Free playbook · For MSP owners
Raise prices across your client base in 30 days, without losing the clients you want to keep.
- Find the clients you’re paying to keep
- Set each increase with the math behind it
- Send the letters and handle the conversation with confidence
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What’s inside
Five steps, and the tools to do each one.
Step 1
Grade every client
Five factors, weighted into an A to D grade, so you can spot the clients losing you money and decide who to keep, reprice or let go.
Step 2
Set each increase
Set a gross margin that leaves room for overhead and 20% net profit, then the math for each grade and the worst-case check.
Step 3
Roll it out in 30 days
A week-by-week plan, plus a phased option for risk-averse owners that still finishes within the quarter.
Step 4
Three ready-to-send letters
A standard increase, a move to a new plan, and a reprice-or-part-ways letter for your worst-fit clients.
Step 5
What to say on the call
A five-line talk track and answers to the five objections owners dread most.
Included
Client tracker
Track every client from grade to effective date, with live totals and a spreadsheet download.
Your costs went up. Your prices didn’t.
Vendor licences, security tools and wages rise every year. A price set three years ago now carries the same client at a thinner margin.
The fix isn’t a blanket percentage on every invoice. It’s a deliberate increase, sized to each client’s real margin and fit, explained in writing and backed by a conversation. This playbook is that process, step by step.
The client you’re paying to keep
Some of your clients cost more to serve than they pay you.
Every MSP has them: the client on an old price who logs the most tickets, runs their own tools and expects the owner on every call. They don’t just earn you less. They cost you money every month you keep them.
Step 1 of the playbook finds them in an afternoon, using last quarter’s numbers. The tracker then shows what they’re costing you in total.
Example: a 10-seat client on an old price
- They pay you
- $1,000 / month
- Technician time (14 hours at $65)
- −$910
- Tools and licences (10 seats at $28)
- −$280
- Gross profit, before overhead
- −$190 / month
You’re paying $2,280 a year for the privilege of being their MSP, before a cent of your overhead, the owner’s time or the team’s morale.
What if I don’t increase my prices?
Nothing happens. That’s the problem.
Your prices stay where they are, and your costs keep rising. Your margin shrinks a little every year, without a single client leaving and without anyone noticing.
- Less profit each year to hire, train or invest in your security stack
- You fill the gap with your own hours, so the business depends on you even more
- Your worst-fit clients stay, because nothing ever asks them to pay their way
- The business is worth less when you sell, because buyers pay for profit and a business that runs without its founder
- The increase you eventually need gets bigger and harder to explain
- Today$4,000 40% gross margin
- Year 1$3,640 36.4% gross margin
- Year 2$3,258 32.6% gross margin
- Year 3$2,854 28.5% gross margin
By year 3, that’s $13,752 a year less gross profit on the same clients doing the same work, and your overhead didn’t shrink, so it all comes off your net profit.
What changes when you get pricing right
“We would have about 4 clients a year. After Shawn's helpful instructions, 4 in one month. Higher than I've ever had in 20 years.”
“At the beginning of this year, our business was down about 25%. Now I'm happy to say that we're actually ahead of last year by about 8%.”
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