What actually moved the number inside an MSP
Three things changed at Principle Networks between 2023 and 2025. None of them was a marketing campaign.
Turnover
EBITDA, against a target set two years earlier
Ahead of plan
Working with the leadership team
Principle Networks is a UK managed service provider working in networking and cyber security. Good engineering, real customers, and growth that depended heavily on the founders being personally involved in it. The full case is here; this piece is about the part that generalises.
Because the interesting question is not what happened. It is which changes did the work — and, for anyone about to attempt something similar, which ones were harder than they looked.
Position first, or everything downstream stays vague.
The instinct in a growing MSP is to keep the proposition broad. It feels safer — more addressable market, fewer conversations turned away. In practice it produces marketing that describes the industry rather than the business, and a sales team explaining what they do differently every time.
Narrowing was the first move, and it was uncomfortable. But it is what made the specialism in cyber security worth building rather than merely claiming, and it is why the vendor relationships that followed had a logic to them.
The general point: you cannot price, package or prospect against a position you have not chosen. Everything after step one inherits its vagueness from step one.
Growth is a system, not a set of activities.
Things that happen
A campaign here, an event there, a push on referrals when the pipeline looks thin. Each one defensible on its own. None of them connected to the next, so nothing compounds and every quarter starts roughly where the last one did.
Effort that does not add up.
Things that connect
Position informs the offers. Offers determine who you target and what you say. Proof from delivered work feeds the next conversation. Renewal is designed in rather than chased. Each part makes the next one easier.
Effort that compounds.
This was the co-CEO’s own summary of what changed, and it is the more useful framing precisely because it did not come from us.
Growth as a system rather than a series of isolated activities.
Lesson three, and the one most owners underestimate: the work has to happen with the leadership team, not with the founder alone.
It is faster to work with one person. It is also how you end up with a commercial capability that lives in the same head as everything else in the business — which is the problem, not the solution. The sessions that mattered were the ones where the leadership team argued about priorities in the room and left aligned on three of them.
That is also why the foundations were still in use after the engagement ended. A capability installed in a team survives. One installed in a founder leaves when their diary fills up.
The test is what happens afterwards.
The engagement ran to 2025. Since then the business has hit £1m EBITDA on £7.9m turnover — against a target the leadership team set two years earlier, a full year ahead of plan — strengthened the leadership team, expanded the vendor ecosystem around the security specialism, and opened an indirect services channel through larger resellers.
None of that was delivered by us. All of it is the sort of thing a business can attempt once its commercial model is repeatable, and could not attempt before.
One honest caveat, since it is the obvious question: this engagement predates the Secure AI proposition. What it evidences is the operating capability to build a commercial system inside an MSP — which is the harder half of building an AI practice, and the half most MSPs are missing.
Four things worth remembering.
- Position first. Everything downstream inherits the vagueness of a position you never chose.
- Activities do not compound. A system does — position informs offers, offers inform targeting, proof feeds the next conversation.
- Install the capability in the leadership team, not the founder. One survives; the other leaves when the diary fills.
- The test of an engagement is what the business does in the two years after it ends.
The full case, including the co-CEO’s own account of the work, is here.
Would the same three lessons apply to your business?
A Growth Review is a structured conversation with you and your leadership team: where your AI practice is constrained, what removing that constraint is worth, and an honest answer on whether we are the right people to help. Ninety minutes, no cost — including when the answer is that you do not need us.
Win the business case before you win the build.