The MSP model budgets $2,500 a person a year for training, certifications and coaching. For the example MSP's 12.50 people that is $31,250 a year, a line in overhead like rent or insurance.
The amount is the easy part. The decision is where it goes. Spend it on the stack your techs touch every day and on moving work down the desk, then check whether the tickets changed.
Set the Budget Per Person
A per-person figure keeps it fair and keeps it from disappearing in a slow quarter. Give each person a line, and decide together what it buys.
It covers certifications, course and exam fees, conference travel and a coaching membership. It does not cover the hours spent studying, which are a cost of their own and worth protecting on the calendar.
Spend It on Your Standard Stack First
The model's belief is to run one standard technology stack for every client and train every tech on it. The second half is where the training budget earns most.
My view: before anyone buys a general certification, make sure every tech can work every product in your stack without escalating. That is the training that shows up in the ticket queue the following month.
Then Spend It on Moving Work Down the Desk
Send each piece of work to the cheapest resource that can do it. Training is how a Tier 1 tech becomes that resource for more of the work.
The model resolves 65% of tickets at Tier 1, at about 30 minutes of labor each. Its sensitivity on a desk that resolves 70% at Tier 1, 24% at Tier 2 and 6% at Tier 3 is worth $108,944 a year to the example.
That is a design target, not a promise. But it shows where the money is: in the escalations a better-trained Tier 1 no longer sends up.
Pick Training From Your Own Tickets
- Pull last quarter's escalated tickets and group them by product or kind of problem.
- Pick the two or three groups that escalate most.
- Find the course, lab or vendor certification that covers each one.
- Assign it to the Tier 1 and Tier 2 techs who escalated those tickets.
- Book the study time on the calendar, inside working hours.
Lab time counts. My view is that a spare tenant or a test machine, where a tech can break and fix the thing they escalated, is worth more than another exam.
Weigh It Against What Leaving Costs
The model assumes 20% staff turnover a year and $5,000 a hire for recruiting. On those numbers, one person's training budget for a year is half the cost of replacing one person, before the months a new hire takes to get up to speed.
Training is also part of a path. The model pays a Tier 1 tech $50,000 and a Tier 2 tech $62,000. A tech who can see how this year's certifications lead to that next step has a reason to take the step with you.
Run healthy margins so you can pay good people well, because labor cost keeps rising faster than CPI. A training line is a small, visible part of that.
Track What Changed
- The share of tickets each tech closes without escalating, before and after.
- Minutes per ticket in the group the training covered.
- Escalations in that group across the desk.
- Who completed what, and when.
Review it at the end of each quarter, and move next quarter's budget toward whatever moved the numbers.
mspoutpost.com/articles/budget-2-500-a-person-for-training-and-spend-it-where-it-pays
Written by Megan Friesen
MSP Outpost publishes information, not legal, financial, insurance, tax or compliance advice, and reading it creates no professional relationship. For decisions about your business, talk to a qualified professional.