Nick Shaw

Nick ShawSep 16, 2026

SpaceX didn't design the clean engine. They flew the ugly one until it told them what to remove.. Most of the sales and marketing I see in SME world never gets to the ugly version. The website's been "in redesign" since last spring. The outbound campaign is waiting on the perfect ICP. The case study is waiting on a client to sign off a quote they'll never read again. Nothing ships, so nothing gets tested, so nothing gets better, and the whole thing quietly dies in a folder. I've built my entire sales function at CIS this way. The first version of our outbound was rough. Sequences I'd be embarrassed to show you now, a list I put together by hand, a pitch that changed every fortnight because prospects kept correcting me on what actually mattered to them. It went out anyway. Every reply taught me something no planning meeting ever would have, and the version running today is nothing like what I'd have designed on paper. That's the bit people miss about the photo. All those pipes on the left engine are there because nobody knew yet which ones were unnecessary. You don't find that out in CAD. You find it out by lighting the thing and seeing what melts. Polish is a reaction to real feedback, not a substitute for it. If something's been sat in draft for more than a month, it isn't being refined, it's being avoided. Send the rough version this week and let the market do the editing. What have you been polishing instead of shipping?

Nick ShawSep 17, 2026

Your MSP mentions security once a year. That's not how attackers work. Almost 43% of cyberattacks target small and medium businesses. And 88% of breaches at SMBs involve ransomware, compared to 39% at large enterprises. Most of those businesses don't have anyone steering the security programme. That job lands on whoever is closest to the infrastructure. Usually the MSP. CISA's guidance for MSPs is specific about what that means in practice: 1. Contracts should spell out security roles clearly 2. Customers get visibility into logging and monitoring 3. Incidents get reported, confirmed or suspected The Australian Cyber Security Centre puts it even more directly. It says MSPs should have an upfront, transparent conversation with customers about what security they can actually expect, and keep having it. Not a slide in the onboarding deck. Not a line in the contract you hope nobody reads closely. If security only comes up at renewal time, the client has no idea what they're actually covered for the other eleven months. When did you last talk to a client about what happens if they get hit?

Nick ShawSep 15, 2026

Most stagnation in the MSP space isn't a technology problem. It’s a conformity problem… When everyone around you sells the same per-seat model, pitches the same SLAs, and packages the exact same stack, blending in feels like safety. Diverging feels like risk. So leaders convince themselves: "Clients will only ever buy per-seat pricing." "Commoditisation is just the reality of our market." "Our value is tied to uptime and ticket counts." In psychology, when a pattern repeats long enough, familiarity gets mistaken for truth. Sticking to the consensus feels sensible because if you fail using the standard model, no one blames you. But if you try something different and stumble, the blame is yours alone. Safety in the herd is comfortable, but it's also where margins go to die. Breaking out doesn’t require revolutionising technology overnight. It starts with the quiet courage to challenge the default script. The longer an industry repeats the same assumptions, the more they start to feel like facts. Progress begins when someone tests them.