Send Us the Procedure

Diligence on an MSP runs about eight weeks. Peter Melby, who runs New Charter Technologies, gave that number to ChannelE2E, and it matches what most platform buyers describe. The first three weeks are the countable part: the contracts, the revenue by client, the accountants’ report on earnings, the tool list, the org chart. Then a request arrives that reads differently from the rest. Send us your client onboarding procedure. Not the onboarding tool. The procedure, as written, as a technician would follow it.

That request is the point of the whole exercise. The financials tell the buyer what the business earned. The procedures tell the buyer whether it will keep earning it after the people who built it are gone, retired, or absorbed into a platform. A buyer paying years of profit up front for a company wants to know which of those years depend on a person and which depend on a document.

What the buyer is pricing

M&A Signal’s 2026 MSP M&A report, the one that publishes a table of what moves an MSP’s price, puts it in one sentence: “Standard operating procedures for service delivery, onboarding, and escalation reduce key-person risk and demonstrate that the business is a scalable operation rather than a collection of individual relationships.” The table around that sentence assigns numbers. Management depth beyond the founder earns a premium of half a turn to a full turn of the multiple. An owner-operator with no succession plan takes a discount of one to two turns. On a company earning two million dollars a year in profit, a turn is two million dollars of price.

Those two rows are about people, and the procedures are how a buyer tests them without taking anyone’s word. Ian Richardson of Fox & Crow Group, who advises MSPs through sales, told ChannelPro in November 2024 that “you also have to examine their practices, what their documentation looks like, and where the gaps are between how the acquiring company does things and selling company does things.” Madhur Duggar of Excendio Advisors said the same thing from the valuation side in ChannelPro in July 2026: operational maturity raises what buyers will pay “by reducing risk of client or employee attrition when the owner steps away.”

No buyer publishes its checklist, and no survey reports what share of MSPs have written procedures at all. So the list below is mine, built from what the requests look like in practice and from what each one proves. Six documents. Each is a test of whether the revenue survives the transfer of the people.

The six documents

Client onboarding. The procedure that takes a new client’s environment from whatever it is to the way the firm runs everything. It proves the firm has a standard and applies it, which is the same fact a reference architecture proves from the engineering side. Kaseya’s 2026 State of the MSP survey asked 1,061 providers to name the three areas where they automate the most, and onboarding came in near the bottom: 17 percent named it, against 53 percent for monitoring and alerts. Onboarding sits near the bottom of what an MSP automates, which makes it one of the most person-dependent things an MSP does, which is why it is the first document a buyer asks for.

Ticket escalation. Who touches a ticket first, what moves it to a senior engineer, when the client hears from a human, and what happens after hours. The buyer reads it to learn whether the service desk works when the best engineer is on vacation, or whether every hard ticket has been routed to the same person for eleven years.

Backup restore testing. Not the backup policy. The restore log: which client, which date, how long it took, who signed it. The joint advisory that seven agencies in five countries issued to MSPs in May 2022 told providers to keep backups isolated from the network and to exercise recovery plans rather than file them. A backup that has never been restored is a hope, and a buyer will not pay a multiple for hope.

Access and offboarding. The procedure for granting a technician access to client systems, and the one for taking it away the day that technician leaves. The same advisory told MSPs to review accounts “particularly when personnel transitions occur” and to keep their own accounts out of client administrator groups. A buyer treats a gap here as a security finding, and security findings are where diligence stops being a pricing exercise. Bill McLaughlin, Thrive’s president, told ChannelE2E that security weighs on the decision of whether to buy a company at all. That is the polite version of: this is the document that ends conversations.

Incident response. Who gets called, in what order, what the client is told and when, and who has the authority to shut something down. The advisory asked for plans with roles for every stakeholder. The buyer asks for the last time the plan was run, even as a tabletop.

Contract-to-invoice reconciliation. The procedure that ties every line on every invoice to a signed agreement and a current seat count. This one protects the number the accountants just certified. Recurring revenue is only recurring if the contract says the client owes it; a firm that bills from memory has revenue the buyer cannot underwrite. In Kaseya’s survey, 24 percent of MSPs put billing and invoicing among their three most automated areas, so at most firms this reconciliation, if it exists, runs by hand.

What the buyers do with the answers

The platform buyers disagree about what happens after close, and the disagreement shows why they all ask for the same documents. Thrive integrates: McLaughlin says every acquisition is on Thrive’s ticketing system and “running our playbooks” within nine to twelve months. Evergreen Services Group leaves its companies alone on tooling and, in Sydney Hockett’s words, spends “a lot of time on customers and their retention.” One buyer needs the procedures to know how far the seller is from the playbook. The other needs them to know whether the clients will stay when the owner stops being the procedure. Same six documents, read for different risks.

What the owner should do with them

You already own a platform, and you are the buyer on the next bolt-on and the seller at exit. Run the request on yourself first. At the next operating review ask for the six documents by name, as documents, not as descriptions of how things are done. Sort the answers into two columns: exists on paper, exists as a person. The second column is what the diligence team will find, priced by the row in M&A Signal’s table.

Then test the paper. Hand each procedure to someone hired in the last ninety days and have them run it on a real client while the author says nothing. Where they stop and ask, the document is missing a step, and the step is living in somebody’s head.

Do the same to the target before the letter of intent, and price what you find. A missing document is not a reason to walk. It is a reason to pay the discount row of the table instead of the premium row, and to put the difference in the earnout, payable when the document exists and a new hire has run it.

The financials say what the business earned. The six procedures say whether it will earn it without the people who wrote it. A buyer prices the second question. An owner who answers it a year early keeps the turn of multiple the diligence team would otherwise take back.