The BMK Vision Podcast

Every MSP owner gets the same email. Someone would like to talk about acquiring your company. Most go straight to the trash, and the rest get filed under one mental category: private equity, roll-up, spreadsheet, faceless. Mitch Pulver is the person on the other end of one of those emails, and he is none of those things.
Mitch is the CEO of Quality Network Solutions, a managed services provider supporting more than 200 K-12 school districts across Illinois and Missouri. A Naval Academy graduate and former surface warfare officer, he spent two and a half years searching for a business to buy, moved his family to a town where he knew nobody, and has run it ever since. In this conversation he explains what a search fund actually is, how it differs from the institutional capital everyone pictures, and what he sees coming for owners of smaller MSPs.
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What We Cover in This Episode
- Distinguish a search fund from the institutional private equity most owners imagine- Understand why a two and a half year search turned out to be a sales process- Hear what the first months after an acquisition actually feel like from the inside- Watch a bank balance fall through a seasonal buying cycle toward payroll- Translate military standardization into a company that documented almost nothing- Learn why going too hard too fast breaks the culture you just bought- See why the investment committee exists to poke holes rather than approve deals- Rethink outreach: why the bought email list stopped working years ago- Meet the river guides who actually connect buyers and owners- Understand where the buyer market for subscale MSPs is heading as capital moves upmarket
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Guest Links
Guest LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mitch-pulver-10739b13b/Company Website: https://www.qnsk12.com/
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YouTube (Video Podcast):https://www.youtube.com/@beringmckinleyvision?sub_confirmation=1
Learn More About the Vision Platform:https://beringmckinley.com/vision
Apply to Be a Guest:https://beringmckinley.com/blog#speaker-form
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SEO Keywords
- MSP acquisitions- Search fund- MSP private equity- Selling your MSP- MSP exit planning- Entrepreneurship through acquisition- MSP valuation- Managed service providers- MSP succession planning- K-12 IT services- BMK Vision Podcast
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Credits
Host: Josh PetersonProducer: Bering McKinleyEpisode: #121 - MSP Acquisitions: Not Every Buyer Is a Roll-Up

Josh Peterson is three billing cycles into a licensing dispute. His team submitted cancellations four months ahead of renewal, in writing. The renewal date passed without acknowledgement, the next invoice came back larger because the annual increase had been applied to seats that should have been gone, and the eventual resolution was a credit rather than a refund.
Gary Boyle declines the villain reading and offers a mechanism instead. Bundled low entry pricing built an installed base too cheap to grow into, which left price on existing customers as the only lever, and longer contracts followed to protect it. From there the two work toward the question an owner can actually act on: whether an MSP should build its own software instead of paying for it, and the tool spend threshold that decides the answer.
----------What We Cover in This Episode
- Trace how a correctly filed cancellation becomes three billing cycles of dispute- Separate a credit from a refund and price the difference- Explain why bundling produced the annual price increase- Connect longer contract terms directly to stalled expansion revenue- Isolate the input costs no vendor or customer controls- Test the Arizona Iced Tea theory that a company can simply hold its price- Compare flat fee and consumption models on client alignment- Run the real arithmetic on building your own tooling with AI assistance
----------Your Hosts
Josh Peterson: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joshdpeterson/Gary Boyle: https://www.linkedin.com/in/garyboyle/Bering McKinley: https://beringmckinley.com
----------Subscribe and Follow BMK Vision
YouTube (Video Podcast):https://www.youtube.com/@beringmckinleyvision?sub_confirmation=1
Learn More About the Vision Platform:https://beringmckinley.com/vision
Apply to Be a Guest:https://beringmckinley.com/blog#speaker-form
----------SEO Keywords
- MSP software costs- PSA pricing- RMM pricing- MSP vendor lock in- Build versus buy- Managed services pricing- Consumption pricing model- MSP profitability- MSP tool stack- BMK Vision Podcast
----------Credits
Host: Josh PetersonCo-Host: Gary BoyleProducer: Bering McKinleyEpisode: #120 - MSP Software Costs: When Building Your Own Actually Pays

Ask an MSP owner what a good per user rate is and watch what happens. Most of them will not say a number. They will contextualize, credential themselves, and explain the whole methodology before the answer ever arrives. Andrea Lipton has spent thirty years studying why we do that, and she has a framework for stopping.
Andrea Lipton is Director of Delivery for Training as a Service at ISG (Information Services Group), with a career that runs from JP Morgan to Harvard Business Publishing to NIIT. In this conversation we explore why explaining before answering costs you trust, how to build rapport without running an interrogation, and AEIOU, the self-coaching framework she built and now teaches to her teams.
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What We Cover in This Episode
- Trace the habit of explaining first back to school, credentialing, and the fear of being challenged- Flip the funnel with the pyramid principle: deliver the conclusion, then the analysis- Run AEIOU in a live conversation: answer, explain, inquire, onboard, update- Separate relational selling from diagnostic selling, and why both get called salesy- Replace "why" questions with what and how questions that do not trigger defensiveness- Ask someone to put the real question on loudspeaker when the stated question is not the real one- Diagnose why early career technicians lose client trust without knowing it- Plus: a bonus segment on poker, game theory, and mapping a buyer's utility curve
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Guest Links
Andrea Lipton on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aflipton/
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Subscribe & Follow BMK Vision
YouTube (Video Podcast):https://www.youtube.com/@beringmckinleyvision?sub_confirmation=1
Learn More About the Vision Platform:https://beringmckinley.com/vision
Apply to Be a Guest:https://beringmckinley.com/blog#speaker-form
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SEO Keywords
- MSP sales calls- MSP sales training- Managed service providers- Client communication- Rapport building- AEIOU framework- Pyramid principle- Direct communication- Soft skills for technicians- MSP business growth- BMK Vision Podcast- Game theory in sales
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Credits
Host: Josh PetersonGuest: Andrea LiptonProducer: Bering McKinleyEpisode: #119 - MSP Sales Calls: Stop Over-Explaining, Answer the Question

Most MSP strategic plans do not fail because the goal was wrong. They fail because the plan carried more initiatives than the company could ever execute.
In this BMK Vision Roundtable, Josh Peterson and Gary Boyle take apart a real example: a client plan Josh built that Gary told him was overbuilt. The goal was sound. The volume underneath it was not. What follows is a working definition of an initiative, the reason most owners misfile efficiency work under a revenue goal, and a hard number for how much a six month plan can actually hold.
Gary Boyle is a Partner for Strategy & Business Development at Bering McKinley and co-hosts the roundtable with Josh.
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What We Cover in This Episode
- Why excitement in a planning session reliably produces an unexecutable plan- Where the attainable half of SMART quietly breaks- Defining an initiative as a driver, and what sits below it- Why "two new clients a month" is a trap without the math behind it- The reason efficiency drives gross profit and not revenue- The full set of revenue levers available to an MSP- How many initiatives fit in a six month window, and how they split by quarter- The rule that disqualifies anything already working from your plan
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Subscribe & Follow BMK Vision
YouTube (Video Podcast):https://www.youtube.com/@beringmckinleyvision?sub_confirmation=1
Learn More About the Vision Platform:https://beringmckinley.com/vision
Apply to Be a Guest:https://beringmckinley.com/blog#speaker-form
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SEO Keywords
- MSP strategic planning- Strategic initiatives- MSP revenue drivers- Goal setting for MSPs- SMART goals- Six month planning- Managed service providers- BMK Vision Podcast
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Credits
Host: Josh PetersonCo-Host: Gary BoyleProducer: Bering McKinleyEpisode: #118 - MSP Strategic Plans: How Many Initiatives Is Too Many

Most MSP owners think the risk in a contract is the part the client might sue over. The real damage is quieter: the work you never priced, the increase you never took, and the invoice you let age past ninety days. Tom Fafinski has spent 35 years as an attorney to managed service providers, and Alexander Caplan runs an international MSP out of London. Josh Peterson puts the two of them in a room and works through the agreement from first handshake to final collection.
Tom Fafinski is co-founder of Virtus Law in Minnesota, a firm he describes as a general counsel's office for MSPs, covering master services agreements, mergers, governance, and estate planning for owners. Alexander Caplan is founder of Synergy Associates, a London-headquartered MSP running for more than twenty years with teams in Paris, New York, Los Angeles, Hong Kong, and the UAE. Between them they see the same contract from both sides of the table.
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What We Cover in This Episode
- Diagnose why a small managed services agreement now gets routed to a client's legal team- Replace the twenty eight page MSA with a staged four page document plus addenda- Avoid the unlimited liability hiding in a client's standard NDA- Document what is excluded, not just what is included, and log every declined service- Build an inflation clause that earns more than inflation- Calculate what a two percent cost increase really does to a twenty percent margin- Set a termination fee a judge will actually enforce- Escalate AR before ninety days instead of after- Convert a payment plan into a promissory note secured by a confession of judgment- Withdraw services without it reading as an act of aggression
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Guest Links
Tom Fafinski LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thomasfafinski/Virtus Law: https://www.virtuslaw.com/
Alexander Caplan LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexandercaplan/Synergy Associates: https://synergy.tech/
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Subscribe and Follow BMK Vision
YouTube (Video Podcast):https://www.youtube.com/@beringmckinleyvision?sub_confirmation=1
Learn More About the Vision Platform:https://beringmckinley.com/vision
Apply to Be a Guest:https://beringmckinley.com/blog#speaker-form
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SEO Keywords
- MSP contracts- Managed services agreement- MSP collections- Accounts receivable- Termination fee- Contract negotiation- Agreement gross profit- Out of scope billing- Managed service providers- BMK Vision Podcast
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Credits
Host: Josh PetersonProducer: Bering McKinleyEpisode: #117 - MSP Contracts and Collections: When a Client Stops Paying

Most MSP company goals say the same thing. Hit a valuation, sell the business. It is an honest goal and a reasonable one, and it satisfies every conventional rule about how a goal is supposed to be written. It is also a goal nobody on your leadership team will ever get out of bed for.
Josh Peterson and Gary Boyle, Partner for Strategy & Business Development at Bering McKinley, work through what a company goal is actually for, why MSPs stall at two million, why identical tactics build very different businesses depending on what they are pointed at, and where the reason for a goal belongs once you finally write the goal down.
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What We Cover in This Episode- Diagnose why MSPs plateau at two million and what changes above it- Separate pushing tactics into a business from pulling them through a vision- Interrogate "provide for my family" into a real number and a real life- Ask the two questions that precede every long term goal- Explain why a valuation target mobilizes nobody but the owner- Show what an owner independence goal does to a leadership team- Decide whether the number or the purpose belongs in the headline- Name the peer group as the real ceiling on what an owner believes is possible
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Host LinksJosh Peterson LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joshdpeterson/Gary Boyle LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/garyboyle/Company Website: https://beringmckinley.com
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Subscribe & Follow BMK VisionYouTube (Video Podcast):https://www.youtube.com/@beringmckinleyvision?sub_confirmation=1Learn More About the Vision Platform:https://beringmckinley.com/visionApply to Be a Guest:https://beringmckinley.com/blog#speaker-form
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SEO Keywords- MSP company goals- MSP goal setting- MSP strategic planning- MSP two million ceiling- MSP exit planning- leadership team alignment- owner dependency- long term business goals- Vision Operating System- MSP business strategy
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CreditsHost: Josh PetersonProducer: Bering McKinleyEpisode: #116 - MSP Company Goals: Why Nobody Rallies Behind a Valuation | BMK VISION ROUNDTABLE