Simon Pardo’s Honest Take
I’ve been turning something over in my mind.
It keeps coming back, usually after I see another acquisition announcement, so I thought it was worth putting the thought down properly rather than letting it continue to circle.
Barely a month seems to go by without another IT business being acquired. Another “we’re excited to announce that we’ve joined forces with…” post. Another group of engineers, account managers and clients absorbed into something bigger. At first glance, it looks like consolidation: a fragmented market tidying itself up. But the more I sit with it, the more I wonder whether it also means fewer genuinely independent choices for the businesses relying on the services our industry provides.
Is this Simply What Success Looks Like?
Is this always just the natural result of success? I’m not sure anymore.
The level of interest in MSPs is hard to ignore. I receive around three emails or letters a month asking whether I want investment or would be interested in selling. I probably receive twice that number through LinkedIn.
And it makes sense, at least on the surface. The IT industry is one of the biggest areas of business growth at the moment. That is not just because of AI and data centres; it also includes managed service providers like ours.
The reason is simple: businesses rely on their IT. Downtime costs money, cyber risk is real, and support that might have been seen as optional or a “nice to have” ten years ago, is now business-critical.
Why Investors Are Interested
That level of need makes the sector attractive. Investors can see the potential for a good return, and private equity firms are actively looking for managed service providers because both the demand and the hype are there.
But that does not tell the whole story.
Many MSPs struggle to make consistent profits. A lot of them undersell their services, sometimes pricing them below the true cost of delivery. Often, that stems from how these businesses begin. The owners are usually IT people first: technically brilliant, commercially aware, and able to connect technology with business outcomes in a way that genuinely helps customers.
They care deeply about the service they provide. They work long hours, often pay themselves nowhere near what they are worth, and build businesses around solving problems properly.
But as the business grows, the pressures change:
- Costs increase.
- More people are needed.
- Competition becomes sharper.
- New business needs to be won.
- Pricing often becomes the easiest lever to pull.
So, they undersell.
What starts as a commitment to good service can slowly become a race to deliver more for less.
Now bring private equity back into the picture: “Here is some money to grow your business. You have a plan—let’s do it.” But soon, that plan falls back on how cheaply the business can provide a service, and the private equity funding begins to cover the shortfall. Two years later, the investors are asking to see returns on their investment. So, what do most companies do? They increase their prices or expand their offering with optional extras.
The Customer’s Place in the Story
I want to be careful here, because there is nothing wrong with building a business that you eventually sell. Plenty of good businesses are built that way, and founders should be able to move on when the time is right.
What I keep coming back to is something slightly different: what happens when selling becomes the real product, and helping the customer becomes the story told while everyone waits for the valuation to look right?
Because if that is the plan, the customer is not really the customer anymore. They become a number on a spreadsheet: monthly recurring revenue, contract length, churn risk—all the tidy things that fit neatly into somebody else’s acquisition model.
They are no longer a business you are trying to understand, with people inside it whom you learn from, grow with and, hopefully, support for a long time.
Isn’t it Ironic?
There is an irony in this that I cannot quite get past. I started Computer Care because I knew IT support should be grounded in strong principles, properly understood in the customer’s language, and not merely sold and invoiced. Now, I look around the industry and see no shortage of companies saying the same thing. They say they are here to help, and I do not doubt that some of that help is real. But increasingly, it seems to mean making a customer comfortable enough to become a valuable line item for whoever buys the company next. The support may be genuine in the moment, but the longer-term relationship feels as though it is being deferred to someone else: some future owner, some next chapter the customer never really chose.
Collaborate to Compete
At the same time, collaboration seems to be enjoying a quiet resurgence elsewhere: open source, shared infrastructure, and businesses that would once have guarded every scrap of expertise but now seem more willing to say, “We don’t do that part, but here’s who does it well.”
It feels as though parts of the industry are rediscovering something we always knew: most problems are solved better together than alone, and trust compounds in a way that a single transaction never can.
So, I keep asking myself whether we are losing sight of what good service looks like. Good service is considered. It is relational. It rewards businesses that stay close enough, for long enough, to understand their customers properly—not merely acquire them or package them. It may not show up neatly in a growth deck, but it does show up in whether someone still trusts you five years later.
Work in Progress
I do not have a tidy conclusion. I am not going to pretend that I know exactly where the industry will land, or that Computer Care has it all figured out. We are a small, independent business trying to stay true to the standards we set out to deliver in an environment that can sometimes feel less open to that kind of work. In a business world often obsessed with more, the result can oddly feel like less.
If you are a business owner reading this and something about the way your IT support has felt lately does not sit right either—the changing tone, the changing faces, the sense that you are being managed rather than helped—perhaps you are not imagining it. And perhaps I am not alone in my thinking.