Every MSP has a service tier that does not appear in any agreement, has never been discussed in a pricing meeting, and will never show up on an invoice. It is delivered dozens of times per month across the client base by technicians who are focused on being helpful rather than on the commercial implications of what they are doing.
It is the five-minute favour. And for most MSPs, it represents a significant unpriced service obligation.
The five-minute favour is any task that is too small to ticket, too quick to schedule, and too routine to escalate. A client calls and asks a technician to look up something in their system. A user emails asking for a quick config change. An office manager texts asking if someone can just check why a printer is not showing up. Each one takes five minutes. None of them get billed.
Individually, they are negligible. In aggregate, across a client base of any meaningful size, over a full month, they are not.
Because the five-minute favour is not actually free. It consumes technician time. It creates an implicit service expectation that has no defined boundary. And it establishes a pattern of informal accessibility that clients come to rely on without understanding that it has a cost.
The commercial problem is not the five minutes. It is the cumulative hour, or three hours, or six hours per month per client that the five-minute favours add up to. That time has a fully-loaded cost. For a technician billing at $150 per hour internally, six hours per month of unbilled favours represents $900 in delivered but unrecovered value per client. Across ten clients, that is $9,000 per month. Across thirty clients, it approaches $30,000.
Those numbers do not appear anywhere in the P&L because the favours are invisible by design. They are delivered informally, never logged, and therefore never analyzed. The MSP whose profit margin is consistently lower than it should be for their billing volume often has a five-minute favour problem they have never identified as such.
There are three realistic responses to the five-minute favour problem, and the right one depends on the MSP's client mix and service philosophy.
The first is inclusion with defined scope. Package the five-minute favour into the agreement explicitly, define what it covers and what it does not, and price the overall agreement to reflect it. Clients get the informal accessibility they value. The MSP gets compensated for it. The boundary is set.
The second is a light-touch service request process. Not a full ticketing workflow, but a simple mechanism that logs informal requests and creates a record. This serves two purposes: it makes the volume visible for the first time, which is valuable for pricing decisions, and it creates the data needed to have a commercial conversation with clients who are disproportionate users of informal support.
The third is graduated pricing. Identify the clients who generate the most five-minute favours and adjust their pricing to reflect actual service consumption rather than the theoretical consumption the agreement was priced on.
None of these require the MSP to become less helpful or to make clients feel nickel-and-dimed. They require the MSP to be honest with itself about what it is actually delivering and to ensure that delivery is reflected in the economics of the relationship.
What is the five-minute favour problem in MSP businesses?
The accumulation of small, informal, unbilled service interactions that are individually negligible but collectively represent significant uncompensated technician time. Because these interactions are never logged or analyzed, their commercial impact is invisible until it shows up as margin that is lower than expected.
How significant is the financial impact of unlogged five-minute favours?
For an MSP with a moderately active client base, the cumulative unbilled time can represent thousands of dollars per client per month in unrecovered value. Across a full client base, the aggregate is often large enough to explain persistent margin gaps that have no other obvious cause.
What should MSPs do about five-minute favours?
The right approach depends on the client mix. Options include incorporating them explicitly into agreements at a price that reflects their actual cost, implementing a light logging process to make volume visible and inform pricing decisions, or adjusting pricing for clients who generate disproportionate informal support demand.