ORLANDO, Fla. -- Members of the MSP 501 MSPs to Watch list suggested smaller MSPs who want to grow fast should “broaden your horizons” through peer groups and conferences to meet with others who face similar challenges.

The 2025 MSPs to Watch list includes 39 companies that missed making the MSP 501 but show great promise for the future. Either they missed our revenue cutoff or fell short in another key area but overall appear poised for expansion. These MSPs gain most of their revenue from managed services, are high performers in terms of percentage of revenue from recurring revenue and boast impressive 2025 forecasts.

During an MSP Summit panel Tuesday, four of their leaders discussed ways to succeed without the resources of larger MSPs.

“It is really helpful if you're part of some peer group,” said Jared Knisely, CEO of Tampa, Fla.-based Fizen Technologies. “Being a CEO or the leader of a company could be a lonely place. So having a group that you can trust to run strategic or leadership type challenges through can be really, really helpful.”

“You have to broaden your horizons,” said Justin Gilliam, co-owner of Nashville, Tenn.-based Bacheler Technologies. “Peer groups are great to be a part of. If you can get into a peer group and have 10 to 15 people to bounce ideas off of, it makes a huge difference in your opinion on things like vendors and tools. I guarantee that if you get 15 MSPs together, they've all tried at least one of these tools at least one time. So it makes a big difference just to have peers to bounce ideas off, also for MSP operations.”

Matt Rose, CEO of Winter Springs, Fla.-based Tech Rage IT, said peer groups and conferences help introduce MSPs to new ideas that can prove helpful.

“When you come here and broaden your horizons, you do hear other opinions,” Rose said. “There's not one way to do this. There’s typically multiple ways to skin the cat. We've made other friends, we've made other huge connections. We've used other products that have been perfectly fine for us only because we open our minds.”

Paco Lebron, founder of Chicago-based ProdigyTeks and moderator of the panel, said he finds conferences especially helpful.

“The hallway conversation is where the magic happens,” Lebron said. “I can't tell you how many times I leave a session or I'm just talking to someone else, and there's a nugget that just sits right in there, and it provides you some type of either different perspective or a way to move forward.”

He said MSPs can also benefit from informal meetings outside of conferences or peer groups.

“Get together, have lunch, have some conversations around that as well,” Lebron said. “There are so many communities available.”

The panelists said another growth enabler is to publicize awards such as the MSP 501 and MSPs to Watch to validate themselves in the eyes of customers.

Gilliam said he lists awards on all of Bacheler Technologies’ proposals. “It's a great icebreaker, right?” he said. “You can say, ‘yeah, we won an award because we were XYZ.’ It also adds credibility to your presence in the market. We have awards to our names. We're not just some fly-by-night MSP company. That’s credibility.”

“We do press releases for everything,” Rose added. “We put it on put it on LinkedIn, put it on our website. During a sales presentation, we have a slide that talks about all of our awards. It shows the hard work we put in. So I do take a lot of pride in it.”

Knisely said awards give prospects reason to trust his company.

“Our customers don't really have a great way to assess how good we are or aren't, especially early on in a relationship,” Knisely said. “There are standard questions everyone gets asked – ‘How long have you been in business, how many employees do you have?’ And a lot of [MSP] owners lie half the time when asked those questions, so they’re not a good way to assess how good your service is. But external validation helps win their trust a little more. It adds credence to what we’re saying about ourselves.”

See the full MSPs to Watch list.

(Photo caption: left-to-right, Paco Lebron, Matt Rose, Jared Knisely, Justin Gilliam)