NinjaOne’s Paul Redding To MSPs: ‘We Should Be Helping You Actually Grow Your Revenue’

‘I think the most successful MSPs will be able to bring on four more customers tomorrow and zero more headcount. We’re not in the business of helping you fire your techs. We’re in the business of helping you not make your next hire,’ says Paul Redding, head of global MSP partnerships at NinjaOne.

Better tools alone won’t grow an MSP. NinjaOne’s Paul Redding says vendors need to help MSPs win customers, expand accounts and turn technical expertise into measurable business value, a shift driving the company’s revamped partner program.

“It’s not helping the revenue machine inside the MSP,” Redding, head of global MSP partnerships at NinjaOne, said of traditional vendor enablement programs that concentrate primarily on technical capabilities. “The tech drives it all forward. But we’re all capitalists. These guys are here to make money.”

For MSPs, he said that growth has implications beyond their next sales quarter.

“These owners don’t have a 401(k). This is their 401(k),” he said. “This is their retirement plan. This is their exit. This is their life.”

That perspective is shaping NinjaOne’s evolved partner program, which provides MSPs with sales and marketing collateral, educational resources, customer-facing talk tracks and guidance on emerging opportunities such as compliance and co-managed IT.

The Austin, Texas-based vendor also launched peer groups focused on operational efficiency, business growth and financial performance. Unlike traditional vendor-specific user groups, the long-term vision is for these groups to be vendor-neutral, allowing MSPs to discuss their businesses and learn from peers regardless of the tools they use, Redding said.

NinjaOne’s goal is to help MSPs build better businesses, not just get better at using its platform. As AI, cybersecurity and customer demands reshape the market, the company wants partners to automate more, unlock new services and deliver bottom-line results for customers, all while scaling their own profits.

“I don’t need MSPs to sell RMM. I need MSPs to sell MSP,” Redding said. “The MSP community as a whole needs to continue to grow. All tides rise all ships.”

CRN spoke further with Redding about the new partner program and peer groups and how MSPs can grow with NinjaOne in 2027.

What was missing from NinjaOne’s traditional partner program? What needed a shakeup?

NinjaOne has always partnered with MSPs to deliver services downstream to their customers, but the enablement we’ve historically done has been focused on the technical side of it. We’ve made your technicians better at using the tool, deepening their ability to automate and script and scale.

It’s not helping the revenue machine inside the MSP. It’s been focused on the technical side. The reality is the tech drives it all forward. But we’re all capitalists. These owners don’t have a 401(k). This is their 401(k). This is their retirement plan. This is their exit. This is their life.

Vendors need to be focused on deepening MSP relationships with the tool and the technical teams, and making teams better. But at the same time, we should be helping them grow their revenue, grow their business, collect more customers, expand the relationships they have with existing customers and answer the questions those customers are asking them.

Right now, you have to be a part of your customer’s business. We need to facilitate that. We have to help with that.

So how is the new program helping MSPs sell more services rather than just better tools?

We’re building in layers of enablement. It began with simple collateral: things we can give you that you can white-label and build your own campaigns out of. AI prompts are another example. You can use them to build a campaign and communicate with potential customers about your services, the compliance standards they need to achieve, and other issues that matter to their businesses.

We’re also providing education. CMMC is a great example. We’re providing material so MSPs don’t have to go do all that research themselves just to figure out what changed. They can go talk to their customers with the right information.

We’re arming them with talk tracks and other resources that allow them to go inside, explain why the customer still needs to move forward with an initiative, help explain the cost and show them a path through that journey. Those are the kinds of things that will ultimately help MSPs land customers, keep customers and expand those relationships.

How will you measure the success of the program?

The first measurement of success on our side will be participation. What percentage of the partners who come on board actually take advantage of these resources? We’re going to track those metrics very deeply and learn from what we create.

But how we measure partner success truly comes down to their own growth as an MSP. We know when our partners are growing 11 percent more versus 30 percent or 40 percent more. Those are the numbers we need to see.

We want to get partners into those heavy double-digit growth numbers that show they’re not onboarding one client a year, they’re onboarding 10. They’re not adding 100 seats a year; they’re adding a couple of thousand.

Those are the kinds of numbers we want to see. We have the data at our fingertips. We just have to learn how to correlate the content we’re creating with the growth of our partners.

How will the partner program evolve over the next 12 to 18 months?

Right now, we’re in launch mode, building out the initial collateral. We’ve talked to partners, talked to our customer advisory board and identified the content people are requesting most. CMMC guides were a big one, content for partners moving from break-fix services or telecom into managed services, or for people who are really just starting to build out their MSP business. Pricing guidance came up a lot, too.

Over the next 12 months, we’re bringing in internal and external subject matter experts to create more dynamic content, video courses and training curricula that can take you through certifications in different areas. The content itself is going to evolve dramatically. As we onboard new tools, we’ll be able to provide more AI-centric content and deliverables.

How will NinjaOne’s peer groups differ from others in the space?

One thing Sal [Sferlazza, NinjaOne CEO] has been passionate about from the beginning is that we’re not trying to create NinjaOne user groups. We don’t want you to have to be a NinjaOne customer or partner to be part of this. We’re going to open the peer groups to everyone.

For the initial beta, I believe we’ll start with partners because we’re leaning into customer advisory boards and the people we know we can ask for more feedback. We want them to help us steer this.

But as we move forward, we want it to be truly vendor-agnostic. Vendor neutrality is something we’re very passionate about, and so is the curriculum we’re putting together. It won’t be purely financially focused or purely marketing focused. We want to put people on the path they want to take.

One area that’s never been a major focus for many peer groups is operational excellence and efficiency. We’ve got huge demand for that. We’ll have operational groups focused on how MSPs run and scale their businesses, as well as growth groups.

You may even see an MSP participate in two different groups, with one person working through operational issues and another focusing on financial growth. We want to meet partners where they live.

How will the peer groups evolve over time?

The peer group launch is going to happen toward the end of this year. It’s something we haven’t done before, so we want to approach it cautiously and make sure we don’t make big mistakes early. Making mistakes is fine. You learn from those. But we don’t want to stumble.

In 2027, I think it will be a slow rise from a handful of groups to dozens, and then we’ll scale from there. By 2028, we want to take this completely global. And as we mature the content, curriculum and deliverables, we want to keep pouring more and more into the program.

NinjaOne sees a gap in the MSP space. We believe we can fill it with subject matter experts, partners, and internal and external resources that can really give something back to the community.

Where do you see the biggest opportunity for MSPs to grow their bottom line?

One opportunity that’s underutilized in the MSP space is co-managed IT. It’s a big opportunity, although there are some pitfalls you can run into if you’re not careful. It requires a different mindset, but there’s a lot of money in co-managed IT, and I think that opportunity is going to continue to grow.

The world is becoming exponentially more complex in the age of AI. Internal IT teams, just like MSPs, can’t be everywhere at once. They can’t learn everything. Internal IT needs help, too.

So how is NinjaOne helping MSPs capitalize on co-managed IT?

That’s actually a big focus within the partner program. One of the first groups of resources we’ve started working on is building out a program to help MSPs learn how to model their offerings around co-managed IT. We’re working with experts on how to build their offerings and differentiate themselves from everybody else in the pack. That’s a big focus for us. And in the same way, I think AI and AI delivery and enablement represent a big opportunity for MSPs. We have to deliver that education as well.

What mistakes are MSPs making when they focus too heavily on technology?

Technology is critically important from an operational perspective, a cybersecurity perspective and the service delivery side. But the reality is, it’s not why the customer hired you. Customers need the same thing MSPs need from us as a service provider. They need you to make them safer, make them faster and help them focus on making more money. The MSP that’s hyper-focused on technology is going to struggle to have a conversation where the customer walks away and sees value. They just don’t care about the tech.

How will the partner program and peer groups help smaller MSPs compete with larger providers?

When you talk about smaller versus larger, it’s not the war between Walmart and Main Street that happened in all these other sectors. It’s not the same thing. The needs of customers range from complex shops with really complex IT requirements at very large organizations, and many times the big platform players are a great fit for them.

But think about the personal touch. When you go out to eat, do you want a robot bartender, or do you want a bartender to talk to you? Smaller MSPs can deliver highly personalized service and highly personalized results. In many ways, they can get deeper into client environments because there’s a more one-on-one relationship.

What will the most successful NinjaOne partners be doing a year from now?

Everything you do as an MSP at this point needs to come back to a simple question: How many hours can I get back? How many fewer clicks can I make? How many fewer dropdowns and fields do I have to deal with? How can I stop jumping through different portals and logins?

NinjaOne is particularly powerful in that arena. One of the truly magical things about NinjaOne is that it is all one platform. We don’t buy other stuff and cram it in, it’s one thing.

I think the most successful MSPs will be able to bring on four more customers tomorrow and zero more headcount. We’re not in the business of helping you fire your techs. We’re in the business of helping you not make your next hire.

What can partners expect from NinjaOne’s community initiatives in 2027?

I think you’ll see more NinjaOne in the regional world, more NinjaOne in your office and more NinjaOne in your local town. In 2027 we’re really focused on meeting partners where they live, enabling them directly and working with them directly to close deals.

We’ll help you learn how to do co-managed IT. If we need to put a NinjaOne team member on-site to work through a deal and help you land a bigger partner, those are the kinds of things we’re here to do. You’ll see more of us globally, in your office and in your face. We want to be part of the community at a much deeper level.