Will Nobles started his company in 2008 with no safety net, no team, and no certainty.
He had just helped lay off eight hundred people at a mortgage company. The economy was in freefall. And instead of waiting for things to stabilize, he went out and built something.
That decision tells you everything you need to know about how Will thinks.
I sat down with Will recently on Sunny Silver Linings, and what came out of that conversation was not a success story. It was a playbook. One that every MSP leader needs to hear right now, especially with everything AI is doing to our industry.
The Fight Behind the Foundation
Will grew up in a small town in North Carolina. Ran a bulldozer out of high school on twelve-hour shifts. He knew quickly that was not the life he wanted, so he left, went to college, got two technology degrees, and eventually found his way into managed services. Today, Vector Choice operates across nine locations from Philadelphia to West Texas, built through a combination of organic growth and acquisitions, starting alone.
But the story that matters is not the growth. It is the mindset behind it.
When I asked Will for his single greatest lesson from the journey, he did not hesitate.
Fight. Fight for what you want, fight for what matters to you, and work your butt off to get there.
That word is not a motivational cliche when Will says it. He grew up in a house built in 1874. He was very blue collar. He decided early he was not going to run from a job. He was going to create jobs. A lot of people get into business to escape something. Will got into it to build something. The outcome is completely different.
Beyond Vector Choice, Will now runs MSP Mastery Group, coaching MSP owners across leadership, finance, pricing, and AI. Four times a year he takes seven CEOs and their spouses to Acapulco for an immersive retreat, disconnected from day to day operations, focused entirely on growing their businesses. He gives everything he has built over eighteen years directly to the people in that room. He also said something I respect deeply. Even after six years of coaching, he still hears things other MSPs are doing and thinks, I want to try that in my own business. That is the community mindset that makes MSP Mastery Group work.
The Pyramid Is Flipping
Will made an observation that every MSP needs to sit with. The staffing model is shifting in a way most owners have not fully reckoned with yet.
For years, MSPs ran on more level one technicians at the bottom, fewer specialists at the top. AI is inverting that. Entry-level ticket resolution is increasingly being handled by AI. The demand for level one volume is shrinking. The demand for strategic, high-level thinking is growing. If your MSP is still structured around the old model, the foundation is shifting under you whether you feel it yet or not.
And it is not just AI creating pressure. Will was direct about compliance too. If you are not selling compliance today, you need to start. Compliance and AI are the two service lines Will sees as non-negotiable for MSPs who want to stay competitive. MSPs that cannot offer both are already losing ground to larger players who bundle compliance, cybersecurity, IT, and AI into a single package. That is the competitive reality right now.
Vector Choice has built exactly that capability, and other MSPs come to them specifically for compliance and AI work they cannot do in-house. That is not a side business. It is a model worth paying attention to.
Four Moves Every MSP Can Make Now
Will’s path forward is direct and practical.
The first move is to maximize the AI functionality already built into the tools you own. Your PSA, your RMM, your full stack. Most MSPs are not using anywhere near the AI capability sitting in their existing platforms. That is the first place to start, before buying anything new.
The second move is to sell AI as a service. Not as a one-time project, but as recurring revenue. The same model that made managed services work, an onboarding fee followed by monthly recurring, applies directly to AI. Will mentioned Hats AI as a specific tool Vector Choice uses and sells to clients as AI software as a service. It gives them additional revenue and deeper stickiness inside the account because clients are now using it for their day-to-day work. Will said AI as a service is already growing faster than their traditional managed services recurring revenue at Vector Choice. That is not a future prediction. That is a data point from an MSP operating at scale today.
The third move is to lead every client conversation with a business question, not an IT question. When Vector Choice goes into a client to explore AI opportunities, they ask what processes get done the same way every single day. They take that back to their team, explore what AI can do with it, show the client a proof of concept, and build a project from there. One example Will gave was an AI assistant built inside Microsoft Teams where employees could type in questions about PTO, insurance options, or bereavement leave and get accurate answers instantly from the company’s own data. Simple to build. Immediate value to the client. A clear path to recurring revenue.
The fourth move is AI enablement. This is the one most MSPs are leaving on the table. Your clients’ employees are navigating real fear right now. Fear, uncertainty, and doubt about what AI means for their jobs is present in every organization. Will and I both said the same thing in the conversation. It is not AI replacing people. It is people with AI skills replacing people without them. The MSP that shows up as the trusted AI advisor, the one that educates and enables clients’ teams with mindset training, Copilot training, or even a simple session on how AI works, owns a relationship no one else in that business is filling. That seat is available right now. Most MSPs are not taking it.
The Seat Nobody Is Filling
Will put the whole thing simply. Do something. Anything. Stop waiting for the perfect plan. The pace of change in AI is moving faster than any single MSP can fully track. New models, new capabilities, new competitive pressure arriving constantly. Waiting for certainty means waiting for a moment that is not coming.
The MSPs who delay are not going to lose their clients in a single dramatic moment. They are going to lose them gradually, one conversation at a time, to a competitor who showed up ready to have the AI discussion they were not prepared to have.
Will is bringing this thinking to Build IT LIVE in August, where he will be speaking on AI and giving every attendee a free checklist of the exact questions to ask clients to start building an AI revenue stream. That is a practical, immediately usable tool he is handing to every person in that room.
If you want to connect with Will directly, his website is mspmasterygroup.com. He gave his email and phone number openly on the show for any MSP with a real question.
The lesson I took from this entire conversation is one I keep coming back to. The MSPs who lead this next chapter are not the ones who know the most about AI. They are the ones who decided to move, learn as they go, and bring their clients along for the journey.
That is how Will built Vector Choice. And that is how he is coaching others to build what comes next.
