himpanzees use sticks to fish termites out of a mound. It’s a tool, and it works — but nobody credits the stick. The primate figured out what to do with it. Rick Murphy reaches for that image to make a point MSPs spend a lot of money forgetting: a new platform, a new integration, a new piece of software doesn’t make a client stickier by itself. What you actually do with it does.

This episode of Cogent Conversations takes on the question every MSP owner has an opinion about: what actually makes a client hard to replace? Rick works through the usual candidates — service mix, high-touch versus low-touch delivery, vertical specialization, the endless parade of tools at every trade show — before landing on the one answer that turns out to matter more than the rest of them combined.

Spoiler: it’s not the CRM.

Watch the episode and be sure to subscribe: https://youtu.be/eps12

https://youtu.be/0N5XldnSwrs?si=XgWczOblfJDolPzw

Key takeaways from this episode

• A tool is only as good as what you do with it. Rick’s chimpanzee-and-termite-stick comparison makes the point bluntly: the tool itself isn’t what matters. New software doesn’t create stickiness on its own — it has to be wielded well enough that a client actually notices and values it.
• Vertical specialization compounds retention and growth at the same time. Get genuinely good at serving one type of client — Rick’s example is oncology offices within healthcare IT — and you don’t just keep those clients longer. You get a repeatable pitch for winning the next one just like them.
• Data isn’t the same as gut. Every CRM promises to flag at-risk accounts, but Rick’s read is blunt: the tools can get in the way of the tenacity and forethought that actually catches a problem before it becomes one. Data tells you what already happened. It doesn’t replace paying attention.
• The relationship is the stickiest thing you have — not the service, not the integration, not the contract. Rick and his co-host land on this directly: tools and services all help, but none of them outperform an actual relationship. And a relationship doesn’t stay sticky just because it’s been sticky for 20 years.
• Ask what the client actually wants, not what looks good on a deck. Whether it’s donuts at a QBR or literally sitting in a dunk tank at the company picnic, the gestures that build real stickiness are the ones the client would choose — not the polished version an owner assumes they want.
• If you don’t ask, you don’t know — and it’s not the client’s job to volunteer it. Same principle Rick keeps coming back to across these conversations: closing requires asking the closing question, and staying requires asking the inquiring one. Silence isn’t information. 

Rick closes with an admission: this conversation is a little selfish. He’s watching the same pattern show up across multiple deals right now — a company’s oldest, largest customer walking away, and the owner not actually knowing why. He’ll bet you a hundred dollars on it. The tools, the verticals, the donuts all matter, but they’re all downstream of the same discipline: actually paying attention to the relationship before it becomes the reason a deal falls apart.

If you want an outside read on how sticky your own top relationships actually are, we’re happy to talk it through.