Ask a room full of MSP owners who has the best client relationships, and every hand goes up. Ask them which of those rock-solid, decade-long accounts could walk next quarter, and the room goes quiet. That gap—between how loyal owners assume their clients are and how loyal they actually are—is where a surprising amount of value quietly leaks out of a business.
This episode of Cogent Conversations tackles the loyalty myth head-on, prompted by a real and unsettling trend: across recent deals, an unusual number of “safe,” long-tenured clients have walked out the door—including three separate situations where it was the seller’s single largest customer. A 10- or 20-year relationship feels permanent right up until a new CEO arrives, a key contact retires, or someone decides to bring IT in-house. The contract says three years; the 90-day out clause says otherwise.
The good news: this is one of the most controllable risks an owner has, whether or not a sale is anywhere on the horizon. The episode lays out exactly what to watch for and what to do about it.
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Key takeaways from this episode
- Loyalty is an assumption, not an asset. The most dangerous belief an owner can hold is that long-time clients will simply always be there. Tenure breeds comfort, comfort breeds taking the relationship for granted—and that’s precisely when it’s most exposed.
- Client losses are trending, and it isn’t chance. Across the deals Cogent has worked recently, key-customer losses have spiked—five in nine months, three of them a company’s number-one account. Three top clients lost across three different deals isn’t a coincidence; it’s a signal worth taking seriously.
- A contract is only as strong as the relationship underneath it. A freshly signed three-year MSA with a 90-day out clause is really a 90-day agreement. Contracts are indicative of a relationship, not a substitute for one—and change-of-control clauses can quietly reshape what you think you own.
- Build a “watch list”—and be honest filling it out. In your heart of hearts, you usually know which clients are wobbling. Naming them on a real watch list lets you act before they leave. In one deal, an undisclosed watch list and an off-boarding list of already-canceling clients surfaced during diligence and forced a retrade—damage that early honesty would have prevented.
- Get to know your clients again. When was the last time you took your top accounts to dinner, met the new people around the table, or learned what’s actually changing in their world? Stickiness comes from staying genuinely close, not from the renewal date on a spreadsheet.
- Stack your renewals and work them on purpose. Sort your customers by who renews soonest, then ask the hard questions: Is anyone actively tending these relationships? Is there real risk here? This matters even if you never sell, because those relationships are your lifeblood—the thing that pays your people and your bills.
The throughline is simple and worth sitting with: the single most valuable asset in an MSP isn’t the stack of customer contracts—it’s the customer relationships those contracts represent. Treat them as permanent and you’ll eventually be surprised. Tend them deliberately and you protect both your profit today and your value whenever opportunity comes.
If you’d like an outside read on how sticky your top relationships really are—and where the quiet risks might be hiding—we’re always happy to talk it through.
