The technician who knows your biggest client’s network by heart is your most valuable asset and your biggest single point of failure. National studies on IT staffing consistently show that technicians leave when they are pulled in every direction at once: project management, QBRs, mentoring, procurement, all stacked on top of the engineering work they were hired to do. The owner’s instinct in that seat is usually the wrong one: “We need you across the board, we’re a small team.” What the owner should say is different.
The gap between the best MSPs and the merely competent ones is not tooling or vendor stack. It is who is doing what. Right person right seat is a framework Gino Wickman built into the Entrepreneurial Operating System, and it applies to MSPs harder than it applies to almost any other business. The right person right seat conversation is the operating discipline most MSPs skip until it costs them a client.1
What Right Person Right Seat Actually Means
Wickman split the concept into two questions. Is this person the right person, meaning do they share the company’s core values, work the way the culture requires, and behave the way the team can rely on. Is this person in the right seat, meaning does this specific role match their skills, their motivation, and their capacity.
The four quadrants that come out of those two questions are the diagnostic every MSP owner should be able to run on every team member.
- Right person, right seat. Keep them. Protect them. Get out of their way.
- Right person, wrong seat. Move them. They belong in the company, just not in that role. Every MSP has at least one of these, usually the person the owner keeps piling extra responsibilities on because the owner trusts them.
- Wrong person, right seat. They can do the job on paper but they are corrosive to the culture. Remove them. The technical output is not worth what they cost the rest of the team.
- Wrong person, wrong seat. Everyone knows. Nobody wants to say it. This one is not complicated. It is just uncomfortable.
Wickman added a third filter for the seat question, which he called GWC. Do they Get it. Do they Want it. Do they have the Capacity for it. Yes to all three means the seat fits. No to any one of them means the seat does not.
Why MSPs Put People in the Wrong Seat
MSPs are especially prone to this because the small-team logic runs deep. When the shop was five people, everyone did everything. That worked. It stopped working somewhere around fifteen or twenty employees, and the transition is usually invisible to the owner because it happens gradually.
The specific traps repeat across almost every MSP that grows past that inflection point.
The senior technician promoted into service management. They were the best at fixing things. They are now expected to run a team of people who fix things. Those are different skills. Some senior techs make the transition beautifully. Most do not, and the ones who do not usually stay in the seat too long because nobody wants to have the conversation.
The account manager doing project management. They are great with clients. They are not great with dependencies, timelines, and technical scope. Projects run late. Clients call the owner. The owner adds another responsibility to try to fix it. The pattern deepens.
The vCIO doing sales. This one is a Rewired MSP theme worth pointing at directly. When the vCIO’s compensation depends on close rates, the advisory relationship gets compromised. Right person, right seat says the strategic advisor and the salesperson are two different roles in two different seats. Putting them in one person under one incentive structure creates the conflict of interest nobody wants to name.
The owner doing everything. The most common wrong seat in any MSP. The owner is the visionary, and integrator, and salesperson, and operations lead, and top escalation point, and CFO, and often the janitor. That works for a while. It does not scale. And every one of those seats has someone in it who could do it better than the owner if the owner stopped filling all of them.
The Signals That Someone Is in the Wrong Seat
People in the wrong seat send signals long before anyone talks about it in a meeting.
They stop making progress on the parts of the role they used to be good at. They start asking for help with tasks the seat should own. They get defensive in reviews. They resent conversations about accountability. Their metrics quietly slip. They put in more hours and produce less. The people around them start working around them rather than through them.
None of those signals is a firing offense. All of them are a conversation. Right seat wrong role is a fixable problem. What is not fixable is leaving someone in the wrong seat because the conversation feels hard.
How to Have the Conversation
The seat conversation is not a performance review. It is a strategic conversation about whether the person and the role are aligned, and it should sound different from a performance conversation.
Open with the accountability chart, not the person. Talk about what the seat requires. What outcomes it owns. What decisions live in it. What skills are essential. Once the seat is defined in writing, everyone can look at it and ask the same question the owner is asking. Does the person in this seat get it, want it, and have capacity for it. Yes to all three, and the seat fits. A clean no on any one, and the honest next step is a different seat.
The best case, and the case that plays out more often than most owners expect, is that the person under discussion already knows. They have been quietly telling themselves they are not in the right seat. The conversation is not the moment they learn something new. It is the moment they hear the owner acknowledge what they already knew. Some of the best hires an MSP will ever make are the internal moves that come out of a candid seat conversation.
What Changes When You Get This Right
MSPs that treat right person right seat as an operating discipline, not a one-time HR project, look different from ones that do not.
Ticket resolution times go down because the technicians are actually doing technical work instead of project management. Client satisfaction goes up because the account manager is having strategic conversations instead of chasing invoices. Projects deliver on time because a project manager who wants the role is running them. The owner has hours in the week again because five other seats are being filled by the right people.
None of that is a tooling upgrade. All of it is a people decision, made honestly, that most owners defer for years because the conversations feel harder than they turn out to be in practice.
Where This Leaves You
Right person right seat is not a slogan. It is the discipline of putting people where their skills, motivation, and capacity actually match the role, and being honest when they do not. In an MSP built for the next ten years, no seat is a permanent assignment. The seats change as the business grows. The people change as they grow. The alignment has to keep getting re-checked.
Draw the accountability chart. Score every seat against GWC. Identify the mismatches. Move the right people into the right seats. The gains will not show up in a spreadsheet the same quarter, but they will compound every quarter after that. That is how MSPs built to last actually get built.
Sources
1 EOS Worldwide, “A Seat Issue + Drama Triangle = Leadership Danger Zone,” eosworldwide.com.
About Brent Lacy: Brent Lacy has been in the IT industry since 1997. He moved into the managed services world around 2015 and was doing vCIO work before the title even existed. He writes about the operational discipline, trust-based relationships, and strategic thinking that separate MSPs built to last from those built to bill. He is the author of Rewired MSP: Mastery, Scalability and Performance, vCIO Rewired: Virtually Conquering IT Obstacles, and Near Miss: Preventable IT Failures Threatening Your Business Security.
