Why I stopped waiting for referrals and built this instead.
I've been running OxygenIT for over 20 years.
For most of that time, the business grew on referrals and multiple acquistions. A happy client told a friend, that friend became a client, that client told two more. It worked, until it didn't.
In 2022 I made a deliberate decision to cut our client base by around 80%. We had grown to $4 million in revenue after acquiring another business, but the company was financially strained and we were serving clients we never should have taken on. So I cut. I focused on alignment and profitability, not headcount.
It was the right call. But it meant I had to rebuild pipeline from scratch, without referrals.
I tried a cold-calling agency first. They didn't understand MSPs. The scripts were generic, the targeting was off, and after a few months we'd burnt through a list of prospects without a single qualified conversation. I tried building an in-house SDR position. Cost us $80,000 for the year, six months to get them trained well enough to be useful, and they left before month 12.
Four consecutive quarters of zero new closed sales.
That's when I stopped trying to copy what worked for other industries and built something for MSPs specifically.
The insight was simple. MSP buyers are not inbound leads. They are time-poor business owners who respond to trust, not to cold outreach. The best conversations I've ever had with prospects were at local in-person events. Low pressure, shared context, high intent. So I built a system around that.
We mapped the ICP precisely. We built a prospect list for our city. We ran targeted outbound to fill a single in-person event per month. Not a trade show, not a webinar, but a small local breakfast or lunch where 15 people who actually fit our profile showed up and had real conversations with us.
The results: $288,000 in closed sales in the first four months of 2026, with $720,000 sitting in pipeline. After four quarters of nothing.
When I shared this with my TruMethods and Evolve peer group, the question I kept getting was: "Can you do this for us?"
VectisMSP is the answer to that question.
Tim ClarksonFounder, OxygenIT + VectisMSP