The 20 MSP Continues M&A Spree With Four New MSP Acquisitions
‘For us, four MSP acquisitions is easy to digest in a month. ‘We’ll probably do two to four acquisitions a month in 2023, or 24 to 48 acquisitions for the year. We’ll do another three or four by year-end this year,’ says The 20 MSP CEO Tim Conkle.
Managed service provider The 20 MSP Monday continued its MSP acquisition streak by unveiling its purchase of four more MSPs.
The news comes less than a month after The 20 MSP unveiled the acquisition of six other MSPs.
It is an acquisition streak whose momentum will continue into next year, said Tim Conkle, CEO of the Plano, Texas-based company.
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“For us, four MSP acquisitions is easy to digest in a month,” Conkle (pictured) told CRN. “We’ll probably do two to four acquisitions a month in 2023, or 24 to 48 acquisition for the year. We’ll do another three or four by year-end this year.”
With experience, acquisitions have become very easy to complete, Conkle said.
“I could do more acquisitions than we’re doing now,” he said. “We have the bandwidth. The only real issue is billing. That takes time to integrate. But we moved to using NetSuite this summer and so now it’s all automated.”
The 20 MSP is a managed service provider set up to acquire other MSPs and build a nationwide services provider. Its acquisition candidates come from The 20 MSP Group, a network of independent MSPs that have signed on to use the same managed services tools that The 20 MSP provides to its own clients, Conkle said.
“We have so many MSPs in our acquisition pipeline,” he said. “There’s no end in sight. We have over 100 pretty much ready to roll.”
The current economy is providing an incredible opportunity for MSPs in general and for The 20 MSP in particular, Conkle said.
“Businesses are looking to save money. And how can they do that?” he said. “By outsourcing their IT to MSPs. The problem is, a lot of IT really sucks. We fix that when we bring a new MSP on-board. I’d say 99 percent of MSPs have no true goal alignment with customers. They can’t keep the business side working. So that’s the first thing we fix when an MSP joins The 20 MSP Group.”
MSPs for the most part are very good at the technical side of managed services, Conkle said.
“But MSPs that come into The 20 MSP Group agree to standardize their contracts on my model,” he said. “That removes the friction they may have with clients.”
When an MSP from The 20 MSP Group is acquired by The 20 MSP, its people go to where their talent can best be used, whether sales or technical, to help them grow and succeed within the company, Conkle said.
“Everyone flows to where their ‘magic’ is,” he said. “Some go to the sales side, some to the tech side. If you give them a good business model and the right resources, they’ll grow. Most MSPs are engineers, but are introverts when it comes to sales. And in a small MSP, a guy who can sell really well will often have problems delivering the services.”
The 20 MSP Monday unveiled the acquisition of four MSPs: Bozeman, Mont.-based MSP and commercial network security provider WolfGuard IT; Newark, Del.-based MSP and support services provider Bolder Designs; Richmond, Texas-based MSP and cloud services provider Byte-Werx; and Columbia, Mo.-based MSP JS Computek.
The four newly-acquired MSPs bring a wide variety of skillsets to The 20 MSP, Conkle said.
“But that’s a by-product of the acquisition,” he said. “The expanded geographical reach into four new states is more important for us.”
One of the acquisitions, Byte-Werx, did bring The 20 MSP expertise in web development, something it lacked in the past, Conkle said.
“In the past, we had to work with outside providers for web development. Now we can bring that all in-house.”
Conkle also said The 20 MSP is also looking to change how the company is characterized from MSP to MID, or “managed IT department.”
“MID says better what we are,” he said. “We’re an outsourced IT provider, a managed IT department for our customers.”