The managed services market’s most respected benchmark covers one operational area. Your business has eight. That math matters more than most owners realize.
You have probably benchmarked your financials.
You may have compared your EBITDA margin to a handful of operators at your revenue tier. You may have normalized your chart of accounts, mapped your gross margins, and walked away thinking you know where your business stands.
Here is the problem with that: financials are one of eight operational areas that determine what your business is actually worth. And if you are only measuring one, you are making decisions with 12.5% of the picture.
The other 87.5% is where most MSPs are losing enterprise value without knowing it.
The Eight Areas Every IT Managed Service Provider (MSP) Has to Run
Every managed services business operates across eight distinct operational focus areas. Not three. Not five. Eight.
Executive and Organizational Leadership. Marketing Strategy and Demand Generation. Sales Training and Revenue Execution. Legal Structure and Risk Management. CPA Financial Strategy and Capital Alignment. Employee Development and Leadership Pipeline. Human Resources and Talent Management. Services and Delivery Operations.
Most MSP owners actively manage two or three of these. The rest operate on autopilot, handled by whoever is closest to the problem on any given day, or not handled at all. The areas that get ignored are typically where the gaps that depress valuation and slow growth are hiding.
Here is what I have seen across thousands of MSP evaluations: the owner who benchmarks only the financial area often walks away with a false sense of readiness. The financials may look competitive. The EBITDA may land in the right range for the revenue tier. But when a buyer or a private equity firm looks at the full picture, they see a leadership team that cannot operate without the founder, a sales function that depends on referrals, an HR structure that does not exist, and a service delivery model that does not scale. Those are not financial problems. They are operational problems that financial benchmarking alone will never surface.
The Best Financial Benchmark in the Industry Covers One of the Eight
Paul Dippell built something genuinely important when he created the Service Leadership Index. It remains the deepest, most rigorous financial benchmark for IT solution providers anywhere in the world. Twenty years of quarterly data, more than 80 metrics, 10 Predominant Business Models, and a level of financial granularity that sets the standard.
I have deep respect for what Dippell built. That methodology is world-class.
What it covers is area number five of eight: CPA Financial Strategy and Capital Alignment. It does that one area better than anything else on the market. But it is one area. A growing MSP has to manage all eight.
When ConnectWise acquired Service Leadership in February 2021, the structural independence that made the methodology neutral transferred to a vendor. ConnectWise is one of the largest PSA and RMM vendors in the MSP market. An owner asking “should I change my tool stack?” cannot get a fully neutral answer from a benchmark that now lives inside a tool vendor. That is not a criticism of the methodology or the people running it. It is a structural fact about what happens when a benchmark sits inside a company with a financial interest in the answer.
The methodology is still rigorous. The independence is not.
Breadth First, Then Depth
The MSP Business Evaluator and Accelerator was built to solve a different problem than financial benchmarking. It was built to give an MSP owner a read across the entire business, all eight operational areas, benchmarked against 11 stages of growth from startup through $100 million, with 72 KPIs that show exactly where the gaps are and how much of the owner’s resources need to be deployed to reach best in class for their stage.
It does this in seconds, with no chart-of-accounts prerequisite, no quarterly data submission burden, and no vendor relationship shaping the answer. It has been used to run approximately 10,000 MSP evaluations since 2020. M&A advisors and private equity firms use it with their own clients, and that is the validation signal that matters most to me. These are people who get paid to be right about what a business is worth. When they adopt a methodology, they are endorsing it with their professional reputation and their deal outcomes.
The MSPBEA is broad by design. Every MSP is different, and a broad read across the whole business is the right place to start. When the diagnostic surfaces the specific areas that need deeper work, that is when experts in each discipline step in. Financial benchmarking at Service Leadership depth may be exactly the right next step for area five. A fractional CMO may be the right next step for area two. An HR consultant may be the right answer for area seven. The MSPBEA identifies what needs attention. The experts provide the solution.
That is the difference between a diagnostic that covers one area deeply and a diagnostic that covers the entire business and tells you where to focus.
What Buyers Actually Look At
A private equity firm running diligence on an MSP acquisition target does not look at financials alone. They look at the leadership team’s ability to operate without the founder. They look at whether the sales pipeline depends on one person or a repeatable process. They look at whether HR policies exist or whether the company is one wrongful termination claim away from a material liability. They look at service delivery scalability, contract structures, and whether the marketing function generates demand or waits for referrals.
These are areas two through eight. The owner who benchmarked only area five walks into that diligence process thinking they are ready. The buyer walks out of it repricing the deal.
I have seen this pattern across hundreds of transactions. The gap between what the owner thinks the business is worth and what the buyer is willing to pay almost always traces back to operational areas the owner never measured. Not because they did not care, but because nothing in the market measured it for them across all eight areas simultaneously, independently, and benchmarked to their specific stage of growth.
The Setup Question Most Owners Never Ask
There is another dimension to this that rarely gets discussed. The most rigorous financial benchmarking in the market requires aligning your books to a normalized chart of accounts and submitting financial data every quarter. That is finance-level work, best supported by a CFO or a dedicated finance function. For the MSP owner who already has that infrastructure, the depth is invaluable.
But the majority of MSPs between $1 million and $10 million do not have a CFO. They do not have a finance function that can dedicate time every quarter to maintaining a benchmark. Which means the most vulnerable operators in the market, the ones who most need to understand where they stand, are also the ones least equipped to use the deepest tool available.
The MSPBEA was built to close that gap. No chart-of-accounts prerequisite. No quarterly input burden. A first answer in seconds. Then, when the owner is ready for depth in any specific area, the MSP Business Growth Marketplace connects them to stage-aligned experts across all eight operational focus areas. Independently. With no vendor relationship attached.
The Market Is Vendor-Captured. Your Benchmark Does Not Have to Be.
In 2021, the two most credible independent voices in MSP operational intelligence became vendor property. ConnectWise acquired Service Leadership. Kaseya acquired TruMethods. The most attended conferences, the most credible peer programs, and the deepest financial benchmark all now sit inside large software vendors.
An MSP owner who wants genuinely independent business intelligence, benchmarked against their stage of growth, covering the full scope of operational areas that drive enterprise value, has one option that carries no vendor relationship, no transaction interest, and no coaching program to sell.
That is not a marketing claim. It is a structural fact about who owns what in this market and where the independent lane sits.
Summary
Most MSP benchmarking measures one of eight operational areas. That is 12.5% of the picture. The other 87.5% is where enterprise value is being created or destroyed, and most owners have never measured it.
The MSP Business Evaluator and Accelerator reads across all eight areas, benchmarks against 11 stages of growth from 0 to $100 million, and does it independently and self-serve. It identifies where the gaps are, how much of your resources you need to deploy to reach best in class, and where to focus next.
Financial benchmarking depth is available when you need it. But breadth across the whole business is where you start.
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About Paul Daigle
Paul Daigle is the Architect of MSP Business Value and Senior Managing Partner at BizAdvisoryBoard. He is the creator of the MSP Business Evaluator and Accelerator, the $100M MSP Scaling Roadmap, and the MSP Business Growth Marketplace, tools used by MSPs, private equity firms, and M&A professionals worldwide. Paul helps MSP owners build, measure, and maximize the value of their business from startup to $100 million to exit.
www.MSPBusinessGrowthMarketplace.com | www.BizAdvisoryBoard.com
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Meta Descriptor: Most MSP benchmarking covers 1 of 8 operational areas. The other 87.5% is where enterprise value is won or lost.
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