Most MSPs grow by signing more clients. We grow by hiring more engineers first. It sounds like the same thing said two ways. It isn’t — and the difference is the whole reason a ticket you raise at 9:15 gets a real answer by 9:30 instead of sitting in a queue behind eighty other firms.
We cap how many client organisations any one engineer carries. Our ratio is roughly five to one — five clients per engineer — and we’d rather turn work away than break it. Here’s why that line is non-negotiable, and what it means when we say no.
What the ratio actually buys you.
The maths is unglamorous and that’s the point. An engineer responsible for five firms knows them. They know your servers, your quirks, the one app that needs handling carefully, the names of the people who call. When you ring, you’re not explaining your setup from scratch to whoever’s free — you’re talking to someone who already has the context.
Stretch that same engineer across fifteen firms and something has to give. It’s never the contract. It’s the response time, the depth of knowledge, and eventually the patience of everyone involved. The work doesn’t get worse all at once; it gets worse quietly, one rushed ticket at a time, until one day you’re “managed” by people who couldn’t pick your network out of a line-up.
The ratio isn’t a marketing number. It’s the difference between an engineer who knows your business and a stranger reading your account notes while you wait on hold.
Why we’d rather say no.
The honest version: every signed client is revenue, and turning one away is turning down money. We do it anyway, because the alternative is worse for the clients we already have. The moment we take on a firm we don’t have the engineer capacity to look after properly, we’ve quietly downgraded everyone else’s service to do it. That’s a trade we’re not willing to make on your behalf without telling you.
So sometimes a prospect is genuinely a good fit and the answer is still “not this month.” It means we’re hiring ahead of the demand, and we’ll have the right person in place before we say yes — not after, while you absorb the shortfall.
What this means if you’re considering us.
Two things follow from the ratio, and you should hold us to both:
- If we take you on, we have the capacity to do it properly. We’re not selling you a slot in a queue and hoping it works out.
- If we ask you to wait, we’re telling you the truth about our capacity rather than over-promising to win the deal. That’s the same honesty you’ll get from us when something breaks.
It’s a slower way to grow a company. It’s also the only way we know to keep the promise that you’ll always get a human, fast — and mean it years from now, not just in the first month.
