How MSPs Can Add vCIO Services Without Hiring a CIO

By Nadim Al-barqhouty, Founder, Kliir Solutions · Published November 12, 2026

Clients of managed service providers increasingly ask for more than help desk and monitoring. They want someone to help plan budgets, review vendors and say where their technology should go in the next year or two. That is vCIO work, and most MSPs do not have a senior strategy person on staff to do it. Here are the realistic ways to fill that gap.

What clients are actually asking for

• A written technology roadmap and a budget they can plan around.
• A second opinion on a major purchase, migration or contract.
• Regular business reviews that talk about risk and cost, not just ticket counts.
• Evidence of security practices for insurers, customers or auditors.

If you are a smaller MSP, your technicians are probably already giving some of this advice informally. The question is how to deliver it consistently, and charge for it.

Three ways to offer vCIO services

• Build it in house. Promote or hire someone to run strategy reviews. You keep full control, but a senior hire is a fixed cost that needs enough clients to pay for itself, and your best technician stops doing technical work.
• Do it ad hoc. The owner fits strategy conversations around everything else. It costs nothing up front, but it is hard to repeat across clients, and it rarely turns into a billable service.
• Partner with an outside vCIO. A consultant sits in the strategy seat for the clients who need it, under your relationship, and you scale the arrangement with demand. There is no new full-time salary, and your team stays on service delivery.

What to look for in a vCIO partner

• Respect for your client relationship. They work with you, not around you, and do not try to take the account.
• Independence. Advice that is not tied to reselling a particular product.
• Clear deliverables. A defined technology review and a roadmap the client can read, not a deck that sits on a shelf.
• Plain-language communication that your clients' owners and managers can act on.
• Flexible scale. You should be able to start with one or two clients and grow from there.

How to start without overcommitting

1. Pick one or two clients who already ask strategy questions or have a big decision coming.
2. Agree on the scope: a technology review, a roadmap, and a regular check-in schedule.
3. Decide how it is priced and who owns the client conversation before the first meeting.
4. Review after a quarter: what clients valued, what it cost you, and whether to extend it to more accounts.

How Kliir works with MSPs

Kliir is a Vancouver IT consultancy that fills the vCIO seat for MSPs and their clients. We use modern AI tools to move faster on research, documentation and troubleshooting, and that is one reason our support moves quickly. That time saving goes into the work and shows up in your cost, so you are not paying for hours spent on tasks that no longer take hours. A person still reviews and stands behind every recommendation. Read more on our MSP partnership page, or see what a vCIO is and when a business needs one.