Bering McKinley

Bering McKinley We all have our limitations, and you may have trouble recognizing the awful truth—you are the problem.

Bering McKinley is the partner you call when you are in need, Our proven operational model gets results for IT solution providers and professional services companies around the world. Bering McKinley is the partner you call when one of two things are happening: you’re pulling out your hair trying to figure out your next move, or nothing has worked from the start. We help you develop both yourself

and your business, determining where your limitations truly lie. Our proven operational model gets results for IT solution providers and professional services companies around the world.

Every MSP owner has had this month. You go to cut licenses you genuinely do not use anymore, and the first job is not ca...
09/03/2026

Every MSP owner has had this month. You go to cut licenses you genuinely do not use anymore, and the first job is not cancelling anything. It is finding your own contract.

Four months of written notice. The renewal date comes and goes. The next invoice is bigger, because the annual increase got applied to the seats you cancelled. Three billing cycles later somebody agrees with you and offers a credit.

What stuck with us was not the vendor. It was the question underneath it. If a client called you tomorrow and said you had not done anything for them in a month, would your answer feel good?

09/01/2026

A consultant once told Josh he had too many initiatives running. He did not hear the warning at all. He was too pleased that someone had called his scattered work an initiative in the first place.

It took six years to understand what the word actually meant.

Every MSP owner has one engineer who is brilliant and impossible with clients.The tickets get closed. The client still a...
08/31/2026

Every MSP owner has one engineer who is brilliant and impossible with clients.

The tickets get closed. The client still asks for someone else next time.

Andrea Lipton has a theory about why, and it is not attitude. People who get very good at something become unconsciously competent, and then forget that they are. The technician stops registering that the client cannot see what he sees. So the third password reset starts sounding like a stupid question, and clients hear that even when nobody says it.

Her instruction is simple enough to put on a wall. Answer it anyway. Then ask whether they'd like to know how to stop needing you every week.

Most of us have handled that engineer with a performance review that says be nicer. Nobody ever gave him something to practice.

08/28/2026

This is the part that stings.

When you let a balance ride, your client does not think you are being generous. They think you do not need the money. And once they think that, you are not their service provider anymore. You are their line of credit.

There is a moment in every planning session where the room gets excited and the plan quietly stops being executable.Nobo...
08/27/2026

There is a moment in every planning session where the room gets excited and the plan quietly stops being executable.

Nobody notices, because no single item on the list looks unreasonable. Fourteen initiatives, and every one of them is defensible on its own. The total is the thing nobody writes down.

Twelve months later that document is a little uncomfortable to open.

The part that surprises most owners is what should get cut first. Not the ambitious material. The work that is already going well. If the sales engine is running, it does not belong in the plan at all.

Look at your current plan. How much of it is aimed at something that is already fine?

08/25/2026

Ten years into his business, Gary kept seeing the same guy on a treadmill at ten in the morning and decided, on no evidence at all, that the man had figured something out.

He was right. Same entrepreneur group, five years older, already exited.

Sometimes the goal you cannot picture is just a goal nobody around you has reached yet.

Every MSP owner has had this client. They went quiet, then apologetic, then quiet again, and the work kept going out the...
08/24/2026

Every MSP owner has had this client. They went quiet, then apologetic, then quiet again, and the work kept going out the door because nobody wanted to be the one who cut them off.

Thirty days became sixty. Sixty became ninety.

Here is the uncomfortable part. That was never really a finance problem, and it was never really about them. It was a decision you made by not making one, and your client read it exactly right.

So what would you have actually done differently at day thirty?

08/21/2026

The most common version of "we run EOS": no facilitator, drifting priorities, and a to-do list that moved into nicer software. Josh has seen this movie more than a few times. Full breakdown in the first comment.

08/21/2026

The hardest thing to teach is not the tech.

Twenty three years in, this owner is interviewing as many people with no technical background as with one. You can teach someone the tools. You cannot teach them to care.

Every MSP owner has been asked some version of this question and gone blank.So where is this going? What do you actually...
08/20/2026

Every MSP owner has been asked some version of this question and gone blank.

So where is this going? What do you actually want out of it?

Seven times out of ten the first answer back is "I can't see myself not working." Josh used to hear that as somebody unwilling to engage. Gary hears it as a description of who that owner spends time with.

Ten years into his own business, Gary kept seeing a guy on a treadmill at ten in the morning. Same gym, same hour. Gary felt like he was getting away with something. The other guy looked like he was exactly where he was supposed to be. Turned out he was five years older, in the same entrepreneur group, and had already sold his business.

Gary set a goal to exit by forty. He did.

You cannot write down a destination you have never watched anyone reach.

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650 Warrenville Road
Lisle, IL
60532

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+12123003016

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