Expand Your Industry Knowledge and Join a Peer Group
- Amanda Kubista
- Jul 29
- 6 min read
Looking for advice, recommendations, or support? Your community of peers is out there. Here’s how to find them.
Who do you turn to when you need to vent about a business problem, are looking for a vendor you can trust, or want to refer a client to an MSP that better serves their needs? You could try chatting people up at the pub, but that comes with a strong beer hazard warning. What you need is an MSP peer group where everyone you meet is running an MSP and looking for the same things. Show up, meet your tribe, bounce ideas off people with lived experience in your realm, and have fun. Plus, it will help your sanity and your business.
We polled online MSP communities to find a collection of USA-based peer groups to help you get this on your calendar. Here are eight options.
It started 25 years ago. Four MSPs – each looking for someone to talk out their business challenges with – started meeting and decided to make it a regular thing. This was in the dawn of the tech boom, so everything was new territory. After more than two decades, this small group of explorers grew to an organized collaboration of more than 750 companies. Join them! They will place you in a peer group that matches your company’s maturity and needs. Your group will meet quarterly, virtually or in person, and most of the members of these peer groups are MSP owners or leaders looking for high-level business strategy advice, collaboration, and direction. You will also get access to a team of coaches and consultants, educational webinars, and an online community you can tap all year long.
Membership at TruMethods gives you an instant connection to a group of MSP business leaders and founders. TruPeer is the Peer or Accountability group created for MSPs looking to maximize profitability. This community, founded by Gary Pica, holds weekly CyberCalls where experts share tips from their specific area of knowledge. You can drop into regular live online “Ask the Experts” webinars, to get help from people with deep expertise in a wide range of topics. Through joining the TruPeer Accountability group, you can also connect online with your peers and hash out issues, get tips, or share your knowledge. TruMethods is the support aspect of Kaseya’s MyITprocess and IT Glue toolset, who also recently acquired the Robin Robins Technology Marketing Toolkit (TMT) commonly known for their Producers Club peer group. This software and support pairing was built to help MSPs achieve operational maturity, hone your sales strategies, and perfect service delivery. It includes a host of on-tap learning tools that will show you how to develop better processes, increase sales, improve client retention, and grow profits.
This executive coaching firm specializes in helping IT solution providers improve efficiency and profits. To this end, it offers business improvement groups (BIGs), which are a specialized form of peer group. In these BIGs, you will find a network of advisors you can turn to for advice, recommendations, community, and support. BIGs are small and facilitated by trained coaches to keep the meetings effective and focused. BIGs discussions address business processes, efficiencies, and challenges. You won’t find yourself pulled into endless technical discussions or debates in a BIG. Come here if you want to focus some time intensely on improving profits, process optimization, and accountability. The groups meet twice a year in person, and you can join a monthly 90-minute conference call during the other ten months of the year. No matter the size of your MSP, this is a great place to start building a network of mentors, advisors, and peers.
ASCII is an enormous IT community where you are sure to find a listserv, event, or webinar that is perfect for your needs, whatever those are right now. This is especially true if you are a small or growing MSP. ASCII was formed in 1984 by Alan Weinberger in an era when being an IT nerd was a Wild West populated by brilliant, technical early adopters. Today, it is a community of over 1,300 members. Membership here gets you access to a vast list of active and specialized groups and nine regional in-person networking events a year. But ASCII also offers software, services, advocacy, discounts, education, and marketing for MSPs. The online events and forums are open only to members, so you won’t find yourself chatting with ‘experts’ who turn out to there to sell you something. You are sure to find a forum here to discuss whatever you are facing today: technical issues, business challenges, products, vendors, and more.
At Pax8 Academy, you can join a peer group that suits your personal MSP career trajectory. The meetings are facilitated and focused so you will not only build a crew of cohorts, but your meetings with them will stay focused and on-topic. Choose from a list of communities where owners or COOs are brainstorming and helping each other with growth, accountability, and improving financial performance. Or pick a sales-focused community to discuss sales strategies, marketing ideas, and ways to improve revenues. Join a security focused group or one for account managers or dispatchers. These communities, facilitated by industry experts, are dedicated to helping MSPs learn from the successes and mistakes of others, get a sense of belonging, and urge each other to learn, grow, and improve processes. They are aligned with the online learning tools here, and you will sometimes get access to those as a perk. Come here when you are ready to find your people because the groups hold you accountable and encourage participation so your squad won’t fizzle when people get busy.
At BMK Community, you will find a lively group of MSP owners and expert consultants who are focused on what you do. As part of the Bering McKinley Management Consultants, these consultants offer financial and strategic guidance, education, and process optimization and are vendor neutral so you can get unbiased advice on choosing tools and services. They host and facilitate peer communities for CEOs and owners, sales professionals, cybersecurity teams, and service managers and dispatchers. The groups focus on five key areas of your business: financials, operations, sales, leadership, and ownership. In these intensive groups, MSP leaders and experts share their best practices and lessons learned in all of these areas while offering support for what you are going through or trying to accomplish. While you are here, you can drop into a workshop to upskill yourself or your team or pick up a certificate to broaden your CV.
MSP-Ignite has been working in managed services for over 20 years and their consultants are steeped in the industry. The peer groups they facilitate are small, intimate, and national so you won’t be chatting with people from competing markets. You can join a monthly group call and attend in-person meetings at rotating locations. Come here if you are looking for peers to act as your personal Board of Advisors, tools-agnostic discussions, to connect outside your geographic area, and to enjoy meetings that are small and focused. The facilitated gatherings operate from an agreed-upon agenda, pulled from issues the group has said they want to address, which helps focus the peer-to-peer guidance and makes for terrific networking. You will find ideas, get feedback on your own ideas, join problem-solving sessions when you are out of ideas, and improve everything from your management and leadership skills to your strategies and plans and your ability to stay accountable and execute those plans. Try the 90-day trial to test the waters. You can dip your toes in, meet the community, and see if you are getting results before you commit.
The 7 Figure MSP peer group is a coaching program designed to help MSPs scale their businesses to seven figures and beyond. Founded by Chris Wiser, the group brings together MSP owners who follow a cybersecurity-first growth strategy focused on high-margin, long-term contracts. Members involved in the peer group receive structured coaching, peer accountability, and access to a community of like-minded professionals who share best practices and real-world results with one another. The group is also known for its tactical, no-fluff approach to sales, operations, and leadership development. Typically, MSPs join this peer group when they’re aiming to grow fast but sustainably while surrounding themselves with others taking the same journey.
Are you looking for a related community but aren’t ready to commit to a peer group? Check out various welcoming ITSP or MSP communities including GTIA, the Tech Degenerates, or MSPGeek.
