Why I stopped competing on price and started fixing the pipeline.
I have been running OxygenIT for over 20 years.
For most of that time, the business grew on referrals and a couple of acquisitions. 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.
And while that was happening, I kept thinking the answer was sharper pricing. A better proposal. A bigger discount. I was wrong. The answer was opportunity scarcity. I had no choice in front of me, so every conversation became a negotiation.
That is 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 have 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.
And here is what surprised me most. As soon as the pipeline filled, I stopped negotiating on price. I had three buyers in the room saying yes. I no longer needed to drop my rate to land the fourth. We moved our average seat pricing from $135 to $300+ in 12 months. Not because the product changed. Because the answer to "would you take a discount" became "no thanks, we are full".
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