I was talking to a conference organizer recently, and he made a comment that stuck with me.
He said that when he started running events for the MSP space, summers were quiet. June through August, almost nothing. Then September would pick up and run through November. A handful of shows a year, spread out, manageable.
Now there’s a conference every week. Sometimes more than one.
That one observation tells you everything you need to know about where this market is right now.
The math has changed
Ten years ago, if you were a solid MSP in your area, you had a real edge just by showing up. The competition was thinner. Clients had fewer options. Word spread. Business came.
That’s not the world we’re in anymore.
There are roughly ten times as many MSPs today as there were a decade ago. The number of vendors, events, tools, and service providers targeting the same buyers has exploded at every level of the channel. And not just the MSPs, the people trying to reach MSPs are more crowded. Which means your clients are being approached from more directions than ever before.
The product that used to sell itself doesn’t anymore. And if you haven’t felt that shift yet, you will.
What this means in practice
If you’re not actively marketing, you’re invisible to a huge portion of your potential market. Your competitors are running ads, publishing content, showing up at events, and building their reputation online. Every month you’re not doing that, the gap widens.
I’ll be honest about something. I have no regrets about the business I’ve built, but if I could go back to year one knowing what I know now, I’d have gone ten times harder. The opportunity in the early years of this market was enormous, and I didn’t fully see it at the time.
The window is still open. But it’s narrower than it was, and it’s getting narrower.
The MSPs who are winning right now
They’re not the ones with the best tech stack or the fanciest website. They’re the ones who treated marketing as a core part of their business from the beginning, built a system around it, and kept showing up consistently while others waited.
Consistency compounds. A year of steady SEO, steady content, and steady relationship-building starts producing results that a one-month sprint never will. The MSPs who started three years ago are reaping the benefits now. The ones who start today will be in that position three years from now.
The ones who wait will keep wondering why it feels like such a grind.
One more thing
The consolidation wave is real. More MSPs are looking to sell, and the ones getting the best valuations are the ones with a real pipeline, a repeatable marketing system, and revenue that isn’t entirely dependent on a few long-term relationships.
Whether you’re building to grow or building to exit, the answer is the same. Build the system now.
The market is crowded. That means the bar is higher. But it also means the MSPs with a real marketing engine have a bigger advantage than ever over the ones still hoping people will just find them.
The MSPs building their marketing engine today are the ones who’ll have options in three years; whether that’s growth, a strong valuation, or a clean exit. Book a free Growth Call and let’s figure out what that looks like for your business.
If you want more practical, no-fluff advice like this, follow me on Instagram @natehelpsmsps where I share what’s actually working for MSPs right now. Or shoot me a note at nate@techpromarketing.com with the word “List” in the subject line, and I’ll add you to my email list.
Photo: Orla / Shutterstock
