How to Double Your MSP Prices Without Losing Clients
When Will came to us, his MSP was bleeding revenue and he was convinced he had a lead generation problem.
His book was full of dental practices, most of them seven or eight years deep with him. He’d been losing sleep over how to fill the pipeline. More marketing, more cold outreach, more referrals. That was the plan in his head.
It’s the same plan every MSP owner reaches for. When in doubt, do more of the thing that’s already not working. Just harder this time.
We told him the plan was wrong.
Will didn’t have a client acquisition problem. He had a pricing problem. And the math on the two is very different. Every new client adds work. Every dollar of revenue from an existing client is pure margin if you can earn it. The fastest way out of a revenue crunch isn’t a bigger book. It’s a better book.
Six months later, Will had doubled his prices across his entire client base. He’d upsold new services into half of them. And, importantly, he’d lost two clients in the process.
This is the part of the story where we’re supposed to apologize for the lost clients. We’re not going to. We’ll get to why those two leaving turned out to be the best thing that happened to him.
This is the playbook he followed. It’s the same six-step process we walk every coaching client through, and it works whether you serve dentists, attorneys, manufacturers, or anyone else.
The Email That Always Fails
Most MSP owners, when they finally decide to raise prices, do the same thing. They draft an email. “Due to rising costs of tools, labor, and licensing, we’ll be increasing our rates by 8% effective next quarter.” They hit send. And then they wait for the explosions.
The explosions come. The biggest client pushes back. The office manager who’s been there twelve years calls to remind you what you used to charge. You panic, grandfather a few clients, cut the increase in half, and end up bumping prices three percent. You tell yourself you did the thing.
You didn’t. You sent a bill change. A bill change and a pricing conversation are different things, and most MSP owners can’t tell the difference. A bill change says, “The number is going up. Sign here.” A pricing conversation says, “Here’s what we’ve delivered. Here’s what we’re going to deliver. Here’s what it’s worth. Here’s the investment that makes it possible.”
When you skip the conversation, the client has nothing to compare the new price to except the old price. The old number is real. The new number is just bigger. So they push back. And then you draw the wrong conclusion: my clients are cheap.
Will said it word for word when he first started working with us. “Joe, dentists are cheap. They will never pay more.”
We have never met an MSP owner who didn’t tell us their clients were particularly cheap. The architecture guys say architects are cheap. The legal guys say lawyers are cheap. Will said dentists. Every vertical is “the cheap one” according to the MSP who serves it.
At some point we expect a small business owner to come on the show and explain that MSP owners are cheap. The cycle continues.
It’s not the clients. It’s the way you’ve set up the conversation. You’ve trained them to compare you on price by giving them nothing else to compare you on.
You Can’t Raise Prices on a Client You Don’t Know
Here’s the reframe that changed everything for Will: you cannot raise prices on a client you don’t actually know.
Will thought he knew his dentists. He’d been servicing some of them for the better part of a decade. But if you’d asked him what kept the practice owner up at night, what was driving their thinking about expansion, or what their revenue cycle actually looked like, he couldn’t have told you. He knew their network. He didn’t know their business.
His QBRs proved it. Will’s quarterly meetings were what Joe Rojas, who built and sold three MSPs before co-founding Start Grow Manage, calls “speeds and feeds, wires and pliers.” A dashboard. Uptime numbers. Tickets closed. Patches applied. And then, right at the end, the uncomfortable ask. “Your firewall is end of life, we should talk about replacing it.” Or, “We should really add this new security service.”
Every meeting ended with Will asking for more money for hardware or a service the client didn’t understand. The practice manager would sit there with their arms crossed, thinking, “Here we go again. The IT guy wants more money.”
Will is a great guy. He is also, in that moment, indistinguishable from someone selling timeshare.
That’s the trap. When the only time you raise a money conversation is when you want more of theirs, you’ve trained the client to brace for impact every time you walk in. No amount of “but the value is here” undoes that, because you haven’t done any of the work to understand what value actually means to them.
Everything changed when Will replaced his QBRs with SBRs, Strategic Business Reviews. And the distinction matters. A QBR is you presenting. An SBR is you listening. A QBR is about the network. An SBR is about the business. A QBR ends with you asking for something. An SBR ends with you understanding something.
When Will sat down with his first dentist and ran a real SBR, the first thing he did was shut up. Twenty-five minutes of questions. Tell me about the practice. Tell me what’s growing. Tell me what’s hard. Tell me what scares you. What he learned in that hour rewrote his entire view of his client base. The dentist Will thought was cheap was trying to open a second location and was terrified about the IT side of the expansion. Another was bleeding money on no-show appointments and didn’t know the technology existed to help. A third had a patient data exposure that, if surfaced, would have ended the practice.
Will walked out of those meetings knowing things about his clients he hadn’t learned in seven years of monthly invoicing.
The first step of raising your prices is not raising your prices. The first step is understanding your client well enough to build something they’d actually pay more for.
The 6-Step Price Increase Playbook
This is the process Will ran, in order. It took roughly six months from start to doubled revenue.
Step 1: Decide what your price should be. Before any client conversation, decide what the right price actually is. Not what you think you can get away with. The right price.
That means defining the problem you solve, assessing the value you actually deliver in dollar terms, and setting a price that respects two boundaries. The floor is at least three times your direct costs. That’s what it takes to fund a real business: people, tools, growth, owner take. The ceiling is roughly one third of the total value you deliver. Above that, the client stops feeling like they’re getting a deal, even when you’re delivering the goods.
When Will did this honestly, he found he was underwater on the floor and at roughly a seventh of the ceiling. The room was enormous.
Step 2: Segment your clients into three buckets. This is the step everybody skips. It’s the one that matters most.
Go through your client list, ideally using the PITA sheet exercise we run with our coaching clients. For each client, sort them into one of three buckets: those who will likely accept the increase, those who will likely leave, and those who need special attention.
Here’s what we see every time. MSPs massively underestimate the first bucket and massively overestimate the second two. They look at their book and assume half their clients are going to leave. Then we work through it client by client and the real number is, “Two might push back, the rest will accept, and most won’t even blink.”
Will was convinced eight or nine of his dentists would leave. The actual number, when we worked through it honestly, was two. And they were the two we expected: the troublesome ones.
For the special-attention bucket, figure out your BATNA, your best alternative to a negotiated agreement. If they walk, what does it actually cost you, and what would you do with the capacity you’d get back? Once you know that, the conversation is easier, because you know what you’re willing to lose.
One firm rule for that bucket: your price is your price and your products are your products. Don’t carve up the offering to make a number work. You can offer a different tier, a stepwise increase over time, or a bonus project that doesn’t cost you anything. You cannot start unbundling services to discount. The moment you do that, you’ve taught the client that everything is negotiable, and you’ll be managing exceptions forever.
Step 3: Improve your service and communicate the improvement. Before raising a single price, start delivering and communicating more value. For most MSPs, this isn’t about adding services. It’s about telling clients what you’re already doing.
Most MSPs deliver stellar service and tell nobody about it. Will was a textbook example. His team caught three major issues in one quarter and the clients never heard a word about it. From the client’s seat, nothing happened, which means nothing was worth paying for.
Will started a monthly newsletter. Industry insights, what his team had prevented or caught, useful advice. Nothing flashy. Just consistent communication.
This step does two things. First, it makes leaving more painful. Loss aversion is real: losing something hurts about twice as much as gaining the equivalent thing feels good. When the client weighs paying more against losing your service, the more clearly they see the service, the worse losing it feels. Second, communication closes the value gap. Most clients have no idea what you’re worth. Every newsletter, every proactive update, every heads-up before they had to ask, was Will teaching his dentists what they were actually paying for.
Step 4: Plan your SBRs. Operationalize the conversation. For each client, decide the price increase you want to land. Decide whether to introduce the increase at the SBR itself or signal it now and implement it in three months. Design the slide deck. Practice.
The timing choice is strategic. Small increases can land at the SBR. Bigger moves need ninety days between the SBR and the increase, time the client uses to prepare and time you use to keep demonstrating value. For very large increases, stage it across two or three SBRs, with each one moving the price up.
That’s how Will got to a doubling. Not in one jump. Across two SBRs over six months, with the value story building between them.
Step 5: Schedule and conduct the SBRs. Reach out to schedule. Build a reminder sequence so clients don’t ghost. Run the meeting using the structure: five minutes to set the stage, twenty-five minutes listening, ten minutes sharing what you’ve delivered, ten minutes on the roadmap ahead, five minutes on next steps.
Before you leave the meeting, schedule the next one. We call it BAMFAM, book a meeting from a meeting. If you walk out of an SBR without the next SBR on the calendar, half of them will never happen.
Step 6: Follow through. This is what turns the SBR from a one-off into a system. The SBR has to have consequences. The projects you committed to, you schedule. The changes you promised, you make them. The communication plan, you set it up. If the price increase is staged, you remind the client at each step that the next one is coming.
Will did all of it. The newsletter went out every month. The roadmap items from the first SBR were on the calendar within two weeks. By the time the second SBR came around, the dentists could see the difference. The second price conversation was easier than the first because they’d watched the first one play out.
The Two Clients Who Left
Six months in, Will had doubled his prices. He’d upsold new services into half his book. And he’d lost two clients along the way.
Losing them was the best thing that happened to him.
They were the two troublesome ones. The ones who called constantly. The ones who haggled every invoice. The ones who took up the most tech time and contributed the least margin.
You know the ones. You’re picturing them right now. You’re probably also picturing yourself driving past their office on a Friday afternoon and not stopping.
They didn’t want to upgrade because they didn’t want to pay more for anything, no matter how much value was on the table. When they left, Will didn’t just save the revenue gap. He got his team’s time back. Tickets dropped. After-hours calls dropped. The remaining clients, who were now paying double, were also lower maintenance than the ones who left.
A book of clients at the right price is easier to run than a book at the wrong price, even when the second book has more clients. Will ended up with fewer clients, twice the revenue, and meaningfully less work. The math wasn’t supposed to work that way. It did.
The Bigger Shift
Everything Will did is the shift from operating as an MSP to operating as a BSP, a Business Solution Provider. An MSP prices on hours and tickets. A BSP prices on outcomes. An MSP has QBRs that bore everybody. A BSP has SBRs that uncover revenue and reframe the relationship.
The entry point for that whole transformation, the one tactical thing that opens the door, is learning to conduct an SBR.
That’s why we built the SBR Challenge. It’s a four-week cohort program for MSP owners who want to actually conduct their first Strategic Business Review. Not learn about it. Not download a deck. Conduct one. With a real client. In four weeks.
You get the outreach scripts, the meeting framework, the follow-up templates, and weekly live coaching with Jeff and Joe to troubleshoot the real-world stuff. The cohort keeps you accountable so you actually do it.
Will didn’t start with a pricing strategy. He started with one SBR. The pricing came after.
Join the SBR Challenge — $97 →
The dentists weren’t cheap. Will just hadn’t given them anything worth paying for. That’s a problem you can fix this quarter, if you’re willing to have a different kind of conversation.
