Four MSPs who built businesses from the ground up talked about the secrets of success and possible pitfalls during a panel discussion, “Leadership Secrets of the MSP 501,” at the MSP Summit last month.

As the moderator of that panel, I thought I’d share some of those secrets here. They came from Peter Melby, CEO of New Charter Technologies; Chuck Canton, founder and CEO of Sourcepass; Harold Mann, founder and CEO of Mann Consulting; and Antwine Jackson, president and founder of Enitech. All their MSPs were members of the MSP 501 last year.

(Go here to apply for the 2025 MSP 501.)

Three of the MSPs lead a company they started. Melby founded Greystone Technology Group in 2001 and sold it to New Charter in 2021. In 2024, he succeeded Mitch Morgan as New Charter CEO.

Here are a few things I learned in the session:

Keys to scaling an MSP.

"As you scale, some challenges naturally arise,” Melby said. “Growth can lead to stagnation—at a certain size, change becomes harder. The bigger you get, the more essential it is to stay nimble. It may seem counterintuitive, but the larger you are, the more radically clear and simple your vision has to be. The key? Mobilize, adapt, and avoid getting in your own way."

Change when necessary but not just for the sake of change.

"In some cases, that's good if you're trying to fix something that's a gap in the industry,” Canton said of making changes. “But in [other] cases, if there's a proven method that's worked for decades, just embrace it. And there are so many resources across the MSP channel. Use those resources. Rinse and repeat those models and spend your time where there are true incremental benefits.”

But don’t be afraid to disrupt when needed.

"What I've learned to do is pay rigorous attention to anybody saying the phrase, 'We've always done it this way,’” Mann said. “In our business we just take a hatchet to anything that is incumbent or tradition. The exciting part for me [has been] to get them to join me in disrupting our own business.”

Of course, a business must be profitable to stand.

"That net profitability is also important, because for a lot of people, this is your retirement vehicle. This is what you're [going] to leave to your families," Jackson said.

Jackson said building trust with customers is at least as important as delivering the right technology and services.

"At the end of the day, there are so many of us doing similar, if not the same, things. For us, the driver has always been, 'How can we deliver a good customer experience but still run a profitable business?'" he said.

Building trust with employees is also essential.

"We're so good at focusing on all the things that need improvement, that we take our eye off of all these people that are working so hard for all those things that are going just fine," Mann said.

AI Wave is Growing.

"I feel like this is a tsunami that's going to just decimate the low end — all your tier ones," Mann said of artificial intelligence. "It's OK, because we'll all just move up to higher ground. But the tools are not going to necessarily get your company on board with it. You have to do that."

Melby added: "We need to perpetually own the next 18 months of innovation forever. We can't rely on the vendor community for that because it just doesn't work that way. The innovation for the masses takes longer. In the very near-term value, we're not asking someone to solve it for us; we're going to solve ourselves. With the long-term view being, we're then going to cycle through the large solutions that find traction.