Why So Many Businesses Secretly Hate Their MSP

Why Most MSPs Are Just “OK” And Why That Is a Problem

I have been in the IT industry for nearly 32 years, and one thing has become very clear over time. A lot of people do not have a very high opinion of their IT provider.

When we speak with prospective clients, they almost always fall into one of two categories. They either say their Managed Service Provider is “just OK,” or they say their MSP “sucks.” Very rarely do we hear someone say, “We absolutely love our IT provider.”

That should raise an important question. Technology runs nearly every modern business. It powers communication, operations, productivity, and increasingly competitive advantage. So why do so many companies feel indifferent or frustrated about the people responsible for managing it?

After thousands of conversations with business owners and executives over the years, a clear pattern has emerged.

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Camp #1: “Our MSP Is OK”

When a business says their MSP is “OK,” what they usually mean is that when they call their IT provider with a problem, they respond in a reasonable amount of time. If you ask what “reasonable” means, the answer is often something like this: “They usually get back to us within a day.”

If you ask how often they need to contact their IT provider, the response is usually something along the lines of, “We do not really track it, but they fix things when they break.”

On the surface, that sounds acceptable. Something breaks, you call IT, and they fix it. But there is usually a bigger issue hiding underneath.

Most companies in the “our MSP is OK” category have almost no visibility into how their technology is actually performing. They usually cannot answer questions like how many technology issues occur each month, which users experience the most problems, which devices or systems cause the most disruption, whether issues are increasing or decreasing over time, or how much productivity is being lost due to technology problems.

Instead, the effectiveness of the IT provider is judged almost entirely on how quickly they respond when something breaks. That is a pretty low standard for something as critical as your business technology.

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Camp #2: “Our MSP Sucks”

Then there is the second group. These are the businesses that say their MSP sucks, and they are usually very open about the frustrations they are experiencing.

Common complaints include support requests taking too long to receive a response, issues taking days or sometimes weeks to resolve, the same problems happening repeatedly, support staff being difficult or unpleasant to deal with, and technicians communicating in technical jargon that makes things more confusing.

This is not just anecdotal. A 2025  poll conducted by MSP Success found that 90 percent of businesses said slow response times was the number one reason they wanted to change IT providers. 

Clearly there are some serious problems in the MSP industry.

But here is the interesting part. Both groups of companies are actually experiencing the same underlying problem. To understand why, we need to talk about the most overused word in the MSP industry.

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The Most Overused Word in the MSP Industry

If you visit the websites of most IT providers, you will see one word everywhere: proactive.

Almost every MSP claims they provide proactive IT services. When you ask what makes their service proactive, the answer is almost always the same. They monitor your systems.

They install monitoring software on your computers, servers, and network devices. That software sends alerts when something goes wrong. For example, it may alert them when a server goes offline, a hard drive becomes full, a network device stops responding, or a critical service crashes.

When the alert is triggered, the IT provider responds.

At first glance, this sounds proactive. But if you step back and think about it for a moment, something becomes obvious.

If a monitoring system alerts someone that your server is down, your disk is full, or your network is failing, the problem has already occurred. Nothing proactive has happened.

What actually occurred is an automated notification that allows someone to react faster to a problem that already exists. Monitoring tools are useful and necessary, but monitoring alone is not proactive IT management.

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What True Proactive IT Actually Looks Like

Real proactive IT should look very different.

A truly proactive IT partner should be able to identify patterns in recurring problems, forecast potential failures before they occur, eliminate root causes of repeated issues, reduce the number of disruptions month after month, and continuously improve the stability of your environment.

In other words, the number of problems your staff experiences should consistently go down over time.

Unfortunately, that is not how most MSPs operate. Most providers spend the majority of their time reacting to problems instead of systematically eliminating them.

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The Real Job of an IT Partner

The biggest failure in the MSP industry is not slow response times. The real problem is that most providers still operate like outsourced help desks.

Their focus is on responding to tickets, resetting passwords, fixing broken systems, and reacting to alerts. But technology should be doing far more for your business than simply not breaking.

A true technology partner should help a business streamline operations, improve efficiency, reduce recurring problems, automate manual processes, and use technology to gain competitive advantage.

Most importantly, they should be able to show the results with real data.

If your IT provider cannot clearly demonstrate how many issues are occurring, where those issues originate, and how those problems are being reduced over time, then you are likely stuck in the same cycle that many businesses experience.

Something breaks. IT fixes it. The same issue happens again.

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What We Will Be Covering in This Series

Over the next several weeks, we are going to dig deeper into the MSP industry and discuss some of the things most providers never talk about publicly.

We will cover topics like why most proactive IT is not truly proactive, why recurring technology problems never seem to go away, why many vCIO services turn into expensive quarterly meetings, why most MSPs never show clients meaningful performance data, and what a true technology partner should actually be doing.

If your current IT provider is “just OK,” or if you think they suck, this series will help you understand what you should really expect from an IT partner.

Is Your IT Provider Actually Doing a Good Job?

Most businesses judge their IT provider based on one thing.
How quickly they respond when something breaks.

But that is not how high performing IT environments are measured.

The reality is that every MSP should be able to show clear data about how well your technology environment is performing and how they are improving it over time.

We created a simple framework that outlines 7 key metrics every business should expect their IT provider to track.

These metrics reveal things like:
    •    how often users experience technology issues
    •    whether problems are increasing or decreasing
    •    which systems are causing the most disruption
    •    how efficiently issues are being resolved

If your IT provider cannot show you this information, it may be time to ask some questions.