The BMK Vision Podcast

"I've been giving onboarding away for years and I close a lot of deals. My competitors who charge for it lose deals. So why would I fix something that doesn't seem broken? What am I actually missing?" That's the listener question. In this Roundtable episode of The BMK Vision Podcast, Josh Peterson and Gary Boyle answer it directly — and the answer is not what the asker wants to hear. Giving away o...

"Do either of you actually believe an owner can fully get out of the day-to-day of an MSP and not have it fall apart? I've tried twice. Both times something blew up and I had to come back in." That's the question a listener sent. In this Roundtable episode of The BMK Vision Podcast, Josh Peterson and Gary Boyle answer it directly — yes, it's possible — and then walk through why the asker's two att...

"I didn't get into this company to pay myself less." That was the disdainful read from one partner in a three-person MSP partnership when the advice came up to cut owner W-2 and tie additional comp to profit. In this Roundtable episode of The BMK Vision Podcast, Josh Peterson and Gary Boyle take the position apart and walk through why the cut is not punitive — it's diagnostic. The W-2 floor that c...

"I fired a client doing 15 grand a month. I've replaced maybe half of it so far, and I'm kind of pissed about it." That question came out of a peer-group room, and it is the most common form of buyer's remorse in MSP ownership. In this Roundtable episode of The BMK Vision Podcast, Josh and Gary walk through why the regret is almost always a measurement problem, not a decision problem. The short an...

"Hire green and train them up is a cop out." A frenemy of the show sent that line in an email, and Josh and Gary spend this Roundtable episode taking the position apart. The senior MSP sales hire most owners are chasing is a unicorn — and even if one exists, the affordability math rarely supports it. In this conversation, Josh and Gary walk through the harder truth underneath the senior-hire fanta...

AI is collapsing the cost of building software — and quietly multiplying the cost of building it badly. Bryan Reynolds, founder and CEO of Baytech Consulting, has been architecting enterprise-grade software for 30 years. In this conversation with guest host Gary Boyle, he separates the AI hype from what actually holds up in production. Guest Introduction Bryan Reynolds runs Baytech Consulting, the...

A Chicago peer team. A confident new owner. One quiet sentence: "I'm comfortable. Why would I blow that up?" The room went silent. Josh and Gary use that moment as the opening for an honest conversation about the most expensive sentence in MSP ownership. In this Roundtable, Josh Peterson and Gary Boyle break down the natural plateau-to-valley cycle every MSP hits, why inflation and attrition erode...

The most expensive problem in your MSP isn't who you hired — it's who you keep hoping they'll become. In this BMK Vision Roundtable, Josh Peterson and Gary Boyle unpack the mirror problem: the way MSP owners project their own work ethic onto staff and call it a standard, then spend years frustrated that no one else operates at their level. Josh and Gary go deep on time entry as the canary in your...

Time entry is the most boring topic in the MSP industry — and almost everything that matters financially, operationally, and legally traces back to it. In this BMK Vision Roundtable, Josh Peterson and Gary Boyle argue that the MSP story doesn't start with vision, sales, or strategy. It starts with time entry. And if you don't have honest, daily time entry, every downstream conversation — agreement...

MSP commoditization is accelerating — and the old playbook of per-user pricing and monthly packages isn't going to protect your business forever. In this BMK Vision Roundtable, Josh Peterson and Gary Boyle explore the two biggest opportunities MSPs are overlooking right now: advisory services that make you a strategic partner and software development that creates enterprise value beyond MRR. Guest...

Most MSP owners are asking whether they should sell, scale, or pivot — but they can't answer a more fundamental question: do you actually understand your own business at a financial and operational level? In this BMK Vision Roundtable, Josh Peterson and Gary Boyle break down the four strategic paths every MSP owner faces and expose the uncomfortable truth that none of those paths work without data...

Every MSP owner has argued about ticket statuses. But that argument is almost always a symptom of something bigger — a service operating model that isn't clearly defined. In this BMK Vision Roundtable, Josh Peterson and Gary Boyle unpack a real listener question about status hygiene and use it to expose the deeper issues: unclear ownership, the absence of a dispatcher, and the financial blind spot...

Most MSPs say they're different. Bryon Beilman actually is. As CEO of iuvo Technologies, he made a deliberate decision to hire consultants — not technicians — building a team that averages 24 years of experience and delivers strategic business value that goes far beyond uptime and ticket resolution. In this conversation, Josh Peterson and Bryon explore why traditional managed services are becoming...

Most MSP owners describe their typical client and call it an ideal client profile. That gap is costing them real revenue. In this roundtable, Josh Peterson and Gary Boyle break down the difference between an ICP and a TCP — and introduce pull-through rate as the metric that reveals whether your clients can actually drive growth. Josh Peterson is the CEO of Bering McKinley. Gary Boyle is a Partner...

Most MSPs invest in security tools — firewalls, endpoint protection, SIEM — but few have a reliable way to know whether those tools are actually configured correctly. Misconfigurations in the very products designed to protect your clients are one of the leading attack vectors in cybersecurity today. Adam Bennett has spent 25+ years on the front lines and built a company to solve exactly this probl...

Most MSP owners who struggle with sales performance aren't dealing with a bad salesperson - they're dealing with no system. In this roundtable, Josh Peterson and Gary Boyle respond to a real listener email from an MSP owner who has tolerated five years of inconsistent results from a salesperson he's afraid to hold accountable. The diagnosis: this isn't a sales problem. It's a leadership problem we...

Most MSPs have invested heavily in perimeter security. But there is a financial risk hiding in plain sight: the unstructured data organizations create every day — spreadsheets, Word docs, old deal rooms, payroll files — that has never been inventoried, valued, or protected at the file level. That gap is what Return on Mitigation was built to close. James Oliverio is the Founder & CEO of ideaBO...

Most MSP owners say they're great at sales — but when you examine what's actually happening, many are confusing orders with selling. In this BMK Vision Roundtable, Josh Peterson and Gary Boyle unpack why sending quotes too early kills deals, why the order of selling matters more than any closing technique, and how a simple three-pillar framework can transform close rates for MSPs at any size. Co-H...

Most MSP owners will tell you they want to improve profitability. But when the solution involves cutting recurring revenue, the conversation gets uncomfortable fast. This roundtable tackles the hard truth: not all revenue is healthy revenue, and the clients you're afraid to lose may be the ones destroying your margins. Josh Peterson, Gary Boyle, and Ryan Alter dig into a real client scenario where...

Not every MSP story ends with a big exit or a moonshot growth curve. Some of the most important transitions in this industry happen when an owner realizes that ownership itself was never the right fit — and does something about it. David Norelid spent nearly a decade running his own MSP before making the decision to close it down and take a role at another MSP, a move he now calls the best decisio...

Most MSP owners don't plan their hires — they react to them. A great person shows up, excitement takes over, and suddenly you're building a role around a person instead of filling a seat you've already designed. In this BMK Vision Roundtable, Josh Peterson and Gary Boyle break down why that pattern keeps repeating and what it's actually costing you. Gary Boyle is a Partner for Strategy & Busin...

In this episode of the BMK Vision Podcast, Josh Peterson sits down with Gary Boyle, Partner for Strategy & Business Development at Bering McKinley. They dig into why MSP partnerships break down, how undefined roles create a slow-burning disaster, and what owners can do right now to get ahead of it — drawing from real client situations happening right now. This conversation explores how the mos...

You don’t need time tracking to survive at $1M — but you absolutely need it to scale past $2M.   In this episode, we break down one of the most common growth ceilings in the MSP industry: the belief that “we don’t track time” is a culture win. Josh Peterson and Gary Boyle unpack why that mindset often leads to stalled margins, mispriced agreements, technician burnout, and emotional decision-making...

In this From the Trenches episode of the BMK Vision Podcast, Josh Peterson sits down with Ray Stasieczko for an unfiltered conversation about the copier-dealer-to-MSP transition—and why so many businesses lose their way chasing relevance instead of building real value.   Ray shares hard-earned lessons from decades in the print and IT services space, challenging vendor-driven MSP models that promis...

At around $5M in revenue, many MSPs run into a leadership problem that has nothing to do with effort or intelligence—and everything to do with role fit. In this episode, the BMK Vision Podcast team breaks down a real client scenario where an owner is sitting in the sales seat but doesn’t truly want sales leadership.   Josh Peterson is joined by Gary Boyle and Ryan Alter to explore why ownership do...