The BMK Vision Podcast

Welcome to The BMK Vision Podcast — the show for MSP leaders, IT professionals, and the vendors who support them. Hosted by the team at Bering McKinley, each episode delivers real-world insights, strategic guidance, and no-BS conversations to help you grow, scale, and profit in the managed services space. We challenge outdated models, highlight proven standards, and share stories from the front lines of consulting. Whether you’re just getting started or running a mature MSP, this podcast helps you bring clarity, structure, and profitability to your business.

The BMK Vision Podcast is a business podcast hosted by Josh Peterson, with 124 episodes on record and a Required Pod Score of 80.

Josh Peterson hosts The BMK Vision Podcast, a business show with 124 episodes published.

Our AI reads these to draft pitches. Use them as grounding for a pitch that cites a real guest and a specific topic.

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  Episode #125

  #125 - MSP Effective Hourly Rate - Why Time Entry Finally Matters | BMK VISION ROUNDTABLE

  Sep 28, 202611 min

  Josh Peterson has pushed MSP owners to enter all forty hours for more than twenty years, and lately he has noticed something new: they have mostly stopped arguing. Gary Boyle thinks the reason is money. Labor costs keep rising while contracts priced years ago never moved, and owners who want to know where the margin went end up at the timesheet. The two work through the one number Josh says explains nearly every weak service P&L: the effective hourly rate on your agreements, measured against the rate you would charge for a project hour. For most MSPs it comes out at roughly half. ---------- What We Cover in This Episode - Explain why MSP owners have stopped fighting time entry - Connect complete time entry to agreement gross profit and utilization - Trace how frustration with managed services is reviving project and hourly billing - Show how rising wages erode contracts that were never repriced - Calculate the effective hourly rate on a managed services agreement - Compare a $95 agreement hour against a $200 project hour - Diagnose weak service revenue and gross profit from a single number - Make time entry stick by explaining what leadership will measure with it ---------- 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 ---------- SEO Keywords - MSP effective hourly rate - effective hourly rate vs standard rate - managed services agreement profitability - agreement gross profit - MSP time entry - technician utilization - service gross profit - MSP pricing - labor costs - project billing ---------- Credits Host: Josh Peterson Co-Host: Gary Boyle Producer: Bering McKinley Episode: MSP Effective Hourly Rate - Why Time Entry Finally Matters

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  Episode #124

  #124 - MSP Action Items - How Detailed Is Too Detailed | BMK VISION ROUNDTABLE

  Sep 21, 202623 min

  Josh brought a live client problem to this one. He had given a single leader about thirty action items for one initiative goal, and that leader told him it felt like being treated like a child. The feedback was fair. The instinct behind the thirty items was not wrong either, and that tension is the whole episode. Josh Peterson and Gary Boyle work through where action items actually belong in a strategic plan, when a step deserves to be its own task, and how you tell whether a plan is working or the quarter simply went your way. ---------- What We Cover in This Episode - Locate action items correctly: yearly plan, quarterly initiatives, monthly goals, weekly actions - Separate a genuine action item from a step buried inside one - Understand why a consultant over-specifies, and where that stops helping the client - Spot action items that carry no link back to a larger goal - Resolve the trap of ten things that are all kind of the one thing - Prioritize and time bind, so what is next is settled rather than renegotiated weekly - Catch the drift that happens when good ideas keep joining the weekly meeting - Ask the uncomfortable quarterly question: did I pick the right initiatives, or did the year help - Reframe results over a one-year horizon instead of a one-month one - Accept a C plus process when it produces A plus results ---------- 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 ---------- SEO Keywords - MSP strategic planning - action items - strategic plan execution - managed service provider - EOS level 10 meeting - quarterly initiatives - weekly meeting cadence - accountability - micromanagement - business coaching for MSPs - prioritization - time horizon ---------- Credits Host: Josh Peterson Co-Host: Gary Boyle Producer: Bering McKinley Episode: MSP Action Items - How Detailed Is Too Detailed

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  Episode #123

  #123 - MSP Owner Pay: Stop Paying Yourself Like an Employee | FROM THE TRENCHES

  Sep 17, 20261h 12m

  A million dollars in revenue, a hundred and eighty thousand to the owner, three percent left at the bottom. The owner is not careless. They are comfortable, and comfort is what stopped the examination. Read the full breakdown: https://beringmckinley.com/blog/msp-owner-pay-why-you-should-take-profit-instead-of-a-salary?utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=short&utm_campaign=ep123&utm_content=short1 Watch the full episode: https://youtu.be/9ypR77IFGIM Apply to be a guest on the show: https://beringmckinley.com/blog#speaker-form Learn more about the BMK Vision Operating System: https://beringmckinley.com/vision #MSP #ManagedServices #BMKVisionPodcast #MSPOwner #Profitability #BusinessGrowth

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  Episode #121

  #121 - MSP Acquisitions: Not Every Buyer Is a Roll-Up | FROM THE TRENCHES

  Sep 3, 202659 min

  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. ---------- 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 ---------- Guest Links Guest LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mitch-pulver-10739b13b/ Company Website: https://www.qnsk12.com/ ---------- 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 ---------- 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 ---------- Credits Host: Josh Peterson Producer: Bering McKinley Episode: #121 - MSP Acquisitions: Not Every Buyer Is a Roll-Up

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  Episode #120

  #120 - MSP Software Costs: When Building Your Own Actually Pays | BMK VISION ROUNDTABLE

  Aug 31, 202654 min

  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 Peterson Co-Host: Gary Boyle Producer: Bering McKinley Episode: #120 - MSP Software Costs: When Building Your Own Actually Pays

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