The Coming Wave of MSP Secondary Buyouts

A new phase of MSP consolidation is starting: the private equity firms that bought platform MSPs between 2019 and 2022 are approaching the end of their typical hold period, and instead of selling to a strategic buyer they are increasingly selling to each other. For owners still weighing a sale, that changes who you are actually negotiating with.

What is a secondary buyout, and why does it matter to MSP owners now?

A secondary buyout is when one private equity firm sells a portfolio company to another private equity firm rather than to a strategic acquirer or through an IPO. In the MSP sector, the platforms that took their first institutional capital in 2019 through 2022 are now hitting the five to seven year window sponsors typically target before exiting, and McKinsey's 2026 Global Private Markets Report puts the average buyout hold period at roughly 6.6 years across all sectors. That timing puts a meaningful slice of the MSP platform universe on the market between 2026 and 2029, not as founder-run businesses but as PE-owned platforms looking for their next owner.

This is not a hypothetical. Deal volume already reflects it. Drake Star Partners tracked more than 100 MSP transactions in a single quarter of 2025 worth $2.6 billion in disclosed value, and Solganick's Q4 2025 technology services M&A update put full year 2025 at 466 total MSP transactions, a 20 percent jump over 2024, with private equity buyers behind roughly 85 percent of that activity. When that much of the deal flow is PE money, a growing share of it is inevitably PE money trading assets with other PE money.

How many firms are actually doing this?

Fewer than you would guess. The active MSP buyer pool is concentrated in roughly 15 to 25 highly active platforms, with a longer tail bringing the total tracked by advisory firm N2M Capital to more than 75. Sponsors with the most repeat MSP buyouts include Shore Capital Partners, TAC Partners, Madison Dearborn, Charlesbank, KKR, and Cinven, several of them building position through five or more acquisitions apiece.

That concentration is the part owners underestimate. If you are evaluating three offers for your business, there is a real chance two of those three buyers eventually sell to the same handful of larger funds, or to each other, within the same five to seven year window. The identity of your buyer's buyer is no longer a distant hypothetical question. It is close enough to affect how your business gets integrated, staffed, and branded after close.

Pricing tells the same story from a different angle. Quality platforms are trading at 7 to 11 times EBITDA, and top tier businesses with strong recurring revenue and modern tooling are reaching 10 to 13 times, according to 2026 MSP M&A multiples data compiled by CT Acquisitions. Of the disclosed MSP deals tracked in 2025, only a small fraction, roughly 17 of 169, involved a business with real managed security capability as the target, and those command a premium over pure break-fix or generalist shops. A platform planning its own resale is paying close attention to which of those categories your business falls into, because it needs the same story to work again in three years.

What changes when your acquirer is planning its own exit

A platform that is two or three years into its own hold period is not optimizing the same things a strategic buyer optimizes. It is building a story for its next sale: clean recurring revenue, defensible margins, a repeatable integration playbook, and a leadership bench that does not depend on any one founder staying forever. That reshapes what happens to the MSP you built.

• Retention terms get more specific. Sponsors preparing for their own future exit want your management team's commitment documented past the typical two year earnout, because a thin bench is a discount on their next sale.
• Integration moves faster. A platform aiming for its own 2027 or 2028 exit cannot spend three years slowly folding you in. Expect tool stack consolidation, rebranding, and process standardization on a tighter timeline than a strategic buyer with no resale clock would use.
• Multiple compression risk shows up in the fine print. Buyers preparing to resell care intensely about anything that could look messy in their own future diligence process, from client concentration to inconsistent documentation.

None of this makes a PE-backed offer worse than a strategic one. It makes it a different kind of deal, with different diligence questions worth asking before you sign anything.

What questions should an MSP owner be asking a PE-backed buyer?

Ask directly where the buyer is in its fund life and what its own exit timeline looks like, because that answer predicts how your business gets treated after close far better than the multiple on the term sheet does. A fund three years into a ten year vehicle behaves differently than one already shopping for its own buyer.

Worth asking specifically:

1. When did this platform take its first institutional capital, and what is the fund's typical hold period.
2. Has this sponsor completed a secondary sale before, and what happened to the acquired companies' leadership teams and brands.
3. What does the integration timeline look like for tooling, staffing, and client-facing branding.

A sponsor with nothing to hide answers these plainly. One that gets vague about its own exit plans is telling you something about how much weight your post-close experience actually carries in its model.

The independent path gets a clearer case

Not every owner wants to sell into this cycle, and the secondary buyout wave actually strengthens the argument for staying independent longer if your recurring revenue and margins are healthy. A business with a well trained, well retained technical team is both a stronger acquisition target when you do decide to sell and a stronger standalone competitor against PE platforms that are, by definition, mid-integration and distracted by their own transaction cycles.

There is also a client-facing angle owners tend to overlook. Clients of a platform mid-transition often notice the change before the press release goes out, through account manager turnover, tool migrations, and shifting points of contact. An independent MSP that can point to a stable team and a consistent client experience has a real, current talking point against a competitor going through exactly that disruption. That is not a permanent advantage, since every platform eventually stabilizes under its new owner, but the 2026 to 2029 window is when it is worth the most.

Building that bench deliberately, rather than reacting to attrition, is the difference between an MSP that can wait for the right offer and one that has to take whatever is on the table when a key technician leaves. Forge University exists for exactly that case: structured training and certification that builds depth on your team instead of dependence on one or two people, whether your plan is to sell in three years or never sell at all.

What this means for the next 24 months

Expect deal volume to stay elevated through 2026 and 2027 as the 2019 to 2022 vintage works through its exits, and expect a growing share of those deals to be sponsor to sponsor rather than platform to independent. If you are approached by a PE-backed buyer, treat the fund's own timeline as a diligence item, not small talk. If you are staying independent, treat this window as a competitive opening: PE platforms mid-transition are, for a stretch, worse at retention, integration, and client experience than a stable owner-operated shop with its own house in order.

None of that requires guessing. Ask a prospective buyer for its fund's vintage year and typical hold period the same way you would ask about payment terms. Track how many of the platforms in your market have already changed hands once. And if the plan is to stay independent, put real budget behind the parts of the business, staffing depth chief among them, that a rushed integration timeline cannot fake.

Either path benefits from knowing exactly where your own tool stack and service delivery stand against what a buyer, or a competitor, would actually find under the hood. Stack Builder gives you that picture in a few minutes, mapped against what platform MSPs are actually standardizing on right now. Pair that clarity with a broader look at Actiforge's full product line before you decide which conversation to have next, whether it is with a buyer or with your own leadership team.

See the full stack to see how Actiforge helps MSPs build the kind of team and operation that stays in control of its own timeline.

Sources: Drake Star Partners MSP M&A tracking via industry aggregation | Solganick, "Technology Services M&A Market Update, Q4 2025 and 2026 Outlook" | McKinsey 2026 Global Private Markets Report | N2M Capital MSP M&A Valuation Report 2026.