“Just get me a quote” is the most expensive sentence in mid-market IT

Five words: “Just get me a quote.” It sounds like cost control. It is the most expensive sentence in mid-market IT.

Here is how it runs. The CEO asks the head of ops to call three MSPs. Two weeks later three numbers land: $9,400 a month, $12,800, $16,200. The CFO takes $9,400. Nobody in that room did anything unreasonable.

Twelve months on, the ops team is buried in tickets that are somehow not covered, the CFO is approving out-of-scope project work every month that costs more than the gap between the cheapest quote and the most expensive one, and nobody can name the moment it went wrong.

It went wrong at the start. Nobody wrote a scope. Three vendors quoted three different scopes. The cheapest one won by leaving the most out.

Three vendors, three scopes

When you email three MSPs asking for a quote for managed IT for a 120-person company, you have not asked a question. You have handed them a marketing opportunity.

Vendor A hears cheap and quotes helpdesk, patching, basic monitoring. Vendor B hears middle of the road and adds backup, some security tooling, a quarterly review. Vendor C hears the works and adds SOC coverage, EDR, phishing simulation, tabletop exercises. Three quotes off the same sentence, and not one of them comparable to the others.

It gets worse inside the line items. On Vendor A’s sheet, “MFA managed” means multi-factor is switched on for email. On Vendor C’s sheet it means enforced on every system that supports it, monitored for bypass attempts, and a compromised account handled as an incident. Same phrase, same-looking line, three different services and three different costs to deliver.

That is not the vendors being dishonest. They answered a vague question with a vague answer. The vague question was yours.

The cheapest quote wins by leaving the most out

The low number is rarely efficiency. It is a thinner scope. The distance between what they quoted and what your business actually needs has a name in this industry, and the name is “out of scope.” It gets billed separately, at project rates, on your schedule of emergencies rather than theirs.

Pull the invoices from any MSP relationship six months into a low-ball retainer. The monthly fee is the smallest line on the page. Change orders and project work are the rest of it. You bought a small certainty and a large unknown, and the unknown is the part that hurts.

Write the one page first

You write the scope. Vendors price your scope instead of their template. That is the entire method.

It does not need to be forty pages. One page does it. What managed IT means here. How many people, how many sites, what we run. How fast we need an answer when something is down. What outcomes we are actually buying. What we expect to happen when those are missed.

Send that page to three vendors and ask each of them to price it. Not their standard offering. Your document. What comes back is comparable, and the vendors who cannot price it disqualify themselves, which is useful information you got for free.

Four questions if you skip the page

If a scope document is not happening this quarter, put these four in the RFP. They do most of the same work.

1. Are you pricing our scope or your standard offering? If it is theirs, their number cannot be compared to anyone else’s. Ask for the redo before you read the price.
2. What is excluded, on page one? Every quote has exclusions. Good vendors lead with them. The rest put them on page 47 and hope you stop reading at 12.
3. What triggers a change order? This is where the real price lives. If the answer is any work outside the exact scope, budget for one every month and re-rank the quotes accordingly.
4. What did a client our size actually pay you over the last twelve months, all in? Monthly fee plus everything else. The vendor who has that number ready is telling you how they run. The vendor who will not give it to you has also told you.

The takeaway

The week you spend writing the scope is the cheapest week in the whole procurement. Skip it and you buy the wrong vendor, at the wrong price, for the wrong service, and you learn that slowly over the next twelve months.

Write the scope. Send the scope. Price the scope. Then decide. It is not more work than getting three quotes. It is the same work, done on your terms instead of theirs.

Will