Welcome to Drop the Hype

Welcome. Let’s get back to basics.

Hype is good and we need it. Let’s get that out of the way first.

Hype creates awareness, unlocks budgets, builds business cases and gets people excited about what’s coming next. Without it, nobody’s buying and nobody’s building. Every wave - Cloud, SD-WAN, Zero Trust, SASE, DEX, AI and on... started with hype, and that’s exactly how it should be.

However, hype doesn’t standardise, it doesn’t scale, and it definitely doesn’t make you repeatable profit.

This blog was born out of 15 years of frustration at the disconnect between technology vendors and the managed service providers they’re trying to partner with. Years ago, MSPs would greet me before I’d said a word with “Just so you know, we don’t resell your product. We’re a service provider.” They still do. They’ve been burned before, and I get why.

I’ve never run an MSP. What I have is a career spent working alongside them, of every shape, size and level of maturity, putting myself in their shoes across four continents.

The same pattern keeps playing out. Vendors lead with technology, MSPs get sold a vision instead of a foundation, and somewhere between the excitement and the execution, profitability quietly disappears. The managed service is an abstraction layer between the customer and the technology, the MSP isn’t a reseller, and until that’s understood, the same response will greet every first meeting.

There’s a specific order to how a successful managed service should be built. The customer comes first, then the challenge, then the service offering, then the architecture, and only then the technology. Almost everything that goes wrong happens when that order gets reversed.

Drop the Hype exists to cut through the noise and focus on the phases between hype and profitability that get treated as an afterthought or forgotten entirely. In my experience that gap is the most underserved part of the managed services lifecycle, and my mission is to connect the two sides successfully, with empathy for both and an understanding of where the disconnects cause friction.

None of this is vendor bashing. My career has been built working for distributors & vendors, and I respect what they do and the pressures they’re under.

This isn’t a vendor blog and it isn’t an MSP blog. It’s observations written at the intersection of both, with no agenda other than making things work better, for practice leads, service architects, product managers, channel leaders, and anyone else responsible for building something that has to work in the real world. If there’s nothing worth saying, nothing gets published.

I wouldn’t class myself as “a blogger”. I started this because people kept telling me the approach resonated, and that it was refreshing to hear someone cut through the noise, mainly from LinkedIn posts and in meetings.

If it resonates, share it. If it doesn’t, just move on.