It usually begins with relief. After months of limping
through outages and firefighting small crises, the business owner finally signs
a managed services contract and hands off responsibility for technology. The
headaches, it seems, are gone. There's an IT provider now, and they will take
care of everything. At first, that's true. Issues get resolved faster. Someone
answers the phone. Problems no longer eat away at weekends. The new
relationship feels like freedom.
But over time something curious happens. The provider begins
to set the pace. They decide what counts as urgent, when patches are installed,
what projects are worth undertaking. Reports arrive filled with charts and
acronyms but little that speaks to the business's goals. Conversations shift
from strategy to process, from "where are we going" to "this is how we do
things." Slowly, imperceptibly, the business is no longer driving the
relationship. The MSP is.
This is the quiet danger of outsourcing IT. When you bring
in experts, there's a temptation to step back completely, to surrender
direction along with the tasks. After all, you didn't go into medicine or
finance or law to debate server patches or firewall settings. It seems only
natural to defer. But the problem with deferring is that the liability never
leaves your desk. When something breaks, when regulators come calling, when
clients lose trust, the fine or the fallout lands squarely on you—not on the vendor.
Regulators don't fine IT providers. They fine the practice, the firm, the
business. Customers don't say "our MSP lost our data." They say "our doctor's
office leaked our records."
That's why control matters. It isn't about micromanaging
technical details or second-guessing the engineer on call. It's about defining
the goals and outcomes, setting the standards for what success looks like, and
holding the provider accountable. Without that, you drift. And drift in
technology is costly. It means projects aligned with what's convenient for the
provider rather than transformative for the business. It means problems
remediated again and again because fixing root causes is harder than billing
for time. It means a relationship that serves the vendor's efficiency more than
your growth.
Many small businesses fall into this trap willingly. They
want to be passengers, not drivers, when it comes to technology. And to a
point, that makes sense. No one running a medical office or an accounting firm
has the time to master the intricacies of patch cycles or endpoint monitoring.
But being a passenger in the technical sense doesn't mean being a passenger in
the strategic sense. You don't have to change your own oil to decide how fast
to drive or where to go. The MSP is the car, the mechanic, sometimes even the
driver. But you still own the destination.
The tension, then, is not whether you should outsource
IT—most small businesses should. The tension is whether you can outsource
judgment. That is what creeps into the gap if you aren't careful. And the signs
that it's happening are easy to miss. If you only hear from your provider when
something breaks, you're on their reactive schedule. If you don't know what
success looks like in measurable terms—downtime avoided, backups tested,
phishing simulations passed—then you've ceded the scoreboard. If reports are
too opaque to tell you anything actionable, you've let the provider define
reality on their terms. If decisions feel one-sided, framed as "this is how we
do it" instead of "here's how this supports your goals," you've already lost
alignment.
Some providers will tell you this is the way it should be.
That the whole point of an MSP is to hand them the keys and let them drive.
There's a kernel of truth in that argument. Many business owners don't want,
and shouldn't want, to hover over their IT partner. But handing over the keys
is not the same as abandoning the map. An MSP that tells you to trust them
without ever asking where you want to go is not offering service. They're
offering dependency.
The businesses that get the most from their providers are
the ones that set the destination clearly and insist on transparency along the
way. They define priorities in unambiguous terms—backups tested quarterly,
HIPAA patches installed within 30 days, average response times under four
hours. They ask for reports that measure what matters, not just what looks
impressive. They schedule quarterly business reviews and treat them as
strategic meetings, not status updates. They push their providers to think about
the future: expansion, remote work, customer experience, compliance deadlines.
And they are willing, when necessary, to push back.
That pushback matters more than many owners realize.
Providers, like any business, tend toward what's easiest for them. Sometimes
that aligns with the client's needs. Sometimes it doesn't. Without a client who
asks why, who demands justification, the path of least resistance wins. And
that path is rarely the one that maximizes long-term business value.
Of course, this isn't a call to treat your MSP as an
adversary. The best relationships are partnerships. But partnerships work only
when both sides recognize the role they play. The provider brings technical
expertise, scale, and specialized tools. The business brings context, goals,
and accountability. The intersection of those two is where value lives.
The irony is that MSPs often market themselves as partners
but act like utilities. They keep the lights on, they bill for hours, and they
fade into the background until the next outage. That may be enough for some
businesses. For those in highly regulated industries or in competitive markets,
it isn't. Peace of mind doesn't come from outsourcing responsibility. It comes
from knowing your partner is bending toward your priorities, not their
convenience.
The lesson is simple but easily forgotten. You can free
yourself from the burden of technical details. You can't free yourself from
ownership. And when you forget that, when you slip into the comfort of assuming
"they've got it covered," you trade control for dependency. You put your
business in the passenger seat.
The question every owner should ask is not whether their
provider is competent. Competence is the floor. The question is whether their
provider is aligned. Do they know where you're headed? Do they measure
themselves against the outcomes that matter to you? Do they show up when
nothing is broken to talk about how things could be better? If not, you're not
managing them. They're managing you.
And if you don't know the answer, then the real question is even simpler: who's actually driving?
