A real MSP relationship,
reviewed and right‑sized

This is a real engagement — real contract, real numbers — showing what a VeriTech-style Review, Refine, and Rebuild actually produces.

Managed IT contract cut from $58,453/yr to $12,588/yr · ~$71,255/yr in total net savings
Real engagement. Company name withheld at the client's request. All figures are drawn from signed contracts and internal spend records.

MSP Relationship Review

Case Study

New England Construction Firm

100–150 employees
IndustryConstruction / General Contracting
Internal ITOne IT role, no dedicated team
Current MSPFull managed contract, multi-year
PlatformMicrosoft 365, on-prem & cloud mix
Review triggerContract renewal
The company was paying for a full team it didn't need — and had the internal capacity to prove it.

The business had one internal IT role and a fully managed MSP contract covering help desk, monitoring, patching, RMM, email security, and endpoint protection — priced and structured as if no internal IT capability existed at all.

That one internal role was the hinge the entire review turned on. Even without it, the honest recommendation wouldn't have been to simply shop for a cheaper MSP — it would have been to reduce MSP dependency by identifying and training an internal champion to absorb part of the day-to-day, paired with right-sizing the MSP's scope and bridging the rest directly through IT Concierge. With the internal role already in place here, the real question became: which parts of this contract does that role need the MSP for at all?

1
Phase one

Review

An unbiased audit of the existing MSP relationship — what the contract covered, what the business actually needed, and where the two didn't match.

MSP Scorecard

Seven dimensions every MSP relationship can be measured against — regardless of provider, industry, or contract size.

Operational
Service deliveryTicket response times were acceptable and within SLA
Right-sized scopeFull managed pricing for work the internal role could absorb
Cost efficiencyPremium per-seat rates layered on top of duplicate tooling
Risk & protection
Security & complianceBaseline controls present; gaps in EDR consistency and patch cadence
Data protectionBackup existed but ownership and restore testing sat with the MSP
Strategic
Ownership & lock-inLicensing, identity, and tooling decisions ran through the MSP by default
Strategic alignmentContract renewed on autopilot; never re-scoped against actual internal capacity

Key findings

01 The internal role had headroom the contract didn't account for

The existing IT role had the capacity — and, with training, the platform depth — to run day-to-day identity, device, and endpoint management directly. The MSP contract assumed none of that capacity existed.

02 Overlapping tools were being paid for twice

Identity and endpoint management ran through both the MSP's stack and separate standalone tools — including a dedicated identity provider layered on top of capability Microsoft 365 already licensed. Four separate management tools were doing work one platform could consolidate.

03 Monitoring and patching didn't need to be outsourced

RMM, patch management, and endpoint monitoring — the bulk of the MSP's recurring bill — were functions a trained internal role could own directly, with EDR alerting kept as the one piece worth specialist attention.

04 The phone system and license mix hadn't been reviewed in years

A legacy phone platform was still in place alongside Microsoft 365 licensing that already included the capability to replace it. License tiers across the user base hadn't been reconciled against actual usage.

05 The contract had never been re-bid or re-scoped

The relationship had run for years on renewal-by-default. Nothing in the contract had been re-evaluated against what the business actually needed at its current size and internal capacity.

06 An aging on-prem server was quietly heading toward a forced replacement

The physical domain controller and file server were both nearing end of life. The MSP's next recommendation would have been a new physical server, new VMware licensing, and folding the replacement into the monthly maintenance agreement — all to keep running services Microsoft 365 already provided at no additional cost.

2
Phase two

Refine

With the review's findings in hand, the internal role took over what it could reasonably run directly, and the subscriptions and tools that weren't earning their keep were cut.

3
Phase three

Rebuild

The remaining piece was infrastructure: an aging on-prem server nearing a forced replacement, retired in favor of the cloud-native platform already included in the business's Microsoft 365 licensing.

All recommended products and platforms are purchased by the client direct from the vendor. VeriTech Advisors takes no commission or reseller margin on any recommendation.

The financial picture

MSP full managed contract (signed renewal)$4,871/mo$58,453/yr
MSP relationship, right-sized to backup-only~$1,049/mo~$12,588/yr
Cut from the MSP relationship alone~$45,865/yr
Plus environment optimization: retiring the standalone identity provider, consolidating four management tools into one, moving the phone system to Teams, and cleaning up license tiers.
Plus retiring the on-prem domain controller and file server before a forced replacement — avoiding the ongoing maintenance a new server would have added to the MSP agreement.
Total net annual savings~$71,255/yr

~$40,812/yr from unwinding MSP-billed services (help desk, monitoring, RMM, patching, email security, EDR), ~$23,843/yr from environment optimization, and ~$6,600/yr from avoiding new server maintenance after migrating file storage to SharePoint and identity to Entra ID.

On top of the annual figure, retiring the server also avoided a one-time capital cost of ~$17,250 — the new physical server, VMware licensing, Windows Server licensing, and MSP labor a replacement project would have required.

What happened next

The MSP relationship wasn't eliminated — it was right-sized. Backup and specialist EDR oversight stayed with an outside provider; everything else moved in-house, one phase at a time, on the same seat and same salary line already in place. No new hire was required to absorb work the MSP had been billing for at premium rates.

No internal IT person to train? This model depends on having someone in-house to hand capability to. If that role doesn't exist yet, IT Concierge is built to be that person on a fractional basis — same right-sizing outcome, without requiring a new hire first.

Want to know what your relationship would score?

A flat-fee, unbiased review of your MSP relationship — the same format shown above, built around your environment.

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