The MSP Roll-Up That Skipped Private Equity

Most coverage of MSP consolidation assumes private equity is behind every acquisition spree. It isn't. One of the channel's fastest-growing roll-ups has acquired 48 managed service providers in under four years without taking a dollar from a PE sponsor, funding every deal instead from cash flow and bank debt.

Who is actually buying MSPs in 2026?

Private equity gets credit for most of the consolidation headlines, but it was not the universal buyer last year, and it is not this year either. Omdia tracked 169 publicly announced MSP-related M&A transactions in 2025. Private equity showed up in 69 percent of the deals where a buyer type was disclosed, a figure Omdia itself says probably overstates true PE involvement because smaller MSP-to-MSP deals get announced less often. That still leaves a real slice of the market: 52 of those 2025 deals closed with no PE participation at all, bought by strategic acquirers using their own balance sheet.

The pattern held into this year. Drakestar counted 111 M&A transactions across MSPs and IT services in the second quarter of 2026, up 9 percent from the prior quarter, and reported that strategic buyers, not financial sponsors, remained the primary consolidators. The same report found that the top 10 acquirers had each closed four or more deals since mid-2024, which tells you consolidation is concentrated among a small group of repeat buyers rather than scattered across one-off transactions.

"Strategic buyer" does not mean the same thing every time, though. Some of those repeat acquirers are PE-backed platforms running a buy-and-build playbook. At least one of the most active is not.

How did one roll-up buy 48 MSPs without private equity?

Omdia's September 2026 profile of The 20 MSP found the company had acquired and integrated 48 MSP businesses in under four years, funded through operating cash flow and conventional commercial bank borrowing rather than a private equity sponsor. Founder and CEO Tim Conkle remains the majority owner, with no outside investor holding a large equity stake.

The speed comes from preparation, not money. The company built a network of roughly 175 member MSPs over about a decade before it made its first acquisition, which gave it a pipeline of pre-vetted targets instead of a cold-calling problem. That groundwork is also what lets the firm move once a deal is signed. Omdia reports the company can take an acquisition from letter of intent to full integration in 90 days or less.

Leadership has set a public target of 12 to 15 acquisitions for 2026. The sweet spot for a target is 1 million to 5 million dollars in annual revenue, with larger deals considered only when they add geography, talent, or a capability the company does not already have.

None of this happened overnight. Conkle spent 18 years building and running his own MSP before he started the member network that eventually became the acquisition engine, and the company has so far operated only inside the United States, with international expansion still an open question rather than a current plan. That timeline matters for how you read the rest of this story. The cash-flow-and-bank-debt model did not replace private equity speed with a slower version of the same thing. It replaced a capital advantage with a preparation advantage built over a decade, which is a trade an individual MSP owner can actually attempt, even if the scale looks different.

Omdia ranks The 20 MSP as the second most acquisitive company in the MSP channel, behind only Evergreen. Evergreen Services Group, a permanent-capital platform backed by Alpine Investors, closed 23 MSP acquisitions between 2023 and 2025, close to eight a year, making it the most acquisitive buyer tracked in the channel over that stretch. The 20 MSP ranks second with 17 deals over the same period. Thrive closed eight deals and Sourcepass four over the same three years, both well behind the top two.

No buyer in that table, PE-backed or not, has sustained anything close to a deal a month. Consolidation is real, but it is still built one relationship and one integration at a time.

Why does this matter if you are not planning to sell?

Even if a buyer never calls you, these roll-ups are competing with you for the same new logos in your own market, and they are set up to move faster than most independents once a target is standardized. The real story above is not about financing. It is about repeatability. A roll-up picks a target, drops in the same stack, the same ticketing structure, the same escalation paths, and the same onboarding on day one, instead of spending a year reverse-engineering someone else's way of doing things.

That is the same discipline an independent MSP needs whether or not it ever sells. A technician who can run your standard playbook on any client, whether that client has been with you for years or onboarded last month, is what lets you absorb growth without a scramble every time you add headcount or acquire a book of business of your own. Forge University exists for exactly that gap: a white-labeled training and certification path you run under your own brand, so every technician you hire, cross-train, or inherit from a small tuck-in hits the same bar from day one instead of drifting for months.

Standardization also changes how a buyer, or a competitor, sees you. An MSP that can show a consistent, documented service model across every client looks like a platform worth paying for. One that runs on a few technicians' institutional memory looks like a risk, no matter how good the work actually is.

Omdia's own read on the 2025 deal data backs this up from a different angle: its analysts wrote that margin structure, not just revenue scale, will define competitive advantage as consolidation continues. A roll-up that integrates in 90 days is protecting its margin on every deal by not paying technicians to relearn a new client's environment from scratch. An independent MSP gets the same protection by refusing to let its own margin depend on tribal knowledge in the first place, whether or not an acquisition is anywhere in the picture.

What should you actually do before the next call from a buyer?

You do not need to be shopping your business, or anyone else's, to act on this. The roll-ups described above are not slowing down, and they are not the only ones watching your market. A few things are worth doing regardless of which side of a deal you expect to be on, or whether you expect to be on either side at all:

• Document your service delivery as a playbook a new hire could run, not as knowledge that lives in one technician's head.
• Separate what is genuinely contracted recurring revenue from one-off project work before a buyer, or a competitor sizing you up, does that math for you.
• Decide now what makes your business worth more than the sum of its tickets, because a well-prepared acquirer already has an answer for every seller in your market.

Before you take a meeting with a buyer, or decide you would rather be the one doing the buying, run your own stack through Stack Builder to see where the gaps sit against what a standardized operator expects out of every environment it absorbs.

Whether you are preparing to sell, planning tuck-ins of your own, or just want to compete with a roll-up that is not going away, the tools that make service delivery repeatable across clients are worth a serious look. The full Actiforge product catalog is built for exactly that kind of standardization. See the full stack.