“It’s not like I’m afraid of commitment. I want to earn your business every single month, not one month a year.” 

Who They Brought In 

Matt Connor is the CEO and Founder of Cyberlynx, an MSP he started sixteen years ago in Lexington, Virginia, after a stint on Wall Street that, by his own admission, cost him a lot of money. He built the company from the ground up under the name Your IT Department, grew it into a thriving managed services operation, and rebranded to Cyberlynx as the business moved deeper into cybersecurity. Today Cyberlynx runs both an MSP arm and a value-added reseller side, serving clients ranging from small businesses to some of the largest companies in the world. He is also the host of The Cyber Business Podcast, where he covers cybersecurity, IT, and the business of running an MSP. 

What Got Loud 

• Why Matt deliberately does not want to grow his MSP and why that counterintuitive decision has made it more profitable, not less 
• The physician model for MSP client relationships: why asking the right questions earns more trust than delivering the right answers 
• Cyberlynx has never lost a client to “you guys suck” in sixteen years. Matt explains exactly how that happens on a month-to-month contract 
• The sweet spot for SOCSoter deployments: why companies between 200 and 500 employees are where the tool fits best and why going bigger gets complicated fast 
• Why AI is not replacing your level one tech. It is turning them into a level three and if your MSP is not using it for everything, you are already behind 

The Rundown 

Matt’s philosophy on MSP client relationships comes down to one analogy he keeps returning to throughout the episode: the physician. When you go to a doctor who skips the questions and writes the prescription in thirty seconds, you leave uneasy even if the prescription was right. The same thing happens when an MSP pitches a security stack without walking the client through why. The bedside manner is not filler. It is the whole trust-building exercise. “They don’t know enough,” Matt says about clients, “and those that do know some, they may have ChatGPT, they may have Googled it. So they’ve got some stuff. Cool. Just like going to the doctor.” His point is that MSPs who treat every client touchpoint as a sales opportunity are doing the opposite of building trust. The ones who occasionally say “you don’t actually need that” are the ones who keep clients for sixteen years. 

The month-to-month contract model is where Matt genuinely diverges from most of the industry. He does not believe in locking clients in. His position is that the moment you sign a three-year agreement, the incentive to earn the relationship every day quietly disappears. He has watched it happen on both sides. The energy that builds through the sales process evaporates the moment the ink dries and the account gets filed away until renewal. “You can cash those checks for three years,” he says, “but at the end, you know, you’re probably going to be looking for a new partner.” Cyberlynx has retained every original client from sixteen years ago. Two were lost to acquisitions. Zero to dissatisfaction. 

On the question of where SOCSoter fits in the market, Matt is precise. The sweet spot is companies between 200 and 500 employees who have not yet hired a CISO or CIO. They have budget, they trust their MSP completely, and they are not running procurement through a committee. Once you get into the 500 to 2,000 employee range, more decision makers enter, more competition shows up, and the buying behavior shifts toward name-brand recognition. “Nobody’s ever been fired for buying Cisco” is the enterprise logic Matt is describing, and it is the wall that makes the mid-market so important to own well before organizations scale past it. 

The AI conversation is where Matt gets direct about what he thinks MSPs are still getting wrong. He is not worried about AI replacing people. He watched Amazon lay off 30,000 employees and then rehire because they overcorrected. His take is that AI is not a headcount replacement. It is a capability multiplier. A level one helpdesk tech using AI to troubleshoot is solving problems at a level three rate. “Supervision is so much faster and easier than creation,” he says, and that reframe applies to every support ticket, every client email, and every security alert that comes through the queue. 

Real Talk 

If your retention strategy depends on contract length instead of relationship quality, Matt’s sixteen-year track record is the argument against you. Month-to-month is not a risk. It is the accountability structure that keeps you sharp. 

If your Microsoft 365 environment hasn’t been reviewed lately, let’s fix that before someone else does it for you. Visit www.SOCSoter.com