NOTE: In 2010 Mitch Sowards wrote a whitepaper entitled “Eating your Vegetables: The Missing Component of Healthy IT”. Today we’re proud to let our colleague Boone McGraw debut his own take on that topic in the context of 2025.

Let me tell you something, friend: Just because it’s 2025 doesn’t mean your IT stopped needing maintenance. In fact, with everything evolving faster than a jackrabbit on a hot griddle, keeping your technology healthy is more important than ever. Years ago, we talked about "eating your vegetables" when it came to IT maintenance—those proactive tasks like patching, monitoring, and backing up data that nobody gets excited about, but everyone needs. Well, buckle up. It’s time for a second helping.

You’ve probably heard the old metaphor about tossing a pebble into a pond. The pebble might be small, but it disrupts the water’s surface, sending ripples in every direction. The ripples travel far beyond the point of impact, sometimes reaching shores you can’t even see. They move around obstacles, over submerged objects, and they keep going until the energy dissipates.

Over my years of organizational leadership, mentoring, and coaching, I’ve come to recognize how often I’ve tossed my own pebbles into the lives and work of others. Sometimes I’ve done it deliberately; other times, it was incidental—a thought, an idea, a challenge, or a story shared almost in passing. But those pebbles often created ripples that influenced thinking, decisions, and even organizational cultures far beyond what I could see at the time.

Facing Purpose: The Heartbeat Behind Your MSP’s Long‑Term Plan

When I wrote “Turning Vision into Reality,” I mapped out how to take bold ideas and turn them into operational milestones. We spoke of milestones, metrics, roadmaps. Today, let’s go a layer deeper—because long‑term planning without a “why” is like a voyage without a North Star.

This article goes deeper—not into what you're planning, but into why you’re planning it at all.

Every MSP owner I’ve ever worked with has a vision—sometimes it’s just a faint image at the edge of their mind, sometimes it’s a fully drawn-out plan with KPIs and exit strategies. But almost all of them share the same unspoken question: “Will I actually get there?”

Weak or No Signal - a common leadership problem

Too often an organization’s values, vision, mission, or value proposition are deeply held by the most senior leadership team…but rapidly fade as you move down the chain of command.