Dan Candee has been asking MSSPs, MSPs, and other partners what they could do with another $50,000 a month in their pockets. Most of the answers fell into one of two categories: hiring or selling.
Security service providers always need to find more help in a talent market that has been tight for several years, Candee, CEO of
Cork Cyber, which offers MSSPs and MSPs a cyber risk intelligence and protection platform, told MSSP Alert.
When it comes to selling, some service providers would use the extra money to pay for outbound, content, and AI-assisted marketing to bring in new customers, with the CEO highlighting that 71% of MSPs in
Kaseya’s
2026 State of the MSP Report named client acquisition as their top operational challenge.
Given that, Candee is working to make that $50,000 a month a reality for MSSPs and MSPs. It’s a key goal of his for the year, with most of that coming through margin recovery for labor. The $50,000 saved is based on service providers with 60 clients.
Sending the Message
It’s a message he took this week to Kaseya’s conference,
Kaseya Connect 2026, in Las Vegas. Candee said Kaseya, which develops AI-powered IT management and cybersecurity software for MSSPs and MSPs and internal IT departments, is making expanding margins for MSPs a theme this year, in large part by unifying more than 40 products into its Kaseya 365 Ops solution to drive revenue and efficiency.
Kaseya 365 Ops, which includes AI-driven workflows and unified reporting, was
added a year ago to the company’s Kaseya 365 platform. Cork’s platform is the financial layer to Kaseya’s platform that monetizes the security posture that the stack creates.
In line with Kaseya’s efforts to improve margins for MSPs and MSSPs, Candee said he settled on $50,000 per month, per partner.
“It is the goal we are building towards, especially as we roll out automated patching [and] vulnerability remediation,” he said. “It's a target for the team.”
Two Areas for Recovering Margins
The $50,000 will come from two areas, the first being labor margin recovery – particularly the labor spent on regular quarterly business review (QBR) with each client, which will account for roughly $42,000. Right now, it takes MSSPs and MSPs about 3.5 hours every three months to prepare for the QBR for each client. Cork’s AI-powered Vantage platform ingests and normalizes telemetry from more than 100 channel tools through open APIs and other features and finds coverage gaps, duplicate tools, orphan licenses, and decommissioned machines that are still billing.
Through this, the QBR prep for each client can drop from three-plus hours to minutes, saving them more than 200 hours every month, which Candee translates into about $42,000 in recovered labor margin.
Optimizing Cyber Insurance
Then there is the optimization of cyber insurance, delivering an average of 33% in premium savings. A year ago, Cork
added the Cyber Insurance Policy Analyzer to the Vantage platform. MSPs and MSSPs can upload a client's policy, and the tool returns a single-page breakdown of coverage, sublimits, and risk exposure. It then connects the service provider with three MSP-dedicated cyber brokers – DataStream, Yukon, and Seedpod – which will underwrite against the live telemetry from the platform rather than a static questionnaire.
“The math is real: $30K-$40K in recovered labor margin from collapsing QBR prep and license cleanup and compliance monitoring on a 60-client book, $2K to $10K in recovered IR revenue from claiming containment hours against financial protection, and $2K to $5K in net new managed-services attach driven by insurance optimization,” the CEO said.
The margins recovered through Cork’s platform and tools can be used by MSSPs to hire more talent and bring in more clients.
Hiring More Help, Finding More Clients
“The share of MSPs reporting severe difficulty hiring tier-two and tier-three techs nearly doubled year over year,” Candee said. “Now our partners talk about shadow AI and the challenge of developing resources. [There’s] always a need for talent.”
The need to find more clients is constant, the CEO said, pointing to the Kaseya report and adding that “savvy owners are making GTM [go-to-market] hires to help expand or communicate better.”
Candee outlined the challenges MSSPs and MSPs are dealing with, including slowing sales cycles and shrinking deal sizes.
“The share of MSPs reporting average customer spend above $25,000 dropped from 75% to 41% year-over-year, and [one-fifth] say they're struggling to demonstrate measurable value to prospects fast enough to close,” he said. Along with the dedicated GTM hires, service providers are “investing in AI-assisted marketing to shorten the sales cycle and tell a sharper value story. Our bet on the $50K is that it funds that motion.”
