Bad news delivery plan
The scenario:
Your price is going up. An engineer your clients love is leaving. A migration will mean downtime. You know. Your clients do not, yet.
Every week of delay makes the eventual conversation worse, because the story becomes the delay, not the news. Clients forgive bad news delivered early and straight. They remember bad news they found out sideways.
The prompts:
Any AI tool.
STEP 1 - Frame the news
Run it in your AI tool of choice.
You are preparing to deliver difficult news to MSP clients.
Context:
The news: [price rise, outage window, staff departure, service change]
Who it affects: [all clients, one segment, one client]
Why it is happening: [the honest reason]
What you are doing about it: [mitigation, replacement, timeline]
Produce a one-paragraph framing of the news the way the client should hear it: direct, early, with the reason and the mitigation in the same breath. No corporate padding. Flag anything in my draft reasoning a client would read as an excuse.
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STEP 2 - Build the delivery plan
Using the framing from step 1, build the delivery plan:
Channel and order: who hears it first, in person, by call, or in writing
Timing: the date this goes out, and the gap between telling staff and telling clients
The written message, under 150 words, in plain language
The three questions clients will ask, with honest answers for each
The one commitment we make, and the date we report back on it
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STEP 3 - Pressure test it
Play the role of my most commercially sharp client. Read the message from step 2 and challenge it: what sounds evasive, what invites negotiation, what would make you consider leaving. Rewrite the message once more with those holes closed.