Let’s be honest about something: every MSP owner has a great story to tell. The growth, the culture, the client who’s been with you since year two and still sends a holiday card. It’s a good story. Tell it proudly.

Here’s the twist nobody warns you about — that’s not the first thing a buyer actually reads.

The Pitch vs. The First Read

Picture the file landing on a buyer’s desk. Before anyone gets to the part where they fall in love with your culture, they’re flipping through something much less romantic: Are the contracts signed? Is the org chart real, or is it more of a suggestion? Does the business run on documented process, or does it run on one guy?

Speaking of which.

Meet Dave

Every MSP has a Dave. Great guy. Twelve years in. Knows where every bit of institutional knowledge lives, mostly because it lives in his brain and nowhere else. Ask Dave how the escalation process works and he’ll walk you through it perfectly — from memory, on the fly, like he’s reciting a favorite recipe nobody’s ever written down.

That’s charming right up until someone asks: what happens if Dave wins the lottery?

Not because Dave’s going anywhere. He’s probably not. But a business that only works because of a guy who’s never taken more than a long weekend off isn’t a system — it’s a very well-run improv show. And buyers can tell the difference in about four seconds flat.

The Part You Actually Control

Here’s the good news, and it’s genuinely good: this is one of the only things in the entire process you can fix today, with zero buyers in the room and zero deadlines breathing down your neck. Writing down a process isn’t a legal filing. It’s not a valuation model. Most of the time, it’s a page. Sometimes three.

And the payoff shows up whether a sale is five years away, five months away, or never happens at all — a business that runs on paper instead of on one irreplaceable person is just a better business to wake up and run. Every single day, not just the day someone’s evaluating it.

Try This One

Pick the one process in your company that only lives in your head — the thing you’d have to explain by phone from an airport gate if it ever came up. Write down the actual steps. Then hand that page to someone on your team and watch what happens when they try to run it without calling you.

If they pull it off, congratulations — you just made your business more valuable, and Dave gets to take an actual vacation.

This is a good chunk of what sits behind Transaction Therapy in real life — not just getting a deal across the finish line, but helping a business get genuinely ready long before anyone’s asking to see the file.