Scaling an MSSP? Reporting decides how fast new testers pay off

Every MSSP that’s growing, whether by hiring, adding service lines or acquiring another firm, eventually faces the same question: how quickly do new testers start delivering? 

In a past life working at an MSSP, the first thing I’d track when a new pen tester joined the team was how long it took them to get a client-facing report out the door. It told me how quickly a new hire would start contributing billable work, and it’s a number every managing director at a growing MSSP should know.

That question is becoming more pressing. In September, NetSPI announced it is merging with Synack, and Axios has reported a surge in M&A and venture activity in cyber testing. However a firm grows, it ends up in the same place: more testers, more engagements and more ways of writing up what they find.

Growth multiplies the ways your team reports

Acquisitions make this easiest to see. In 2020, Cerberus Cyber Sentinel bought Clear Skies Security and then Alpine Security within a few months, integrating Alpine’s pen testing team into its existing crew. In the UK, Claranet took a similar path, acquiring security provider SEC-1 in 2017 and NotSoSecure in 2018, then bringing both into a single global cyber security unit.

I recently spoke with a venture-backed provider following the same playbook, planning to acquire smaller pen test shops until it has somewhere between 50 and 100 testers. Standardizing reporting across those teams was one of the first things on its mind.

Hiring quickly and adding service lines have the same effect on a smaller scale: more people writing up findings, across more types of engagement. If you think of each pen tester as a source of findings, five testers on five engagements means five slightly different ways of recording what they found. At 50 or 100 testers, that variation adds up quickly.

Where it shows up in the numbers

For a managing director, inconsistent reporting shows up in the numbers that matter most, starting with margin and billable time. By the time you have ten pen testers, you’re carrying something like a million in salaries for testing alone, and every hour spent writing and formatting reports is an hour not spent testing. For a growing firm, the goal is close to test more, report less.

QA is usually next. Review tends to fall on senior testers and team leads, and as the team grows, that review becomes a bottleneck for every report going out. At the same time, managers find it harder to see what’s happening across engagements.

Clients feel the difference too. When every finding follows one layout, every client gets the same quality of report, whichever tester or team did the work, and that consistency matters for client retention. And if you’ve bought another firm, every week it takes the acquired team to deliver reports to your standard is another week before the deal starts paying off.

What standardizing looks like in practice

Standardizing reporting comes down to a few in practical decisions, and they apply whether you’re adding one tester or a whole team:

• Agree on one findings layout with required fields, so every finding is written up the same way, no matter who wrote it.
• Build a library of reusable write-ups, so testers start from vetted content instead of a blank page. PlexTrac by Brinqa includes more than 25,000 reusable write-ups to start from.
• Run QA in the same place as the report, with reviewers and testers working in it together in real time instead of passing documents back and forth.
• Keep every engagement in one place, so managers can see status and workload across the firm.
• Connect your AI tools to that data. PlexTrac’s MCP server gives AI assistants such as Claude, ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot read-only access to live findings, so a tester can generate a client’s executive summary with a single prompt.

Once your data follows one standard, automation and AI have something consistent to work with, and that’s where much of the time comes back.

Read more: How PlexTrac Helps MSSPs Build Recurring Revenue

Make it part of how new people join

Whether you’ve hired five testers or acquired a whole team, getting people onto a shared standard is an onboarding and training effort, and it deserves the same attention as any other part of bringing them in. This is where we spend a lot of time with growing firms at PlexTrac by Brinqa. Our professional services team builds templates with you during onboarding and helps set up the platform around how your teams work.

Some firms put the standard in place before the team even exists. Providers that already run a SOC tend to understand the value of a platform, so some bring one in before they’ve built their pen testing team, while they’re hiring their first tester with plans for more.  

Either way, the measure of success is the one I started with: how quickly a new tester, or a newly acquired team, produces a client-facing report to your standard.

Standardized delivery adds to what your firm is worth

There’s one more reason this matters, especially for venture- and PE-backed firms thinking about an exit. Standardized delivery makes a firm easier to buy. Put yourself in the acquirer’s position. If one MSSP runs its reporting out of Excel and another has a mature process on PlexTrac, I’d likely buy the one using PlexTrac.

It works both ways. As a buyer, a standard means every new team becomes productive sooner. As a seller, it’s part of what makes your business attractive to the next buyer.

If your firm is growing, whether through hiring, new service lines or acquisition, start by measuring how long it takes a new tester to produce their first client-facing report. That number shows how quickly your growth turns into billable work, and standardized reporting is how you bring it down.

Want to see what this looks like for your team? Book a demo of PlexTrac by Brinqa, and we’ll show you how growing MSSPs standardize findings, reuse write-ups and run QA in one place, so new testers get to their first client-facing report sooner.

David Rushton Sr. Solutions Engineer David Rushton is a distinguished professional with a rich background in education, which he has seamlessly combined with his passion for cybersecurity. With over five years of dedicated experience in proactive cybersecurity, David has honed his expertise in attack surface management, vulnerability intelligence, threat intelligence, vulnerability management, and penetration testing. Currently thriving as a sales engineer, he is committed to solving customer issues by leveraging his in-depth knowledge and experience. He is adept at identifying the current state of cybersecurity affairs, pinpointing issues, and devising strategic measures to mature proactive security programs. His wealth of experience encompasses consulting roles in both the public sector and private industry, where he has consistently demonstrated his ability to navigate complex cybersecurity landscapes and deliver results that exceed expectations.