The IT Experts Podcast

About The IT Experts Podcast

The IT Experts Podcast with Ian Luckett, is designed to help ambitious IT/MSP business owners build a profitable tech business. In this show you will learn the complete tried and tested strategies that are working today as Ian helps techie business owners in the IT / MSP community on a daily basis. The content of this Podcast is a blend of expert advice and Interviews with some of the most successful people in the industry, offering massive value and a wise range of topics from his MSP profit Builder System. Whether his guests are experts from large enterprises, established IT/MSP businesses, serial entrepreneurs, or world class techies, they all have great stories and content to share. So, if you are preparing your IT/MSP business for growth, then we will help by sharing what IS and what ISN'T working in business right now. Our outcome for you listening to this podcast is that we help you to spend quality time working ON your business rather than being consumed IN it!

Publisher

Ian Luckett

Category

business · technology

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

16 Nov 2019

Latest episode

4 Oct 2026

Latest episodes

308 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   4 Oct 2026

   EP305 - The 2026 State of the Channel – What Every MSP Needs to Know with Carolyn April and Ian Luckett

   In this episode of The IT Experts Podcast, I sit down with Carolyn April, VP of Research at GTIA, to unpack the 2026 State of the Channel report and what it means for your MSP right now. We hear plenty of opinions at industry events about where the channel is heading. This conversation brings something different to the table, real data from across the entire channel ecosystem, built on fifteen years of research. If you want to understand the forces shaping your business over the next twelve months, this is one to listen to with a notebook in hand. Carolyn April opens by explaining how the State of the Channel began as a pulse check on the health of the industry, back when GTIA was the association arm of CompTIA. The sample goes well beyond membership, covering MSPs, ITSPs, resellers, consultants, vendors and distributors. That breadth gives the findings real weight, and it means the trends we discuss reflect what is happening in businesses like yours. The first big theme is confidence. MSPs are feeling optimistic, and that optimism is tempered with caution. AI brings huge opportunity alongside a significant business shift, and the wider economic and geopolitical picture makes forecasting harder than ever. I shared a conversation with an MSP owner who has lost seven good clients this year because those businesses closed their doors. Nothing to do with the service they delivered. Carolyn April explains why resilience matters so much here. The MSPs that came through the pandemic in good shape were the ones with strong operational fundamentals already in place, healthy cash flow, lines of credit and a clear view of their numbers. This links directly to something we see every week inside The MSP Growth Hub. So many owners believe a couple of new clients will fix everything. When we relaunched our account management framework with 55 MSPs in the room, not a single new sales tactic was needed to give them nearly two years of valuable work. The data backs this up. The companies ahead of plan, who track their margins and know their numbers, are the same companies doing more with AI, doing more with cybersecurity and setting higher growth targets. We then explore what surprised Carolyn April most this year. For the UK and Ireland, workforce and skills gaps came out as the number one challenge, the only region to rank it first. We talk about the lasting effects of Brexit on skills mobility, the growing maturity of offshore service desks and account management, and the leadership challenge of managing remote teams well. Around 65 to 70 percent of the conversations we have inside The MSP Growth Hub come back to leadership, so this one landed close to home. AI adoption is where the gap becomes really clear. The study found 98 percent of channel companies are using AI in some form. Only 20 percent have a strategic approach with governance, policy and a named leader responsible for AI. That maturity gap is immense, and Carolyn April makes a strong case for getting your own house in order before taking AI services to market. The opportunity is huge. Complexity is the number one driver of channel health, and customers who dive in too quickly, or not at all, need a trusted advisor to guide them. That is why consulting is on the rise. We also tackle pricing. Token based AI costs are already causing sticker shock at enterprise level, and traditional per user and per device models are starting to feel out of step. Consumption and outcome based pricing are on the horizon, and nobody has the blueprint yet. My advice is simple, approach with caution and avoid embedding every tool so deeply that you cannot unwind it. The biggest surprise of all was vendor satisfaction. In the UK and Ireland, the share of partners who were very satisfied with their vendors fell from 37 percent to 19 percent. Programme changes, a heavier sales focus and the disruption AI is bringing have all played a part, alongside a wave of new AI vendors competing for attention. Carolyn April closes with three clear priorities. Put AI governance and a strategic leader in place first. Strengthen your operational fundamentals across finance, sales and marketing. Tackle workforce challenges through outsourcing, partnering with other MSPs and upskilling the brilliant people already on your team. The mindset shift is clear. Growth comes from building a resilient, well led business first, then using AI and new opportunities to accelerate from a strong foundation. To get hold of the full report, head to GTIA.org (https://gtia.org/) and become a member. You can also catch Carolyn at ChannelCon EMEA in London on 9 and 10 November, where she will be presenting this research and hosting a panel with some of the biggest names in the industry. You can connect with Carolyn April on her LinkedIn HERE. Make sure to check out our Ultimate MSP Growth Guide, a free guide that walks you through a proven process to take your MSP from stuck to scalable, without working even more hours. It's 44 pages rammed with advice, insights and inspiration to help you decide what support is available to you now if you want to grow and scale your business. Click HERE to get your copy. Connect on LinkedIn HERE with Ian and also with Stuart by clicking this LINK And when you're ready to take the next step in growing your MSP, come and take the Scale with Confidence MSP Mastery Quiz (https://scaleyourmspquiz.com/). In just three minutes, you'll get a 360-degree scan of your MSP and identify the one or two tactics that could help you find more time, engage & align your people and generate more leads. If you're serious about growth and want to explore what this could look like for your MSP, you can book a Right Fit Clarity Call with us HERE. OR To join our amazing Facebook Group of over 400 MSPs where we are helping you Scale Up with Confidence, then click HERE Until next time, look after yourself and I'll catch up with you soon!

2. 

   27 Sept 2026

   EP304 - Stop Chasing Revenue – Start Building a More Valuable MSP with Ian Luckett

   In this episode of The IT Experts Podcast, I want to challenge one of the most common success measures in our industry. Are you measuring success, or are you simply measuring size? After more than 300 episodes, some themes keep coming back, and this is one we hear every week from prospects, clients and the wider community. It is the gap between how much revenue you bring in and how much profit you keep, and why closing that gap is the key to building a more valuable MSP. So many owners set their sights on the million-pound turnover mark, or on growing to 30 people, as if headcount were the prize. I know MSPs well past a million pounds who are making very little, and I know MSPs turning over six or seven hundred thousand who are absolutely nailing it, with more in their pocket than competitors twice their size. A bigger turnover means more money flowing through the business. It often means more cost flowing out the other end too. You can run a profitable million pound MSP with eight to ten people. When I hear of a million-pound business carrying 24 people, I know straight away the numbers cannot work. Bigger teams bring more complexity, and that complexity lands on the owner. Most MSP owners never planned to lead large teams, which is why leadership is the area we help with most inside The MSP Growth Hub. Here is the test I often share. If you are too busy to make decisions, too caught up in the tech, or the person everything waits for, you have a leadership opportunity sitting right in front of you. The most successful MSPs grow because the owner has time to think. Strategic thinking time leads to better decisions, better clients, and better profit. We also talk about the clients who quietly drain your margin. Many owners fear saying no to anyone. Some of your biggest clients are the noisiest and most demanding, and very few MSPs track profitability by client or by service. In some cases, you would be better off letting that client go, because the cost of serving them outweighs the value they bring. I share the story of MSPs who joined us bloated, with ten or twelve people in the wrong roles. One owner described his approach as destroy and rebuild. He took control of his most important clients, built the right team around them, and came out leaner and stronger. Another member recently sold his business for an eight times multiple with a smaller team than he had two years earlier. He walked out with no earnout, because he had become ONN, owner not needed. Three or four years before the sale, he knew his numbers so well it was almost unhealthy. That is how a more valuable MSP is built. From there, I walk through four practical actions. The first is to measure net profit and EBITDA before you celebrate revenue. Keep a close eye on client concentration, so that no single client represents more than 10 to 15 percent of your revenue. I share an old analogy about pound coins leaving a drawer each morning and returning each evening with friends, because every pound that leaves your business should come back with a return. Track revenue per employee and aim for north of £150,000, and track profit per employee alongside it. These are the numbers that separate a busy business from a more valuable MSP. The second action is to attract profitable, right fit clients. If someone is shopping on price, let them go. Make sure projects and managed services each stand on their own commercially, so a dangling carrot does not leave you in a pickle. The third is to build a lean team with the right people in the right roles. Keep spans of control to six to eight people per leader, design roles that are plug and play, and use AI to upskill your people and raise quality, rather than to cut heads. The fourth is to review your KPIs monthly and quarterly so they drive business value. Even a small MSP can start with one or two. This is not about boiling the ocean. Something Stuart taught me many years ago still guides how we work. Where is the data? Show me the data. When your decisions rest on meaningful business metrics, you invest with confidence, you know which opportunities will pay, and you build a more valuable MSP that is easier to scale and far easier to sell on your terms. Better clients beat more clients. We do not want you to build the biggest MSP in town. We want you to build the best one. So I will leave you with the same question I close the episode with. What are you measuring in your MSP this month to move your profitability up? Answer that honestly and you are already on the path to a more valuable MSP, with more time, confidence and freedom as the owner. Make sure to check out our Ultimate MSP Growth Guide, a free guide that walks you through a proven process to take your MSP from stuck to scalable, without working even more hours. It's 44 pages rammed with advice, insights and inspiration to help you decide what support is available to you now if you want to grow and scale your business. Click HERE to get your copy. Connect on LinkedIn HERE with Ian and also with Stuart by clicking this LINK And when you're ready to take the next step in growing your MSP, come and take the Scale with Confidence MSP Mastery Quiz. In just three minutes, you'll get a 360-degree scan of your MSP and identify the one or two tactics that could help you find more time, engage & align your people and generate more leads. If you're serious about growth and want to explore what this could look like for your MSP, you can book a Right Fit Clarity Call with us HERE. OR To join our amazing Facebook Group of over 400 MSPs where we are helping you Scale Up with Confidence, then click HERE Until next time, look after yourself and I'll catch up with you soon!

3. 

   20 Sept 2026

   EP303 - Why Raising Your Prices Could Be The Fastest Way to Win More Clients with Ian Luckett and Stuart Warwick

   In this episode of The IT Experts Podcast, Stuart Warwick joins me to talk about one of the topics that makes most MSP owners squirm in their seat, raising your prices. It sounds simple on paper and it gets an eye roll from almost everyone who hears it, yet putting your prices up is genuinely one of the fastest routes to a healthier, more profitable MSP. We start by unpacking why raising your prices feels like such a psychological battle. Most MSP owners are scared their clients will leave, go out to tender, or feel hard done by. What we uncover is that the real block sits underneath that fear. Raising your prices is really about positioning yourself for value. Until you value your own business and translate that into the right pricing for what you deliver, no pricing conversation will land properly with your clients. Stuart makes a point that stuck with me. Most MSPs have not touched pricing for their legacy clients in five, ten, even fifteen years. Costs keep moving, hardware, chips, licensing, inflation, yet the invoice stays the same. The starting point for raising your prices is always your numbers. Do you know your margins? Do you know what each client is actually costing you to service? Without that clarity, you cannot confidently or intelligently decide where prices need to move. One story from the episode says it all. A client of ours had a base price of between fifteen and twenty pounds a user and genuinely believed they could not compete on anything higher. It took five years for them to shift that belief. Once they rebuilt their packaging, told the story properly to their existing base, and phased the change in gently, they added one hundred and eighty eight thousand pounds a year in additional profit. That is profit, not turnover, and it transformed everything from pensions to investment in new technology, eventually helping them toward a strong exit. We also talk about the ninety percent problem. New clients are easy. You set your pricing, your margin looks healthy, and everyone is pleased. The real heavy lifting sits with your existing base, because the vast majority of your recurring revenue usually sits on legacy packages that have never caught up with the value you now deliver. Raising your prices for existing clients means selling a story, not simply issuing a new invoice. Explain what has changed, cybersecurity, cloud, automation, the modern tools you now provide, and frame the new pricing around the outcomes they get rather than the number itself. Stuart shares a brilliant piece of thinking here too. If you have a sensible, well framed conversation with a client about raising your prices and they agree, you make more profit. If they say no and decide to leave, you also make more profit because you remove a client who was quietly costing you money. It genuinely is a win either way, and once you know your numbers, most MSPs can point to two or three noisy clients who are doing exactly that. We close by talking about confidence and selling without selling. Nobody loves the idea of pushing products, yet raising your prices sits far more comfortably when you shift the framing from selling to helping a client buy. Know your numbers, build real belief in the value you deliver, tell the story with clarity, and bring your existing clients with you at a pace that respects the relationship you have built. Price condition new clients from day one so annual increases become an expected part of working with you rather than an awkward surprise years down the line. Higher profits, stronger retention, and the confidence to invest in recruitment and marketing all start from the same place. Raising your prices properly, and believing you deserve to. Make sure to check out our Ultimate MSP Growth Guide, a free guide that walks you through a proven process to take your MSP from stuck to scalable, without working even more hours. It's 44 pages rammed with advice, insights and inspiration to help you decide what support is available to you now if you want to grow and scale your business. Click HERE to get your copy. Connect on LinkedIn HERE with Ian and also with Stuart by clicking this LINK And when you're ready to take the next step in growing your MSP, come and take the Scale with Confidence MSP Mastery Quiz (https://scaleyourmspquiz.com/). In just three minutes, you'll get a 360-degree scan of your MSP and identify the one or two tactics that could help you find more time, engage & align your people and generate more leads. If you're serious about growth and want to explore what this could look like for your MSP, you can book a Right Fit Clarity Call with us HERE. OR To join our amazing Facebook Group of over 400 MSPs where we are helping you Scale Up with Confidence, then click HERE Until next time, look after yourself and I'll catch up with you soon!

Who has been a guest on The IT Experts Podcast

Names identified in recent episode analyses. Showing up to five guests.

• Graham Stead
• Ali Stewart
• Julie Hutchison
• Stuart Warwick
• Clare Elliott

Reach and audience

Public platform figures. Ratings count people who left a rating, not total listeners.

Apple Podcasts (US)

5.0 / 5

1 ratings

Spotify

5.0 / 5

13 ratings

Podcast Authority Score: 59 / 100

A composite of feed quality, social presence, YouTube performance and engagement. Read the methodology.

Quality

84

Social presence

0

YouTube

0

Engagement

85

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Guest appearances

Books guests

Based on episode analysis; this does not confirm that the show is currently accepting guests.

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