Most MSP owners are not short on knowledge. They are short on action.
That is the thought I kept coming back to after my conversation with Greg Jones, SVP at Kaseya, on the AI By Design podcast. Greg has spent close to eight years at Kaseya and many more on the MSP side before that, including fourteen years in local and central government working on technology in education. He now travels roughly seventy five percent of the year meeting MSPs across the world. Few people have a wider view of this channel than he does.
Greg recently published a book called The Best of One Minute Wednesday, built on a simple habit he started seven years ago. After a conversation with an MSP at an event gave him an idea so sharp he had to share it, he began posting a one minute tip every Wednesday on social media. Hundreds of tips later, a mentor challenged him to pull the best of them into a book, alongside contributions from over a hundred MSP and channel leaders. The book has 150 tips in total, 100 from peers across the industry and 50 from Greg himself. Every dollar of profit goes to a children’s charity hospital that Greg sits on the board of.
Here is what struck me. Greg almost did not write the book at all. He told me directly he did not think he had a book in him. What changed his mind was a mentor asking him to think beyond himself, about the lasting impact he could have on the channel, and how much of that wisdom would simply be lost if he did not collect it. That is a lesson for every leader in this industry. You do not need to feel qualified to write down what you have learned. You need to be willing to serve.
But the real core of our conversation was not the book itself. It was what Greg calls execution over consumption.
Take action, don’t wait for perfection
Greg’s advice for MSPs deciding where to focus first was simple. Leverage your existing MRR and your foundations as you branch into new opportunities, whether that is AI as a service, compliance as a service, or co-managed IT. Nobody, in his words, knows exactly what the finish line looks like right now. That is not a reason to wait. It is a reason to move.
This is where I think about my own MSP journey back in 2003. I used to attend conferences, take notes, and come back energized. Then nothing changed. I had gained knowledge, but I had not closed the gap between learning and doing. I call this the knowledge action gap, and it is the single biggest reason MSPs stall. In the AI era, that gap is more dangerous than ever, because the pace of change does not wait for anyone to feel ready.
Stop being a tech business. Start being a go to market business.
Greg made a point that every technically excellent MSP needs to hear. A website that lists when you were founded, how many staff you have, and how fast you answer the phone means nothing to an SMB buyer. They do not care about your tools any more than someone hiring a plumber cares whether he uses DeWalt or Makita. They care about outcomes.
Greg does not accept the excuse that a business is not ready for sales and marketing yet. There is no such thing as a perfect MSP, he told me, having worked with everyone from solo entrepreneurs to hyperscalers. The businesses people trust and buy from are the ones who showed up in the market, not necessarily the ones with the best product.
Scale without losing yourself
The last piece of our conversation was personal for both of us. Greg described how he pushed off joining a peer group for two years, calling himself a busy fool stuck on the hamster wheel. What changed everything was learning to step back and delegate more, trusting the people around him instead of running every decision through himself. Not every decision needs to sit with the owner. Delegation is not a loss of control. It is what allows a business, and its leader, to actually grow.
That’s the shift right there. Peer groups do not just hold you accountable for revenue targets. They hold you accountable for your health, your family time, and whether you are actually building a business or just feeding one.
Here’s what matters. Knowledge without execution is a hobby. A plan that never gets written down and reverse engineered into weekly and monthly actions is just a dream. Greg’s book exists because he finally executed on an idea he sat on for years. The MSPs who win in this next chapter of the industry will be the ones who do the same.
