When a professional sports league approaches its trading deadline, teams are often characterized as buyers or sellers. A team’s status depends on where it sits in the standings, its financial situation and other factors but most teams fit into either the buyer or seller bucket.
The MSP world is similar. With M&A rife and private equity highly interested in investment opportunities, every MSP can be considered a potential buyer or seller. The MSP Summit last week featured many discussions about this topic as we heard from MSPs who have bought and sold their companies, and others who may consider. Here are tips and opinions from MSP 501 companies and those looking to buy MSPs.
How Sellers Should Approach MSP M&A
“I would say it's important to have your business in a saleable position at any point in time, benchmarking it with a peer group, making sure that there's a financially viable option,” said Tim Guim, whose PCH Technologies became part of the Evergreen portfolio this year. “Especially since everybody's business here is probably the biggest asset, and if something happens to you unfortunately, make sure you have a proper system in place so you don't lose that wealth.
“I think it's important to really have a business positioned like that. Look at the opportunity which allows you to make that decision that if you sell your business, if you want to stay on like I did with Evergreen, or if you want to sell and move out. And look at the different models — ones that integrate, ones that hold your brand.”
Julio Lopez, CEO of IT For Education, has not sold his business but agrees with Guim that all MSPs should be prepared for when an offer comes. He said peer groups are a great help in preparing.
“We went through a mock exercise that really lets you understand what the true value of your business is,” Lopez said. “So you're not kidding yourself -- a lot of us always feel like it's worth more than what it really is, right? These events are great. We're part of Technology Marketing Toolkit. We're part of its Producers Club. That's been huge for our company. I’m an engineer by trade, I didn’t know anything about marketing and sales. I had to learn the hard way. So these peer groups have been great for us.”
Ahmed Mahmood, CEO of Ocean Solutions, joined Guim and Lopez on an MSP 501 panel where the topic came up. He advised all MSPs to have their financial records in order at all times to increase their market value.
“Anybody needs to be positioned in a place where they can present their books,” Mahmood said. “You have to look three or four years out. [Buyers] look into books for years to figure out: Where is this EBITDA coming from? How are the product sales now dropping, and MRR all of a sudden is up? All that kind of stuff needs to go back to reality. So you always have to run clean sheets. Since we joined TruMethods years back, there is a KPI for enterprise value that we track every month. That helps us look into how we're doing overall in terms of growth, net share, and all the aspects of the business that basically drive value. When you reduce unnecessary expenses and increase EBITDA, you're not only increasing enterprise value, you're increasing multiples by jumping into the next bracket.”
How Buyers Look at MSP M&A
The fourth MSP 501 panelist, Blue Mantis CEO Josh Dineen, looks at M&A from the other side. Blue Mantis has spurred growth through frequent acquisitions, even picking up three MSPs and nearly 200 customers in one day a few months ago.
“M&A is definitely a key part of [growth] strategy, whether you're looking to be acquired or you're looking to be the acquirer,” Dineen said. “And so we look at organic growth or inorganic growth, and the value each has on your business. I would caution everybody to be very intent on how you go about that and make sure that you're going to be investing in an area that's going to drive the outcome you've set out to do. There are a lot of great businesses out there. That doesn't mean that they're great fits for your business. And vice versa.”
Another MSP Summit panel on MSP Consolidation featured CEOs of three frequent MSP buyers: Peter Melby of New Charter Technologies, Juan Fernandez of MSP Owners Group, and Anthony D'Ambrosi of Abacus Group.
Melby has been on both sides of M&A. He sold Greystone Technology to New Charter in 2021. New Charter has acquired more than 30 MSPs over the past six years, many of those since Melby became CEO in 2024. New Charter owns 23 MSPs that were part of the 2025 MSP 501.
Like Dineen and Melby’s fellow MSP Consolidation panelists, the New Charter CEO said it’s important to make sure the acquirer and acquired companies are a good fit. “It’s not nearly as simple as people make it out to be when they send you the emails,” he said. “It’s not a one-size-fits-all thing. There’s nuance to this.”
D'Ambrosi suggested MSPs engage an outside expert to get a good idea of what their business is worth. He echoed Ocean Solutions’ Mahmood in advising MSPs to have “good clean books.”
“Preparing your business for sale can be a one-to-two-year journey to make sure that you're positioning the company for maximum value,” he said. “That takes time and effort and investment. It behooves most to engage an advisor or a consultant to help you with that, because you are going to be put through a level of due diligence well beyond an audit, starting with quality of earnings, and then drilling into all kinds of aspects of the business. If you want to command a good multiple for your business, make sure you have good clean books.”
Fernandez said a big concern of MSPs looking to sell is how losing control of their company can impact their employees and clients.
“When we created the MSP Owners Group, we were trying to get past a lot of the fear of consolidating into a larger thing. A lot of the great people were leaving [after acquisitions] and I didn’t like that. And so I said, ‘well, let's change it.’ If we're going to sit here and expect to take whatever's offered to us, then that's our problem, and that's why we decided to try to do it differently.”
Melby said having control is overrated anyway.
“I think as MSPs, we often worry about losing control,” Melby added. “The thing I've learned through building at scale is that control is overrated. I like to say alignment eats control for breakfast. Alignment is what you need when it comes to having 1,400 employees. Control is a myth. I can't control 1,400 people. You have to create alignment in that. You always have to look at what's ahead for everybody, and make sure that that alignment is going to go the direction that you need it to go.”
Tim Pabich, CEO of MSP 501 winner Magnitech, moderated the consolidation panel to provide an MSP’s perspective.
“There's a lot of ways to look at it,” Pabich said of what an MSP owner thinks about before selling. “One is, I can pull some chips off the table, remove risk, take care of my family. The reasons I started the business in the first place may not have always been financial. It could have been freedom -- maybe I have a problem with authority, so that's why I started my company. Now I am the authority, and maybe I'm ready now for that next chapter. Or maybe I've gotten this far, which is really what makes it appetizing, and now we’ll get this infusion. Maybe I'm part of the future. Maybe I'm not, so I have to be prepared to deal with either of those scenarios.”