Get value from your MSP peer community

A seat at the table isn’t enough

I’ve spent a lot of years on both sides of the MSP peer community table, facilitating peer groups for hundreds of MSP owners and as a peer member myself. I’ve brought my numbers, shared my problems, listened to other owners challenge my thinking and left meetings knowing there were things I needed to do when I got home.

I’ve learned something along the way: joining a peer community doesn’t guarantee you’ll get results.

I’ve watched MSP owners participate in the same program, attend the same meetings, use the same tools and frameworks, work with the same facilitators and have access to the same group of peers—yet get dramatically different results. Why? More often than not, the difference isn’t the program but in how they show up.

Here are a few ways you can get the most value from your peer community.

Peer is a participation Sport

A great peer community gives you something you don’t get inside your own company: perspective.

As MSP owners and leaders, we spend so much time inside our businesses that it’s easy to lose sight of what’s happening overall. We get used to the way things work, develop assumptions and create explanations for why certain problems exist.

Then you sit down with a group of other MSP owners and are asked a question you hadn’t considered before. That’s where peer becomes powerful.

I’ve learned from years of being both a member and a facilitator that you don’t just get value from peer. You have to extract it. Just showing up isn’t enough. You have to come prepared and be willing to talk about what’s really happening in your business. You have to contribute when someone else needs help. Then, when you leave, you have to do something with what you learned.

That last one took me a while.

Don’t focus on perfection

When I first became a peer member, I wanted to do things correctly.  If the program gave me a playbook, I wanted to understand every part of it before I implemented it. If I wasn’t sure about something, I questioned it. If I couldn’t execute it exactly as designed, I’d sometimes wait until I could. Meanwhile, I started noticing something about some of the most successful people around me. They moved.

I remember attending a workshop where we were asked to send testimonial requests to several customers right there in the room. Simple assignment: send the email. Other members opened their laptops and did it, but I didn’t. I wanted to wait until I got back to the office to make sure I had all the details right before I sent anything. Meanwhile, people sitting around me started getting testimonials back that same day.

Years later, I came across Dan Sullivan’s The 80% Approach, which gave language to something Peer had already taught me. Sullivan’s premise is that our first attempt at something is rarely  perfect, no matter how much preparation we do beforehand. More importantly, much of the learning required to improve something doesn’t happen until we start.

That’s exactly what I had watched happen around the peer table. The members getting results weren’t necessarily coming up with better ideas, but they were willing to put something into action, learn from what happened and improve it.

I was thinking: Discuss. Perfect. Execute.

Peer taught me: Discuss. Act. Learn. Refine.

There is a certain amount of preparation that’s necessary, but there’s a point where preparation stops helping you move forward and starts becoming resistance.

Don’t just take

The best Peer members I’ve known tend to be incredibly generous. They don’t only show up looking for answers to their own problems. Instead, they’re engaged when someone else has the floor, they ask questions, share experiences and tell the group what worked for them. More importantly, they’re willing to share what didn’t work.

There’s tremendous value in hearing another MSP owner say, “We tried that. Here’s what happened.” Sometimes that ten-minute conversation can save another owner months of frustration or an expensive mistake. I’ve also found that helping someone else work through a problem has a way of sharpening your own thinking. You may find yourself explaining a decision or process in your business and realize you haven’t thought about it that clearly in years.

What next?

This is just the beginning of working with a peer group. There is a deeper layer to getting the most from your peer community, and it has everything to do with what you bring to the room.

Getting the most starts with how you show up but really begins with what you are willing to put on the table. That’s worth looking at. You don’t just get value from Peer. You have to extract it.

Related: Peer groups: The difference between accountability and networking.