-Community
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The Hidden Cost of Poor Dispatching: How Small Scheduling Mistakes Hurt MSP Profitability
A technician spends thirty minutes driving across town for a low-priority issue that could have waited until the following day. Another engineer sits idle because work wasn’t distributed evenly. A high-value client waits longer than expected because an urgent ticket was incorrectly prioritised. A senior technician handles routine requests while junior engineers remain underutilised. Individually, none of these situations seem particularly serious. Together, they create thousands of pounds in lost productivity, lower customer satisfaction, and unnecessary operational costs every year.
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BMK-Community
min
Why Your MSP Doesn’t Need More Leads-It Needs Better Sales Conversations
It’s an understandable conclusion. Growth depends on winning new business, and when sales begin to slow, generating more opportunities feels like the obvious solution. Marketing budgets increase, new campaigns are launched, SEO agencies are hired, referral programs are introduced, and sales representatives are encouraged to make more calls than ever before.
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BMK-Community
min
The MSP Owner’s Guide to Technician Utilization (Without Burning Out Your Team)
After all, technicians represent one of the largest investments in any managed service business. Salaries, certifications, benefits, training, equipment, and ongoing development all contribute to the cost of maintaining a skilled technical team. It’s only natural to want that investment to generate the highest possible return.
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BMK-Community
min
Chatbots Are Just 5% of the Revenue Opportunity. Here’s the Other 95% of What AI Can Do
You see anxiety-driven headlines like “MSPs face growing pressure as AI accelerates threats” (source). You feel intense pressure to create a new revenue stream for your MSP as your customers ask how to use AI in their organizations. If you are not the go-to strategic advisor on AI, you will lose your role as THE tech advisor. They will find AI expertise elsewhere.
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BMK-Community
min
Why Most MSPs Stay Stuck at 10 Technicians (And How to Scale Beyond It)
In the early stages of building a managed service provider, every new client feels like a major milestone. Revenue increases, referrals become more common, technicians are added to support the growing customer base, and the business begins to establish a reputation in the market. For many owners, these first few years are filled with momentum because every improvement produces visible results. Hiring another engineer means faster ticket resolution. Winning another customer increases recurring revenue. Investing in better tools improves operational efficiency. It feels like the business is moving in exactly the right direction.
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BMK-Community
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Why Your MSP Service Manager Is the Most Important Leadership Hire You’ll Make
At first, everything runs through the owner. They handle sales calls, approve quotes, jump into escalations, answer technician questions, review tickets, meet customers, and somehow still try to think about growing the business. It works when the company has three technicians because everyone sits close together and communication happens naturally.
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BMK-Community
min
The Complete Guide to MSP Professional Certifications: Dispatcher, Service Manager, and Sales
Professional certification is the structural alternative. This guide covers the four BMK Community certifications available for MSP operational roles — what each one teaches, who it is built for, how to choose the right starting point for your team, and what separates MSP-specific certification from the generic alternatives available in the market.
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BMK-Community
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BMK Dispatcher Certification Review: What You Learn, Who It's For, and What Changes After
This post answers that question directly. Not as a sales pitch, but as a transparent breakdown of what the course actually covers, who it is and isn't right for, what the two days look like in practice, and what changes in your operation afterward. If you're evaluating the certification for yourself or an employee, this is the information you need to make that decision.
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BMK-Community
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5 KPIs Every MSP Dispatcher Should Track (And What to Do When They're Off)
A dispatcher who tracks the right metrics doesn't wait for complaints. They see the problem forming in the data and address it before it reaches a client. That's the difference between reactive dispatch and professional dispatch — and it's one of the clearest markers of whether the function has been properly trained or simply staffed.
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BMK-Community
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Why MSP Sales Is Different From Every Other B2B Sale (And How to Train for It)
Managed services is one of the most complex B2B sales in the technology industry. The buying decision involves significant trust, a long-term financial commitment, and a prospect who is almost always making a change from a situation they've grown comfortable with — even if that situation isn't working. Getting a prospect to sign an MRR agreement requires a completely different skill set than getting them to approve a purchase order for hardware or renew a SaaS subscription.
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BMK-Community
min
How to Onboard a New MSP Technician in 30 Days (The Service Manager's Playbook)
The most common version of MSP technician onboarding looks like this: the new hire gets access to the tools on day one, sits with a senior tech for a few days, starts picking up tickets toward the end of week one, and is more or less on their own by week two. The service manager checks in informally. There's no defined expectation set, no documented learning path, and no formal checkpoint until something goes wrong.
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BMK-Community
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MSP Staff Training vs. Certification: What's the Difference and Which One Actually Moves the Needle?
The question isn't whether to invest in your team. The question is what kind of investment actually produces a change in how your business operates. Training and certification are not the same thing, and the difference matters more than most MSP owners realize when they're writing the check.
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BMK-Community
min
What Does an MSP Dispatcher Actually do ? (and why your business Needs One)
Most MSPs understand - at least in theory - that someone needs to manage the flow of work across the service team. What far fewer MSPs have is a clear picture of what that function actually involves, what a trained dispatcher does differently from an untrained one, and what it costs when the role is left undefined.
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BMK-Community
min
Who’s Actually Running Your Service Desk? (Part 1 of 2)
In Part 1 of this series, we’ll walk through the symptoms MSP owners feel every week when no one is leading the service department. In Part 2, we’ll look at the deeper consequences, why this role is so hard to fill, and what owners can realistically do about it.
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BMK-Community
min
The Real Cost of Not Having a Service Manager at Your MSP (And What an Outsourced One Delivers)
This article puts a number on what that absence costs, explains what a full-time hire looks like in practice, and makes the case for the outsourced alternative that delivers the same function at a fraction of the overhead.
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BMK-Community
min
Why MSP-Specific Bookkeeping Beats a Generic Bookkeeper Every Time (And What to Look For)
Most MSP owners have clean books. What they don’t have is financial visibility. Without MSP-specific bookkeeping, revenue gets lumped together, COGS are misclassified, and agreement profitability becomes impossible to track. The difference between a generalist bookkeeper and an MSP-focused financial partner is the difference between balanced books and actionable business intelligence.
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BMK-Community
min
MSP Technician Utilization: What 75% Actually Means And How to Get There
Most MSP owners have a rough sense of whether their technicians are busy. What they don’t have is a precise, weekly measurement of how many available labor hours are converting into billable work. That gap between “feels busy” and “actually billing” is where one of the most significant and recoverable revenue leaks in the MSP business model lives.
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BMK-Community
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The 7 Ticket Fundamentals Every MSP Dispatcher Must Enforce (And What Breaks Without Them)
Ticket quality isn’t a soft concern. It’s the operational foundation everything else in your service desk is built on. And maintaining that foundation consistently, across every ticket, every technician, every day is the dispatcher’s first and most important job.
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BMK-Community
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MSP Accounts Receivable Is Silently Killing Your Cash Flow | Here's How to Fix It
Your MRR looks great on paper. But how much of it is actually in your bank account? For a lot of MSP owners, there’s a frustrating gap between those two numbers and it’s not caused by losing clients or dropping agreements. It’s caused by invoices that go out late, payments that come in later, and a follow-up process that either doesn’t exist or gets skipped whenever the team gets busy.
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BMK-Community
min
What Is an MSP Service Manager And Do You Actually Need One?
Your technicians are busy. Your clients say they’re “fine.” But do you actually know if your service department is profitable? Not whether it’s generating revenue, whether it’s profitable. Whether the labor hours your team is logging against managed service agreements are producing the gross margin those agreements were priced to deliver.
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BMK-Community
min
Why Your MSP's Chart of Accounts Is the Single Most Important Financial Decision You'll Make
A generic chart of accounts gives you a rearview mirror. An MSP-specific chart of accounts gives you a dashboard. It shows where your revenue comes from, how profitable each service is, and turns your financials into a real decision-making tool.
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BMK-Community
min
ConnectWise Evolve vs Taylor Business Group vs BMK Community: Which MSP Peer Group Is Right for You?
If you’ve been researching MSP peer groups, you’ve almost certainly come across three names more than any others: ConnectWise Evolve, Taylor Business Group, and BMK Community. All three are credible, but each serves different MSP needs depending on your stage, goals, and operational maturity.
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BMK-Community
min
The Complete Guide to Outsourced Back Office for MSPs (2026)
Most MSP owners didn’t start their business to manage spreadsheets or chase billing discrepancies. But as businesses grow, the back office becomes a full-time responsibility that, if handled reactively, can quietly erode margins and limit growth. This guide explains what outsourced back office services cover and when to make the shift.
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BMK-Community
min
Why Most MSPs Struggle with Dispatching (And How to Fix It in 90 Days)
MSP dispatcher services are one of the most overlooked operational levers in the industry. Most MSP owners focus on sales, tools, and hiring while service delivery breaks down behind the scenes — leading to missed SLAs, technician burnout, and reactive chaos. This guide breaks down what’s going wrong and how to fix it with a 90-day roadmap.
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BMK-Community
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Top MSP Peer Groups in the United States (2026 Comparison Guide)
MSP peer groups have become one of the highest-ROI investments for IT business owners in 2026. These structured communities allow managed service providers to benchmark performance, solve operational challenges, and gain accountability from non-competing peers. The right peer group can help MSP owners improve pricing strategy, retain technicians, reduce client churn, and scale their business with proven insights from industry leaders.
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BMK-Community
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Cybersecurity for MSPs: Protect Clients & Increase MRR | BMK Community
Cybersecurity for MSPs has evolved into both a protection mandate and a high-margin, recurring revenue opportunity. MSPs that embrace cybersecurity win trust, retain clients, and significantly increase Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR).
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BMK-Community
min
Why Every MSP Needs a Dedicated Sales Professional to Grow in 2026
Most Managed Service Providers (MSPs) don’t fail because of poor technology—they struggle because of inconsistent sales. In 2026, the U.S. MSP market is more competitive than ever, and relying on DIY sales often leads to unpredictable pipelines, stalled revenue growth, and burned-out owners wearing too many hats.
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BMK-Community
min
Peer Teams for MSPs: The Fastest Way to Scale Your IT Business in the USA
Peer teams for MSPs are structured communities of MSP owners and leaders who meet regularly to share real-world challenges, benchmark performance, solve operational and growth problems, and learn from peers who are actively scaling.
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