Standards, relationships and service: how to build a strong MSP

Most MSPs talk about standardization, but Matt Disher lives it. Disher, President of Southwest Networks in Palm Desert, California, has grown the 100% ESOP company into the Coachella Valley’s go-to IT partner. He serves businesses across 18 cities and has earned CRN MSP 500 recognition for three years consecutively. With 19% revenue growth in 2025 and a 14% average over the past few years, Southwest Networks is thriving.

MSP Success sat down with Disher, a CISSP and HCISPP-certified expert, to discuss how building better relationships with vendors, standardizing the client technology stack and delivering consistently high service quality have driven growth.

MSP Success: What are your top three growth indicators you use to measure your company, and why?

Matt Disher: Top-line, EBITDA and number of clients. All three of those indicators tell me about the health of the company. We all like to see a large top-line number, but if you aren’t keeping much of it, what good is it? EBITDA tells me if we are charging appropriately. Then we want to watch client churn. Client count alongside EBITDA shows you overall margin. We can’t continue to grow if we aren’t healthy.

MSP Success: What is one key secret to your success over the past year?

Disher: Standing firm in what we deliver and who we deliver to. I still have some older clients I need to work with but standardizing and not settling for the sake of adding a new client is important. Standardizing my stack not only helps build a better relationship with vendors, but makes our staff very efficient when issues arise, saving time and money. Compromising has cost us in the past and has led to clients that just didn’t fit.

MSP Success: What has been the biggest catalyst for growth?

Disher: Doubling down with Kaseya has let us shrink what we spend to deliver services while maintaining our high-quality service. In addition, we continue to watch our pricing and margins, making price adjustments when needed. We also make sure our TBR meetings are happening on a regular basis so that our clients know where they stand from a security stand-point for their industry and we can work with them to ensure their business remains healthy.

MSP Success: What strategies are you using to acquire new customers?

Disher: Drip marketing, direct marketing and having an SDR making outbound calls. But we’ve also been pushing hard on optimizing our website, and not just for traditional SEO, but GEO and AEO now too. With AI being used not only to do tasks but to search for companies and products, the rules are changing so things need to be done differently.

MSP Success: What were your biggest challenges this past year related to growth?

Disher: Expanding our reach from our current location has been a challenge. We have a good portion of our current market in the immediate area and, thanks to increased competition and rough business environment in California, moving further out is proving harder than I thought.

MSP Success: What advice would you give to other MSPs looking to grow?

Disher: First is to double down on your relationship with vendors you like working with. Make sure they provide you with more value than just a profit margin. Stop buying products just because you think they will be magic and make you rich – it doesn’t happen. I hear way too often about MSPs who use all these different products, and half of them do the same thing as the rest.

Second, get into a peer group and engage with it. If it wasn’t for everything we’ve learned from being in Producers Club for over 10 years, I know we would not be as healthy of a company. The programs they offer and speakers they bring in are helpful. But it’s the relationships with other MSPs that make a difference. Hearing what they’ve struggled with and how they solved it, or, even better, what not to do, is worth the time and money. I think learning what mistakes to avoid is often better than learning what to do.

Upcoming Webinar

Matt Disher will be joining Dan Tomaszewski, EVP of Channel at Kaseya, and fellow MSPs Jennifer Gilligan from IntegraMSP, Kari Renn from LoyalITy and Craig Bacheler from Bacheler Technologies, on Thursday, July 30, 1:00 PM (ET) for The power of peer: how MSP owners grow through community. Register today and join us for an honest conversation about how peer groups have helped owners shape and grow their businesses.

For more great interviews with MSP leaders, read our previous MSP Spotlight featuring Kari Renn, From the ground up: rebuilding around sales simplicity and the human touch.