I Survived: Private Equity Acquired My MSP and Everything Changed
PE acquisitions are analysed in our Private Equity Eating MSPs article.
I want to tell you about the company I loved. And how it died.
I joined a founder-led MSP in Sydney in 2016. Thirty people. The founder — let's call him Michael — had started the business in his garage in 2009. By the time I joined, we had a proper office in North Sydney, a decent client base, and a culture that was genuinely good.
Michael knew everyone's name. He knew my wife was expecting. He sent flowers. When I was going through a rough patch, he sat me down in the kitchen and asked how he could help. Not HR. Not my manager. The founder. The person who'd built this thing from nothing.
We had flexible hours. If you needed to leave early for a school pickup, you did. If you wanted to work from home on Fridays, you did. Nobody monitored your keystrokes or questioned your output. Michael judged you on your work, not your hours.
I got my CCNP there. Paid for by the company. I got my first management role there. Michael mentored me personally. For eight years, I genuinely loved going to work.
The Sale
Michael was in his early 60s by 2023. He'd been talking about succession for a while. None of us were surprised when he announced he'd found a buyer. What surprised us was who the buyer was.
A private equity firm. One of the big ones. The kind that specialises in "IT services rollups" — buying small MSPs, squeezing them together, cutting costs, and selling the combined entity for a multiple of the original purchase price.
Michael told us in a team meeting. He said all the right things. "They share our values." "This will give us resources to grow." "The culture will stay the same." He looked like he believed it. I wanted to believe him.
The sale closed in August 2023.
The Transformation
Within three months, the new PE firm installed a new CEO. Not someone from the MSP world — someone from their portfolio. A former logistics executive. He'd never managed a ticketing system in his life, but he understood "operational efficiency."
Here's what changed:
Month 1: New CEO. Mandatory office attendance three days a week (we'd been flexible for eight years). "Collaboration" was the justification.
Month 2: New KPIs. Response times. Resolution rates. Utilisation targets. If your billable hours dropped below 85%, you got a "performance conversation." Michael had never tracked utilisation. He tracked client satisfaction and staff happiness. They're not the same thing.
Month 3: "Headcount optimisation." Three people were made redundant. Including our best project manager. The official line was "restructuring." The real line was that PE wanted to cut costs before the next quarterly report.
Month 4: Michael's "advisory role" was quietly dissolved. He'd been told he'd stay on for a year. He lasted three months. I saw him clear out his office on a Friday afternoon. He didn't say goodbye to anyone. I think he was too ashamed.
Month 6: Mandatory office five days a week. "We're building a high-performance culture." The flexible hours that had made this place special? Gone. Replaced by time-tracking software and "core hours" of 9am to 5pm.
Month 9: Two more redundancies. A freeze on new hires. The team was now 20 people doing the work of 30. "Lean operations."
Month 12: I handed in my resignation.
Why I Left
It wasn't any single thing. It was the accumulation. The culture that had made this place worth working at for eight years was systematically dismantled in favour of metrics that looked good on a spreadsheet but had nothing to do with why clients chose us or why staff stayed.
The new CEO was professional enough. He wasn't cruel. He was just... indifferent. To the things that mattered. He saw headcount as a cost to be minimised, not a team to be invested in. He saw flexible hours as a perk to be earned, not a trust to be maintained. He saw Michael's legacy as a set of processes to be optimised, not a culture to be protected.
The final straw was when he announced a "rebrand" — new logo, new website, new name. Eight years of reputation, five years of client trust, all wiped out because PE needed the company to look like it belonged in their portfolio.
What I'd Tell Others
If your MSP gets acquired by PE, start preparing immediately. Update your resume. Refresh your certifications. Start networking. PE acquisitions follow a predictable playbook: install new leadership, cut costs, push for growth, sell again. You are a cost in that equation.
The founder's promises won't survive the transition. Michael genuinely believed the culture would stay. He was wrong. PE doesn't buy companies to maintain them. They buy them to extract value.
Watch the first 90 days. That's when the playbook kicks in. If you see new KPIs, mandatory attendance, and headcount discussions in the first three months, you know what's coming.
Your institutional knowledge is leverage — but only if you use it. PE firms acquire businesses for their client relationships and recurring revenue. If you're the person who holds those relationships, you have more power than you think. Use it to negotiate a better package before the next round of cuts.
The "synergy" talk is code for "someone is losing their job." When PE talks about synergies between portfolio companies, they mean eliminating duplicate roles. If your role looks like it could be done by someone in another portfolio company, it will be.
What I Learned
- PE acquisitions in MSP are value extraction, not value creation. The financial logic is straightforward: buy at 6x EBITDA, cut costs, grow revenue, sell at 10x. Staff are a cost line in that equation.
- Culture is the first casualty. It's intangible, doesn't show on a balance sheet, and gets in the way of "efficiency." PE firms replace it with metrics because metrics are measurable and culture isn't.
- Founder-led MSPs are a different beast. If you work at one and it gets acquired, understand that the thing you loved about the place was the founder, not the business model. The business model is about to change.
- Your loyalty was to a person, not an entity. Michael's company is gone. The entity that bought it has his name on the door but none of his values. It's okay to grieve that.
- The best time to leave an MSP is when it's still good. I should have left when Michael sold. Instead, I gave the new owners a year to prove me wrong. They didn't. Don't make my mistake.
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