Should your MSP fire a client? It’s a question almost no one asks aloud, but a lot of MSP owners think about it privately… this is what you need to know. Also this week, analogies to help any prospect understand complex tech issues, and how this guy generated 1,000 highly qualified leads for MSPs.

Welcome to Episode 336 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green, powered by the MSP Marketing Edge.

Should your MSP fire your most annoying client?

A big question… Should your MSP fire a client? It’s a question almost no one asks aloud, but a lot of MSP owners think about it privately. Now, you know the client I mean, right? The one whose name pops up and your stomach tightens slightly. The one who, when they ring, your team kind of looks around quietly hoping someone else answers the phone or more likely they look down at their desk hoping they don’t make eye contact with someone. I mean the client who drains more energy than they generate. And you know that name that’s in your head right now, if you’ve had that name negatively floating around in your head or in meetings or in discussions more than once over the last few weeks or months, then what I’ve got to say here is worth paying attention to.

Every so often in business, perhaps if you just take a few days off or if you have a bit of space to think about things strategically, you get this amazing rare combination of perspective and momentum, the two going together. Perspective because you can step back and see the bigger picture to how the last 12 months have really felt and momentum because you’re thinking about growth and direction and what the next stage of your MSP’s growth looks like. And when you zoom out like that, the handful of difficult clients, they really stand out very, very clearly.

The noisy one, the energy vampire, the one who questions every single line on every invoice, the one who is permanently unhappy, the one who doesn’t treat your team with respect. And you find yourself thinking, “Am I really going to put up with this for another 6, 12, 18 months?” And then the doubt creeps in. You tell yourself, “Oh, hang on here. I’m trying to grow the business. Firing your client is going backwards.” No, that’s completely the wrong way to think about it because here’s something that most MSPs don’t realise until they’ve done it…

Your worst client often costs you more than they actually pay you.

Now sometimes yes, that cost is financial, but it’s always emotional, mental, and operational. A single difficult client can completely demoralise your team. They can drain all the time from your senior technicians and from senior management. They can create chaos in your calendar and slow down work that you’re doing for good clients. Bad clients can even contribute to staff churn, I’ve seen it happen, and they can absolutely destroy your personal mood or the mood of your team with a single ticket. Why would you continue to tolerate that? The opportunity cost of keeping the wrong client is huge. So how do you spot one clearly? To me, there are four big red flags:

• First, is when your team groans, when their name appears on caller ID. That is the biggest warning sign of all. If your people feel dread and are just avoiding the call, something is very wrong there.


• Second, they argue over everything – quotes, invoices, priorities, response times. Every time anyone speaks to them, any kind of interaction, it just feels like a negotiation, which is not a partnership, is it? That’s just pain.


• Third, they expect champagne service on a lemonade budget. I love that line. They want premium response and premium outcomes, but when you explain what that costs, suddenly you’re too expensive.


• Fourth, they don’t follow your processes. They won’t log tickets properly. They won’t approve upgrades. They won’t invest in their own security. Maybe they even phone you on your personal mobile in the evenings. But despite all of this, when something breaks, it’s still your fault. If a client consistently refuses to work with you, they’ll always feel like they’re working against you.

So let me ask again, “Is someone’s name very clearly in your head at this point?”, then let’s talk about how to handle that properly. First of all, change the language in your own mind. You’re not really firing them. You’re helping them to find a provider who is a better fit for how they want to operate. I mean, that mindset shift alone changes your tone immediately.

This conversation should be done with them on the phone, it should be professional, it should be calm. Thank them genuinely for their business and just explain that your business, your MSP is moving in a slightly different direction and you no longer feel like that the fit is right between you and them. Give them formal notice, of course, confirm it in writing and do recommend another provider who may suit them better. And then it goes without saying that you should work properly to transition them without any kind of drama.

So done right, they won’t be thrilled, of course they won’t because they’re already probably a negative person or negative people, but they will respect how you’ve handled this. Done badly, there’s always that danger that they’ll leave a review that leads like a horror story or just talk badly about you to other businesses. But here’s the bigger point, growth is not just about adding new clients and growth for the sake of it, that’s very rarely a smart idea. Growth is also about protecting your culture, your energy, and your direction. The right clients energise your team, they respect your process, and they trust your advice. And of course, they make your business better. But the wrong clients do exactly the opposite. So if you’re serious about building an MSP that’s profitable, stable, and enjoyable to run, sometimes deleting a client is the smartest move you can make.

Analogies to help any prospect understand complex tech issues

Surely one of the biggest frustrations for any MSP is trying to explain something complex to a prospect and watching their eyes kind of glaze over halfway through the sentence. You understand the tech, but they don’t. And that’s not a criticism, it’s just a reality. Most ordinary business owners and managers don’t want to understand the technical detail, but of course, they do want to understand the impact and the outcomes. So right now, I’m going to give you three analogies that you can use to make complex tech issues instantly make sense. And then after that, I’m going to share a whole blast of extra ideas that came out of a conversation inside my MSP marketing Facebook group, because there are some brilliant ideas in there.

So let’s start with the first and most common analogy… computers and cars. And this is a classic, isn’t it? Because it just works. Most business owners can drive a car. Some of them could do small fixes or tweaks to their car. At the very least, most people can swap a tyre, right? But yet they still get it serviced. They still rely on a professional mechanic for preventative maintenance. And when something serious goes wrong with their car, they don’t personally strip the engine out. They don’t take it out and strip it down to pieces, do they? They call a specialist for this. So IT can be positioned as exactly the same. And yes, a user can reboot a PC and maybe even reinstall a printer, but that doesn’t mean that they should be responsible for patching or security backups or monitoring or recovery planning. And here’s the key point. If you don’t service a car properly, it doesn’t always fail immediately, but as we know, the problem builds quietly until one day, just when you need it the most, you’re stranded. And that’s what unmanaged IT looks like. So framing managed services as a servicing plan for the most critical asset in their business suddenly makes it kind of obvious rather than optional.

The second analogy you can use is the smoke alarm or smoke detector. And this is brilliant for explaining monitoring and cyber security, because a smoke alarm doesn’t stop fires or eliminate risk, it just detects danger early enough for you to act. Monitoring tools and security alerts and suspicious login notifications, they’re kind of like digital smoke alarms. You don’t wait until the building is on fire to install a smoke alarm. You install it because early warning massively reduces damage, and that one lands really quickly with most prospects.

And then the third analogy is insurance. No sensible business owner cancels their insurance just because they didn’t make a claim last year. They understand it’s there to protect against catastrophic risk. Backups, disaster recovery, layered cyber security, all of those things and more are insurance for the digital side of their business. And just like with insurance, you don’t want to discover the gaps when you’re mid-crisis, you want to know in advance that you’re covered properly.

Do those three make sense to you? Can you see that they would be a useful way for you to explain difficult tech stuff to people using concepts they already understand?

It’s important you know this is not about talking down to people, this is actually you physically dropping down to their level to explain stuff in a way that they understand. It’s very powerful.

Now, let me give you some other ideas. A few months back, I asked inside my MSP marketing Facebook group what analogies people there use, and there were some absolute gems. And by the way, if you’re not in that group, it’s completely free and it’s a vendor-free zone as well. Just go onto Facebook, search for MSP marketing and have a look at groups. We’re normally the