MSP Business Benchmark

ConnectWise benchmark data places the median at $15,000 per month per technician. Top-quartile MSPs reach $22,000+ through automation, tiered service delivery, and higher endpoint ratios. Below $10,000 per technician usually signals over-staffing relative to recurring revenue.

Annual client retention above 92% is considered good by Channel E2E industry surveys. MSPs below 80% typically spend 15%+ of revenue on sales and marketing to replace lost clients, while those above 92% spend under 8%. SLA compliance is the strongest leading indicator of future retention.

Endpoint ratio measures managed endpoints per technician. ConnectWise data shows top-quartile MSPs manage 350-500 endpoints per tech through automation and RMM tooling. Below 150 endpoints per tech usually means manual processes are consuming capacity that could serve more clients.

Healthy MSP gross margins run 55-65% according to ConnectWise benchmarks. Below 40% usually indicates excessive hardware resale (low margin) or under-pricing managed services. Top-quartile MSPs achieve 65-75% by weighting their mix toward managed security and cloud services.

ConnectWise data shows MSPs with 80%+ recurring revenue command 8-12x EBITDA multiples at acquisition versus 4-6x for project-heavy firms. Recurring revenue reduces buyer risk and makes cash flow predictable, which is the single strongest driver of MSP business value.

Enter your actual numbers across 8 dimensions. The tool compares each metric against ConnectWise IT Nation benchmarks and shows where you sit relative to poor, average, good, and excellent thresholds. You see your weakest areas ranked by gap size, so you know exactly where improvement delivers the most impact.

Common signals: a solo or junior IT person handling more than they can manage, recurring fires across security and operations, mission-critical uptime requirements that exceed in-house coverage capacity, growth that is outpacing IT hiring, or a budget where MSP retainers fit at or below the loaded cost of equivalent in-house staffing.

Industry baseline expectations include MFA enforced across every employee and every business application, centralized patching with 7-day critical-patch SLAs, business-grade endpoint protection (EDR rather than free antivirus), quarterly security-awareness training with simulated phishing, off-site immutable backups with quarterly tested restores, dedicated email security beyond default provider filtering, and a documented incident-response plan with a named lead.

Common triggers: hardware end-of-life, an acquisition or major growth event, regulatory or contractual cloud requirements, modernization of legacy applications, or a clear cost or agility business case.

Backup is the practice of creating copies of data; disaster recovery (DR) is the broader practice of restoring business operations after an event, including backup restoration plus infrastructure rebuild, application failover, and process resumption.

Mid-market businesses without existing security controls typically need 6-12 months from project start to SOC 2 Type 1 readiness, and an additional 3-12 months of operational observation period for SOC 2 Type 2.