#117 - MSP Contracts and Collections: When a Client Stops Paying | FROM THE TRENCHES

Most MSP owners think the risk in a contract is the part the client might sue over. The real damage is quieter: the work you never priced, the increase you never took, and the invoice you let age past ninety days. Tom Fafinski has spent 35 years as an attorney to managed service providers, and Alexander Caplan runs an international MSP out of London. Josh Peterson puts the two of them in a room and works through the agreement from first handshake to final collection. Tom Fafinski is co-founder of Virtus Law in Minnesota, a firm he describes as a general counsel's office for MSPs, covering master services agreements, mergers, governance, and estate planning for owners. Alexander Caplan is founder of Synergy Associates, a London-headquartered MSP running for more than twenty years with teams in Paris, New York, Los Angeles, Hong Kong, and the UAE. Between them they see the same contract from both sides of the table. ---------- What We Cover in This Episode - Diagnose why a small managed services agreement now gets routed to a client's legal team - Replace the twenty eight page MSA with a staged four page document plus addenda - Avoid the unlimited liability hiding in a client's standard NDA - Document what is excluded, not just what is included, and log every declined service - Build an inflation clause that earns more than inflation - Calculate what a two percent cost increase really does to a twenty percent margin - Set a termination fee a judge will actually enforce - Escalate AR before ninety days instead of after - Convert a payment plan into a promissory note secured by a confession of judgment - Withdraw services without it reading as an act of aggression ---------- Guest Links Tom Fafinski LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thomasfafinski/ Virtus Law: https://www.virtuslaw.com/ Alexander Caplan LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexandercaplan/ Synergy Associates: https://synergy.tech/ ---------- Subscribe and Follow BMK Vision YouTube (Video Podcast): https://www.youtube.com/@beringmckinleyvision?sub_confirmation=1 Learn More About the Vision Platform: https://beringmckinley.com/vision Apply to Be a Guest: https://beringmckinley.com/blog#speaker-form ---------- SEO Keywords - MSP contracts - Managed services agreement - MSP collections - Accounts receivable - Termination fee - Contract negotiation - Agreement gross profit - Out of scope billing - Managed service providers - BMK Vision Podcast ---------- Credits Host: Josh Peterson Producer: Bering McKinley Episode: #117 - MSP Contracts and Collections: When a Client Stops Paying