Growth exposes the training gap that has been sitting in your MSP all along, hidden behind a handful of senior people who could see everything. When growth takes away their line of sight, quality drops, good people burn out, and the same problems keep coming back.
I learned this the expensive way. At the MSP where I was COO, we grew revenue about 20 percent a year for three straight years, added more than four million dollars in new revenue, and finished with a private equity platform transaction. From the outside it looked like we had it figured out. From the inside, the company ran on managing by walking around. I could hear a bad call from across the room and I knew who was struggling before they said a word.
Then we went remote, and everything I had been doing to hold quality together became invisible overnight. Two things showed up first, in this order: good people started leaving because they were burning out, and the same issues kept coming back because nobody had the room to find a root cause. For about a year I blamed growth for breaking our service delivery. I was wrong; our service delivery had always been that fragile. Growth and distance took away the thing covering for it, which was me and three senior people who could see the whole floor.
Is this a growth problem or a training problem?
It is a training problem that growth makes visible. The industry is growing well right now. ConnectWise’s Service Leadership Index 2026 profitability report (opens in a new tab) found MSP revenue grew 9.6 percent in 2025, up from 7.1 percent the year before, and best in class providers held adjusted EBITDA at 19 percent or better for the sixth straight year. Growth is the reward. What it exposes is how little of our operating knowledge has been taught to the people who have to carry it.
Ask yourself four questions. Do you believe your people are the most important part of your company? Every owner says yes. Do you provide mandatory, ongoing, paid training on the skills and processes people need to do the job, beyond technical certifications and beyond shadowing, for at least an hour a week? Is it tracked? Is it assigned by their manager? Most MSPs lose the thread at the second question.
The broader research says the same thing. In CompTIA’s Workforce and Learning Trends 2026 (opens in a new tab) study of 1,049 HR, learning and IT professionals, a net 83 percent place a high priority on addressing skill concerns, and only 34 percent have a formal, organization wide reskilling or upskilling program (opens in a new tab). The same respondents name the strength of their own internal development programs as a cause of their skill gaps (45 percent) and rank burnout as the top driver of low performance (52 percent). The belief is close to universal. The execution belongs to about one company in three.
Two ways MSPs grow, one way they break
The failure looks different depending on how you grow, and it lands in the same place. Two composites from client work, anonymized, show the pattern.
The first is a group growing by acquisition. Every acquired MSP brings twenty or thirty people who were competent at their old shop and are now beginners at yours: a different PSA, different ticket standards, different escalation rules, different service tiers priced differently. Their client knowledge transferred. Their platform knowledge did not, and neither did your process. The plan for closing that gap was a library of SOPs and an expectation that managers and senior leads would train people as they went. It took weeks or longer for an acquired technician to become productive, and the whole time the most expensive technical people in the building were teaching instead of billing. On the org chart the integration was finished. In the queue it had barely started.
The second grew entirely through sales, and its sales team was excellent. Nothing in its story starts in service delivery. It starts with a win. Large new accounts landed, onboarding outran the handoff process, and the team was not ready for what arrived. Client onboarding had never been standardized, so they covered it by pulling people in from other departments. Existing clients felt the difference immediately, booked project revenue went at risk, and they lost a client in the middle of the best sales year they had ever had.
One company bought its growth and the other sold it. In both, the capacity to serve grew slower than the obligation to serve, and nobody was measuring the difference. You will not find a line item called chaos on the P&L. You find it in utilization and gross margin per technician when senior leads teach instead of bill, in project slippage when people get pulled in to cover onboarding, in churn when existing clients lose confidence, and in recruiting cost when burned out people leave.
Why SOPs do not protect service quality
The thesis of my MSP NXT session this month fits in two sentences: SOPs are not training, and training without reinforcement is failure.
The first sentence costs MSPs the most money. We write the process down, put it in the documentation platform, send the link and tell ourselves the team has been trained. A document has never changed anyone’s behavior. It is a reference, and references only help people who already know what they are looking for. Shadowing has the same weakness. It transfers whatever the person being shadowed happens to do that day, including the workarounds and bad habits, and it cannot be assigned, tracked or improved.
The second sentence is the part almost nobody addresses. Even MSPs that run real training treat it as an event. Everybody attends, everybody nods, and then Monday happens. Without something reinforcing the behavior every day, it drifts back to whatever it was before the money was spent. That reinforcement is supposed to come from managers, and Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace research (opens in a new tab) finds that only 44 percent of managers have received formal management training. We promote our best technician, hand them six direct reports, and expect coaching to happen by instinct.
How do you move a process from SOP to habit?
Every process in a service organization travels three stages, and most MSPs live at the first one while believing they are at the third.
An SOP is written down, current and findable. The proof is that a document exists and someone can produce it. Stop here and behavior does not change; the SOP becomes evidence in a post mortem instead of a control.
A skill has been taught, practiced and observed. The proof is that a named person watched someone run the process end to end and signed off. If you cannot name that person, you have a document and some optimism.
A habit runs without being asked and survives a bad week. The proof is that the routine still happened the last time the manager was out, and the number held when volume spiked. This is the target.
Getting from skill to habit takes reinforcement, and reinforcement has three parts. A routine gives the behavior a fixed time and place, such as a start of shift check of the queue and an end of shift rule that every ticket is updated, every hour is entered and every status is correct. A number tells you whether it is actually happening. A conversation connects the two for the person doing the work, in a weekly one on one and a monthly review of their numbers and their training. Miss any one of the three and the process slides back a stage. A routine with no number is theater. A number with no conversation is surveillance. A conversation with no number is a chat.
Most of the numbers already live in your PSA: time for a new technician to take and own tickets, escalation rate, CSAT, ticket age, time per ticket and kill rate. What is usually missing is the behavior underneath each number, the lesson that moves it and the question that belongs in the one on one. Attach those three to every metric you report and reinforcement stops depending on having one naturally good manager.
What to do on Monday morning
Start with a single process and give it thirty days.
- Choose the process that is hurting most. If you are growing by acquisition, it is probably platform onboarding for acquired technicians. If you are growing through sales, it is probably client onboarding or account handoff.
- Score it honestly as an SOP, a skill or a habit, using the evidence tests above. If you cannot name who observed the last person run it, write down SOP and start there.
- Install exactly three things: one routine so the behavior has a time and a place, one number so you know whether it is happening, and one question that goes into every one on one until the behavior holds.
Thirty days, one process, three things. Then pick the next one. This is the same discipline behind a working accountability flywheel, and it is the job a first service manager should own once you hire one.
See the full session
I am teaching the full version of this, with the scoring card and the daily disciplines checklist, at MSP NXT 2026 (opens in a new tab) in Austin on Thursday, October 29, at 10:45 a.m. Central. The conference is sold out, so if you have a badge, come find me. Everything else we are teaching live this fall, including the Gross Margin Workshop, is on our events page. If you want help building the training system behind your next growth cycle, let’s talk (opens in a new tab).
