The #1 reason businesses stay with a bad MSP is fear of the switch. This playbook exists to show you the switch should be boring — and if it isn’t, that’s a signal about your new MSP.
Week 1–2: Discovery
Your new MSP should learn your environment before touching it. This phase is about them, not you.
- ✓Kickoff call with leadership — agreed objectives, success criteria, and points of contact
- ✓Inventory of every workstation, server, network device, cloud account, and line-of-business application
- ✓Access to your current MSP's documentation (or a plan for creating it from scratch)
- ✓Review of security posture — MFA status, backup status, endpoint protection, patch status
- ✓Review of any current or pending compliance obligations
- ✓Your people shouldn't be doing homework for this phase — the MSP drives it
Week 3–4: Planning
- ✓Written findings report — what's in place, what's at risk, what they'll change
- ✓Prioritized roadmap for weeks 5-12 with dependencies called out
- ✓Fixed monthly cost confirmed in writing; any project-based work scoped separately
- ✓Transition plan — who owns the hand-off from the old provider, how vendor relationships transfer, what tickets look like during the gap
- ✓Communication plan for your team so nobody gets caught mid-ticket
Week 5–8: Transition
This is where bad MSPs hide problems. Watch for these specific deliverables:
- ✓Remote monitoring and management (RMM) agents deployed on every endpoint — you should see a count that matches your inventory
- ✓Endpoint detection & response (EDR) active on every workstation and server
- ✓Backup system in place with at least one restore test completed
- ✓Microsoft 365 (or Google Workspace) admin access transferred cleanly
- ✓MFA enforced on every user if it wasn't already
- ✓Your previous MSP's contracts closed out cleanly — documented handoff of licenses, domains, registrar access, DNS
- ✓First month's invoicing matches what was quoted
Week 9–12: Running
- ✓Help desk is answering calls from named people, not a general queue
- ✓A 90-day review meeting with leadership — what's working, what's not
- ✓Documented incident-response plan with your MSP's name in it
- ✓Monthly operations report showing ticket volume, SLA adherence, and systems health
- ✓Quarterly strategy cadence scheduled for the next 12 months
Red flags during the first 90 days
- ✓Week 1-2 discovery never finishes — scope keeps expanding
- ✓No written inventory or findings report by week 4
- ✓Tickets routed to a different rep every time you call
- ✓Billing doesn't match the quote (either direction — unexpected surcharges OR mysteriously missing line items)
- ✓MFA deferred "until we get everyone trained" — this is the single biggest tell
- ✓Backup "in place" but no restore has been tested
- ✓Your previous MSP's offboarding paperwork never completes
- ✓Change requests bounce between techs without ownership
What you should be doing, in order
- Week 1: introduce the new MSP to your team and list who has what authority.
- Week 2: collect your vendor list and hand it over.
- Week 4: read the findings report and ask questions until it’s plain English.
- Week 6: schedule the first restore test attended by one of your people.
- Week 10: hold the 90-day review yourself — not your office manager.