Tag
private-equity
10 posts
Your Liability Cap Does Not Cover the Sales Pitch
The liability cap in a managed services agreement limits what an MSP owes for bad work. It does not reliably limit what the MSP owes for a false statement made to win the deal. Eight court rulings across backup, software projects, cloud software, website builds, demos and security monitoring show the split, and seven checks tell an owner where the exposure sits.
The Six Partnerships an MSP Runs On
An MSP resells someone's software, subcontracts someone's labor, gets clients from someone's referrals, sells through someone's marketplace, and is owned by someone's fund, and no industry survey measures any of it. A guide to the six partnership types: what each gives, what each costs, who is doing it, what can go wrong, and the six questions for the owner's next operating review.
The Compliance Practice Nobody Bills For
Four in ten MSPs offer compliance and fewer than one in ten count it as revenue. A guide to building the practice as a real line: what it sells, who buys it, how it is priced, who runs it, what the frameworks require in 2026, whether AI governance belongs in it, and what a buyer of the MSP pays for it.
Rent the SOC, Build It, or Buy It
Most MSPs sell security. Far fewer run the room where alerts get read at three in the morning. For a private equity owner there are three doors to that capability, rent, build, or buy, and the years left on the hold should pick the door.
What Private Equity Looks for When It Buys an MSP
The scorecard a private equity platform runs on an MSP, line by line, with the published number behind each line: deal activity, size floors, recurring revenue and contract terms, margin, growth, client concentration, owner dependency, security posture, the premiums and discounts in turns of EBITDA, deal structure, and how long the process takes.
Send Us the Procedure
A private equity buyer's diligence team asks an MSP for six written procedures because each one tests whether the revenue survives the transfer of the people. Here is the list, what each document proves, and what the owner should do with it before the diligence team arrives.
The Reference Architecture
A reference architecture is a parts list with a rule attached: every client gets the same design. It is where top-quartile MSP profit comes from, and it is the one answer to why you and not the other three firms that quoted.
The Missing Service Catalog
A founder-led MSP prices every deal by feel, and the industry never settled on a model, so a hired seller has nothing to quote from. The service catalog gets written before the job description does.
The Vertical He Never Named
A founder-led MSP's client book usually clusters in one industry by accident. The buyer's job is to name it, because a vertical pitch is the one sales motion a hired seller can run without the founder.
The Milestone That Counts the Wrong Thing
MSP platforms report how fast an acquisition was integrated and never what the acquired revenue did afterward. One platform published the number that would count, and most MSPs cannot report it.