Stop Being the Managed No Provider

Mature MSPs with great security stacks and amazing margins are going to die. Not all of them. Just the ones in the habit of telling customers "no" or "we can't support that."

Their stack is fine. The reflex is what kills them.

I was listening to a podcast today with Netflix's CPO Elizabeth Stone talking about how the role of technology is shifting with AI. She kept coming back to two things: scaffolding and systems thinking.

That was the inspiration for writing this blog.

The math has changed  

ChatGPT will confidently tell your customer it can help them keep IT running secure, stable, and reliable without you.

Meanwhile, your customer is feeling pressure to adopt AI faster than you're ready to support it.

Your customer doesn't care about your security concerns. They don't care about your stack. They don't want to buy your MRR token arbitrage offering.

They want to automate the things that hurt in their business, and they don't know how.

Your customers are looking for someone to talk to… and someone is looking to talk to your customers.

If you open with "nOboDy GeTs AdMiN oN My WatCH" or launch into the standard "BuT SeCuRiTy" tirade, you lose. Maybe not this quarter. But you lose.

Two important definitions 

Just think differently about what you're building. Which means getting specific about those two words:

Scaffolding is the reusable context you build once so AI produces the same quality output every time, for everyone. On a job site, the scaffolding is not the building. It's the structure that lets every worker get to the right spot and do consistent work safely. Same idea here. A documented brand guide. A product knowledge base the AI can read. A prompt template with real examples baked into it. Context and guardrails that live somewhere other than one person's head.

Systems thinking is solving for the whole workflow instead of just the ticket in front of you. It's asking "who else does this, how often, and what breaks downstream?" instead of "how do I close this out?" Anybody can fix the broken thing. A systems thinker builds the thing that keeps it from breaking for everybody.

Scaffolding is the thing you build. Systems thinking is how you pick what to build next.

What it actually looks like 

Kyle Christensen built a company brand guide for us at Empath that anyone on our team can connect to an AI.

Now when someone uses Claude to design a slide deck or a marketing one-pager, it gets our branding 99% right on the first pass. Every user. Every document. It saves time on every single document and the outcomes are more consistent.

That's scaffolding.

It's reusable.

It produces consistent outcomes.

And it wasn't hard to build.

Same idea, next problem. As we ship new features and entirely new products (foreshadowing), Empath needs product information stored somewhere the AI can access it, so everyone gets the same answer, and the answer is always current.

More scaffolding. Still not complicated.

That took someone who understands how the company actually works. A tech who has no idea what your customer does all day can't spot that need, let alone solve it. And if you don't solve it, your customer will. Their way. With whatever tool they found on LinkedIn. The tool you now have to figure out how to support.

This is a people problem 

Building reusable scaffolding takes a systems thinker. Somebody who asks how one system can serve multiple people across multiple departments. And it’s part of the service that you should be delivering to your customers.

Identifying who thinks this way and can start engaging your customers in this fashion should be your 2026 focus, and it won't be easy… It’s a strategic shift, but it’s you running to where the ball is going - and that’s important.

As you take this journey, new rock stars will emerge on your team, and probably not the ones you'd predict.

Some of your best people will struggle with the change, and you need to support them. The ground is shifting under their feet, so expect them to get uncomfortable.

Your job as a leader is to shepherd them through it. Not to announce it in a Monday meeting and hope. Not to tell them that AI is taking their jobs. But to walk with them and show them that AI is changing their jobs and raising the bar on what good output looks like.

Stop Scrolling - Go do the work! 

Your customers will insist on using AI, with or without you. Showing up with small, concrete starter ideas helps them solidify what they're actually asking for. It also establishes you as the systems thinker who can help them deploy this stuff for real.

You can't sell that from a slide. You have to have done it. Be customer zero. Do it for your MSP first.

So here's your challenge:

1. Pick one problem in your own company you can solve with systems thinking and scaffolding. Go do it now.

2. Pick the right kind of problem, and you'll be done in under an hour.

3. Stuck? Build the brand guide. Don’t have one already? Point AI at your website to defeat the blank page. Then feed some of your best marketing collateral. Ask it for your fonts, your colors, your voice, the words you use and the ones you don't. Give it two examples of writing that sounds like your brand.

4. Save it where your whole team can grab it. Done is better than perfect - you’ll come back and iterate over time - but resist the urge to be perfect.

5. Stop at good enough and then share it with your team.

6. When you know it works, pick up the phone and share it with customers and just ask the simple question - would this make your team’s life easier?

Seriously - close this browser tab and go do the work!

Alex J. Farling | Co-Founder & CRO @ Empath

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