Tusker is the newest MSP portfolio company, following a rebrand this month.
Formerly known as ACP CreativIT, Tusker consists of five regional companies acquired since 2017. Those MSPs are Chicago-based Arlington Computer Products (ACP) and Mindsight, Green Bay, WI-based Camera Corner Connecting Point, Duluth, MN-based Citon Computer Corp. in 2022, Boston's Versatile Communications, and Chicago-based Mindsight. Tusker is now a national brand combining these five formerly family-owned MSPs, and Tusker CEO Matt Zafirovski said he will hunt for more acquisitions as well as try to grow organically in 2026.
“All roads lead to managed, and that's why the whole channel – really the whole industry -- is moving in that direction,” Zafirovski said.
Tusker has strong advisory, consulting and managed services businesses, focusing on cybersecurity, compliance, cloud and data center infrastructure. The MSP has around 400 employees with $280 million in 2025 revenue.
We spoke with Zafirovski about the reasons behind the rebrand, and his vision for growth.
What’s the reason for the branding, and why now?
Zafirovski: We've been so fortunate to acquire these five fantastic businesses. The youngest company we've acquired is over 20 years old. We're so proud that we have five companies with decades of experience. So how do I respect the history, that heritage, long-term relationships and community presence? Those things helped these companies adapt, survive, persist for a couple of decades in this space. We can't lose that.
Frankly, I've taken probably a couple years longer to do the rebranding simply because I wanted first the team to know that we weren't just going to buy someone and slap a new coat of paint on the next day. Part of the rationale for rebranding was so we can tell that story as one, because the collective capabilities of the company are really extraordinary. But frankly, the other piece was to reduce customer complexity.
How does the rebrand reduce customer complexity?
Zafirovski: We would be meeting with the customer and we would have a sales rep with one email and a cloud solution architect with another email. We’d have a Windows engineer with a different email. With the customer, we’d spend 10 minutes talking about “Who's who? Wait, are you guys contractors? Are you guys consultants? Why are there six different emails?"
What we were hearing from our team was we have to go tell our story as one without losing the obsession with winning locally. That's how we compete. We're in the ultimate barbell industry. I'm up against the guys with the mega scale and then these incredible boutique, specialized firms. So we have to be able to do both.
How big are all of your companies combined now?
Zafirovski: We're about 390 full-time team members. About $280 million in revenue for 2025. The objective is to grow over $300 million this year organically. We want to grow faster than the market.
I've been the CEO for just over three years now. In that first year, services made up about 6% of revenue. Last year it was about 13%, and I'm very proud of that traction. The goal is to get that to about 20% in the next two years.
Tusker CEO Matt Zafirovski
Will you continue to acquire MSPs?
Zafirovski: We will use M&A, but we have to grow organically—keep growing services, really leading with advisory services, lifecycle management, professional services. And then can we use M&A to accelerate that?
M&A has been wildly important for constructing our foundation. But M&A is not easy. We don't just acquire to acquire. We have to make sure we're going very strategically. M&A helps accelerate the story and accelerate the traction but is not a silver bullet.
What type of MSPs do you look for in acquisitions?
Zafirovski: We want to attract great companies that do have history in their communities and have found a way to adapt and survive. Companies that are great cultural fits. If we can do those pieces well, I think this becomes a really exciting story in the channel. We have to obsess over earning our customers' business every single day. But I believe we're setting ourselves up for a pretty exciting run here.
Who are your biggest strategic partnerships?
Zafirovski: Microsoft is wildly important. We've probably tripled that business over the last year. So I'm very proud of the Microsoft relationship. We have some great Fortinet shops. I think we're the most specialized Fortinet partner in the country, we've been at the highest level for seven years. Cisco is very important. Mindsight, one of our companies, was a long-time Cisco Gold partner. We're a top 25 HPE partner in the country. We've been consistently platinum on the compute, hybrid cloud, and Aruba and Juniper on the networking piece. We bleed HP green, if you will. We love Dell. We sell a lot of Dell. Lenovo has been a great growing partner, both on the client side and the server side. And then Apple. We are one of only 12—I believe it's called the Premier Partners—in the world.
I would put us up against anyone in the channel with our top partners. I'm very proud of those seven, eight partners.
You're in the middle between the big-scale guys—call it Insight, CDW, Tech Data, and so on—and then boutique firms. How do you succeed between those two types of competitors?
Zafirovski: My view is we're big enough to matter, small enough to care. What I mean by big enough to matter is we have the scale, the depth, and capabilities with those core partners so that we can effectively compete with the big guys. With our core partners, we have a very good win rate with our customers against those big guys. With our core partners, our smart guys are as good as their smart guys. While they may have thousands of people and I only have hundreds of people, our smart guys are as smart as their smart guys. And then against the smaller boutique guys, scale is to our advantage. We're big enough that you have some benefit against the smaller guys, but then frankly, we can do more than some of the boutique shops.
What are you doing with AI? How do you use it to drive revenue?
Zafirovski: We don't play in the application layer, and so where we've been able to support our customers for AI is on the infrastructure piece. I mentioned we're a strong HPE, Dell, Lenovo provider. We're an Nvidia partner. Also Cisco, Fortinet, a lot of the solutions we've sold have been into the data center. In other words, we've sold GPUs. We've built some AI infrastructure solutions for companies.
The next piece is we've had a bunch of consulting and service engagements tied to more AI governance. This is an extension of the cybersecurity piece, which is all around compliance, documentation, procedures, and governance. That's led to some smaller but important consulting engagements where firms are trying to figure out: We have all this data. What does this mean as we start using all these different LLMs?
The other piece is internal. Our chief innovation leader has built an AI agent for our sales team. For example, our team is down at a data center in Texas right now doing a Juniper networking project. They'll be able to search for "data center, AI, networking, Juniper," and they'll be able to see the different projects that will get spit out. These tools will just enable our sales team to move faster, to understand all the things that are happening, to connect the dots quicker with all of our respective capabilities. I'm using—I mean, there's one example of many things we're doing to experiment with what we can do internally.