FREE RESOURCES
Practical stuff, free, no email required.
Checklists built from running the business for 24 years, organised by the problem you actually have. Use them whether or not we ever talk.
You'll notice there are no calculators here. A checklist sends you to look at your own numbers. A calculator pretends it already knows them.
CHECKLISTS
Start with the thing that's bothering you.
Each one is a list of questions to go and answer inside your own business. No sign-up, no download gate.
MSP Tool Stack Audit
Work out what you are actually paying for, what overlaps, and what nobody has opened in six months.
- List every tool with a recurring bill, including the ones on a personal card.
- For each one, name the person who would notice if it stopped working tomorrow.
- Mark every tool where a second tool does the same job.
- Check the seat count you are billed for against the seat count you use.
- Find the tools bought to solve a problem that no longer exists.
- Note which contracts auto-renew, and when.
- For each tool, write one sentence on what breaks if you cancel it.
- Identify anything a technician built a workaround around instead of using.
Next step: How to cut MSP software costs without weakening the stack — the full audit method, pricing-unit maths, and where free self-hosted alternatives fit
MSP Operational Health Check
A short list of the things that quietly decide whether the business runs you or the other way round.
- Can a ticket be resolved correctly by whoever picks it up, or does it depend on who?
- Is there a written standard for the work, and does anyone follow it?
- How many tickets this month were caused by something you already knew was broken?
- What percentage of your week was planned before the week started?
- Which recurring tasks still live in one person's head?
- When something goes wrong twice, does anything change after the second time?
- Do you know which clients generate the most unplanned work?
- If you took two weeks off, name what would break first.
Next step: gr0wpath — assesses what each technician can already do and trains the gaps; built by the developer behind MSP Reboot
Client Profitability Review
Not a calculator. A list of the things to go and look at in your own numbers.
- For each client, pull actual hours delivered against hours assumed in the agreement.
- Add the work delivered outside the agreement that nobody billed for.
- Include the tool and licence costs attributable to that client.
- Note which clients drive after-hours or emergency work, and how often.
- Identify clients whose scope has grown but whose price has not.
- Flag anyone still on pricing set more than three years ago.
- Rank clients by unplanned work generated, not by revenue.
- Decide, for each of the bottom five, whether to reprice, rescope or end it.
Pricing Review
For when you already suspect the pricing is wrong but have not sat down with it.
- Can you explain, in one sentence, how your price is calculated?
- Does that explanation match what is actually on the invoices?
- When did you last raise prices, and what happened?
- How many different price points exist for effectively the same service?
- What is included that you never intended to include?
- Which exclusions have you stopped enforcing?
- Would you sign your own agreement at your own price?
- What would you charge a brand new client for exactly what your oldest client gets?
The Difficult Client Checklist
Before you fire them, or decide to keep tolerating them, answer these honestly.
- Is the problem the client, or an agreement that never matched the work?
- Have expectations ever been set explicitly, in writing, by you?
- Does your team dread this account, and have you asked them why?
- Is the behaviour new, or has it been true since the day they signed?
- What would have to change for this account to be fine?
- Have you actually asked for that change, or just complained internally?
- What is the real cost of keeping them, including morale?
- If they left tomorrow, would you replace the revenue or the headache first?
Owner Dependency Checklist
How much of the business still routes through you, and what it would take to change that.
- List every decision in the last month that only you could make.
- Of those, mark the ones that only you could make for a good reason.
- Who signs off on purchasing, and what happens when you are unavailable?
- Who owns the relationship with your largest client — you or the business?
- Which vendors will only talk to you?
- What is the last escalation you took that someone else should have handled?
- Is there written documentation for the things only you know?
- What would a buyer discount the business for, if you left after the sale?
Security Stack Review
Whether your stack matches your actual clients and your actual liability.
- What does your agreement promise about security, in writing?
- Can you deliver that promise today, for every client on it?
- Which controls are deployed everywhere versus deployed where someone remembered?
- When did you last verify a restore, not just a backup job status?
- Who is watching alerts outside business hours, and what do they do?
- Which tools were bought after a webinar rather than after an assessment?
- What is your actual answer when a client asks if they are covered?
- Where does your liability sit if a client refuses a control you recommended?
Next step: Exploit Hound — exposure management that re-checks whether a fix actually took, across every client; built by the developer behind MSP Reboot, with a free interactive demo
Service Agreement Review
Most agreements drift. This is how to find where yours did.
- Read one agreement end to end. When did you last do that?
- Does the scope section describe the work you actually do?
- List the exclusions you no longer enforce.
- Are response times defined, measurable, and measured?
- What happens on renewal — automatic, negotiated, or forgotten?
- How do out-of-scope requests get priced, and does anyone follow it?
- Does the agreement say what happens when the client refuses your advice?
- How many versions of this agreement exist across your client base?
Help Desk Triage Review
The queue is usually where reactive operations become visible first.
- Who decides what is urgent — the client, the technician, or a rule?
- What percentage of tickets are reopened, and why?
- How long does a ticket sit before a human reads it?
- Which ticket types could be prevented rather than resolved?
- Are interruptions routed, or does everyone hear every phone call?
- Do technicians know what "done" means without asking?
- Which client generates the most tickets per endpoint?
- What is the most common ticket this month, and what would stop it recurring?
Next step: ClientSt0r — free, open-source documentation and service desk, so runbooks and a written definition of "done" sit next to the ticket
TOOLS I ACTUALLY RECOMMEND
Software worth looking at.
Third-party tools I used or would use. Nobody paid to be on this list, and there are no affiliate links.
Net Agit8or - Network Troubleshooting Tool
Free online network troubleshooting tool with ping, traceroute, DNS lookup, port scanning, and other network diagnostic capabilities. Quick and easy web-based interface for testing connectivity and di...
Visit site →Invoice Ninja
Free, cloud-based invoicing platform for small businesses and freelancers. Create professional invoices, manage payments via Stripe/PayPal/20+ gateways, track expenses, manage vendors and projects, ti...
Visit site →IT Flow
Free, open-source platform that consolidates IT management into one solution. The defacto ERP for MSPs. Features client documentation, ticketing, invoicing with Stripe integration, AI support, passwor...
Visit site →Draw.io
Free online diagram software for creating flowcharts, network diagrams, UML designs, ER diagrams, database schemas, BPMN workflows, and circuit diagrams. Browser-based with no installation required. I...
Visit site →Tactical RMM
Open-source remote monitoring and management tool built with Django, Vue, and Golang. Features remote desktop access, real-time shell execution, patch management, automated checks with email/SMS/webho...
Visit site →Greenshot
Lightweight, free screenshot tool for Windows. Quickly capture selected regions, windows, fullscreen, or complete scrolling web pages. Features built-in annotation, highlighting, obfuscation, and flex...
Visit site →Opnsense Firewall
Open-source firewall and routing platform offering enterprise-grade network protection. Features stateful firewall with IPv4/IPv6, multi-WAN load balancing, hardware failover, VPN (IPsec, OpenVPN, Wir...
Visit site →UrBackup
Open-source client/server backup platform combining image and file backups. Supports hundreds of active clients per server, fast incremental backups, web-based management, and bare metal restore capab...
Visit site →The open-source tools I wrote myself are listed separately.
See the tools I built →Worked through a checklist and didn't like the answers?
That's usually the useful outcome. Bring what you found and we'll spend an hour on it.