Best M&A Advisors for
MSPs & Managed Service Providers in 2026

Who This Guide Is For, and How We Evaluated These Firms

This is written for owners of managed services providers in roughly the $2 million to $50 million revenue range who are preparing for a sale or deciding whether to start. If you run a shop below that, a business broker is likely a better fit than anyone on this list. If you run one above it, the bulge-bracket technology teams will take your call and this comparison is too small for you.

Each firm was assessed against four rules governing what we were willing to print. First, verifiability: can a claim be confirmed from something other than the firm's own marketing. Second, attribution: every number is tied to the publisher and document it came from, inside the sentence, with its date. Third, precision about what a number counts, because “transactions” and “parties” and “engagements” are not the same word. Fourth, where we could not confirm something, we say so rather than filling the gap with the firm's own language.

Applying those rules produced an uncomfortable result worth stating before you read any further. We went looking for independent evidence about these seven firms and found almost none. Setting aside the regulatory records, which are public and definitive, exactly one genuinely independent piece of journalism exists about any firm in this comparison: a Star Tribune profile of Revenue Rocket published in 2012. Everything else traces to a company website, a LinkedIn page, or a press release the firm issued about itself. That is the evidence base for an entire category of advisory firm, and it is the most useful thing we learned writing this guide.

What We Could Verify, and What We Could Not

Every firm on this list publishes some version of a track record. We tried to check each one.

Revenue Rocket self-reports more than 150 closed transactions. We found no independent confirmation of that figure, and we found secondary sources citing a higher number, which means at least one of the two is out of date. Roadmap Advisors reports hundreds of IT and MSP transactions on its practice page. The National Law Review item often cited alongside that claim is a press release the firm issued, and it carries no transaction count at all. N2M Capital Advisors publishes no deal count, no named transaction, and no client size range.

FOCUS Investment Banking is the exception, and the distinction is worth being precise about. FOCUS states it has completed transactions involving 76 parties over five years, including 12 private equity platform launches. Parties are not transactions: a single deal has at least two. The firm does not publish a deal count, and the number that circulates as “76 MSP transactions” is a misreading of its own careful wording. What can be checked is the named work. Its sales of Velonex Technologies and Fresh Managed IT, and its representation of Simplegrid Technology in the sale to CompassMSP, appear in trade press and acquirer announcements rather than only on its own MSP page. That is a lower number than several competitors advertise and a far higher grade of evidence.

Notice what this means before going further. On the single dimension owners weigh most heavily when choosing an advisor, the length of the track record, the firm with the smallest published figure has the best evidence, and the firms with the largest figures have none you can inspect. A deal count is not a credential. It is a marketing claim in the shape of one.

Why “Are You a Broker-Dealer” Is the Wrong Question

Securities registration is the one dimension here that leaves a public, definitive record, so we checked all seven against FINRA and SEC databases. The results split three ways.

FOCUS runs securities transactions through FOCUS Securities LLC, CRD 150589, an affiliated broker-dealer, which makes it the only firm in this comparison where the entity advising you and the entity permitted to take a transaction fee belong to the same organization. Roadmap Advisors and Auxo Capital Advisors are not broker-dealers themselves and borrow the license: Roadmap through representatives of StillPoint Capital, CRD 133146, a Tampa firm SEC-registered since 2005 whose stated business is providing compliance infrastructure to independent M&A bankers, and Auxo through Weild & Co., CRD 132398. CT Acquisitions, N2M, Revenue Rocket, and Salt Creek hold no broker-dealer registration. CT Acquisitions and Salt Creek disclose this plainly. For N2M and Revenue Rocket we simply found no record, which is not the same as a firm telling you.

Here is why that scoreboard matters less than it looks. On March 29, 2023, Section 15(b)(13) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 took effect, exempting M&A brokers from SEC registration when the target company has no registered securities and either EBITDA below $25 million or gross revenues below $250 million. An MSP doing $30 million of revenue at a 15% margin clears both tests with room to spare. Almost every reader of this article is selling a company Congress has decided can be sold by an unregistered advisor. Salt Creek operates under that exemption, which is precisely why we are not going to write a standard that flatters us and indicts four of our competitors.

The exemption has real limits, and they are where the question becomes useful again. It is unavailable to any broker that holds client funds or securities, provides financing for the transaction, forms or represents a group of buyers, deals with a passive buyer, or represents both sides without written disclosure and consent. So the question worth asking a prospective advisor is not whether they are registered. It is this: who on your deal performs any securities-related work, under which registration or exemption, and what happens if the transaction is structured as a stock sale rather than an asset sale. An advisor who cannot answer that in one sentence has told you something.

The Seven Firms Compared

Two kinds of information sit in this table and they are not equivalent. The registration column is drawn from FINRA and SEC records, which are public and definitive. Every other column reports what the firm publishes about itself, labelled as such. This is not a ranking. The order follows the profiles below, with Salt Creek first because it is the firm this guide is written from.

Read down the third and fourth columns together. Four of seven firms publish no deal volume at all, two publish figures that exist nowhere but their own websites, and one publishes a number that counts something other than deals. Six of seven publish no fee information. The column that actually separates these firms is the last one, and it is the only column where the firms had no say in what it says.

Salt Creek Advisory

Salt Creek Advisory is a family-owned lower middle market investment bank in Chicago. Jack and Connor Pitts work every engagement personally, through preparation, buyer outreach, negotiation, diligence, and closing. Standard sell-side engagements carry no retainer and no monthly work fee, so the firm is paid only if the transaction closes.

We publish no MSP deal count, because we do not have one worth publishing. What we do publish is our valuation work and every source behind it, including the MSP valuation multiples guide, so you can check what we think a business like yours is worth before you ever call us. Jack hosts The Making Of, which featured Dave Moorman, who built DynaSis before selling it to Novatech in 2019 and then ran Novatech's managed IT services division. That is sector immersion rather than a transaction list, and we are not going to present it as the latter.

The honest limitation is capacity and record. A firm where both founders work every deal can carry only a handful of engagements at a time, so there are stretches when we are the wrong answer purely because we could not give a new mandate the attention it needs. Revenue Rocket has spent twenty-five years inside IT services and we have not. If a long sector-specific transaction list matters more to you than who runs your process, call Revenue Rocket or FOCUS first, and ask each of them for the closed-deal list rather than the headline total.

Best for: founder-owned MSPs that want both principals on the deal and no advisory cost before closing.

N2M Capital Advisors

N2M Capital Advisors is a boutique bank covering middle-market technology services, and it is the firm in this comparison we could learn the least about. Its published MSP materials name no completed transaction, no deal count, and no client size range. We found no FINRA or SEC registration for the firm. N2M says its team includes former operators and executives from Deloitte, PwC, DXC, Oracle, and SAP; we could not confirm those backgrounds against any public record, so treat the claim as the firm's own and ask for names.

What N2M does publish, and what makes it consequential well beyond its own client base, is a valuation ladder for MSPs that circulates widely and gets quoted as though it were market data. It is discussed below on its own merits.

Best for: owners who value a small senior team and are willing to run the reference checks the firm's public materials do not support.

Revenue Rocket

Revenue Rocket has advised technology services companies and nothing else since 2001. Twenty-five years inside a single vertical is the strongest claim on this page that does not depend on an unverified number, and it is the reason the firm belongs in any serious comparison. Founder Mike Harvath states that he built and sold technology services businesses and ran a $200 million services operation at MicroAge before starting the firm; that figure is self-reported and we found no independent record of it. The firm describes its focus as MSPs, cybersecurity providers, and application developers.

Two cautions. The $5 million to $50 million client revenue range widely attributed to Revenue Rocket comes from that 2012 Star Tribune profile and is now fourteen years old; the firm publishes no current range, so confirm directly rather than assuming you fit. And Revenue Rocket charges a retainer in addition to a success fee, with amounts undisclosed. Read the next section before you agree to one.

Best for: owners who want the deepest single-vertical tenure in the group and will pay a retainer to get it.

FOCUS Investment Banking

FOCUS serves larger MSP sellers through a dedicated team inside its Technology Services Group, targeting platform and recapitalization sales involving $2.5 million to $30 million of EBITDA. Note what that floor implies: at the 15% to 20% margins typical of a managed services business, $2.5 million of EBITDA means roughly $12.5 million to $17 million of revenue. Most owners this article is written for do not clear it, and should ask which process and which bankers a smaller deal would actually get.

FOCUS is the only firm here with its own affiliated broker-dealer rather than a borrowed license or none, and the only one whose named MSP work appears in sources it did not write. Both facts are worth more than the deal count it is usually credited with.

Best for: MSPs above roughly $2.5 million of EBITDA that want a senior-led process and private equity platform experience.

Roadmap Advisors

Roadmap Advisors is a Tysons, Virginia firm with a named IT and MSP practice sitting alongside professional, facilities, industrial, and consumer services. It provides valuation, buyer outreach, diligence support, and execution, and reports hundreds of IT and MSP transactions. We could not corroborate that figure anywhere outside the firm's own site. Its stated client range, enterprise values of $10 million to $100 million, comes from a press release the firm issued rather than independent reporting.

Securities transactions run through designated representatives of StillPoint Capital, a FINRA and SIPC member that is a separate company from Roadmap. That arrangement is common and entirely legitimate, and it has one practical consequence worth understanding: the firm you sign with and the firm whose license covers the securities portion of your deal are different companies, so ask in advance who supervises the work and who is responsible if something goes wrong.

Best for: owners who want FINRA-supervised execution and whose business straddles IT and other service lines.

CT Acquisitions

CT Acquisitions, legally CT Strategic Partners LLC, publishes more and better MSP sale content than any other firm in this comparison. Its guides on multiples, private equity platforms, and pre-sale preparation run to many thousands of words and are genuinely useful. That is why it currently ranks first for most searches an MSP owner runs, and it is why you have probably already read its material without noticing whose it was.

The firm also states plainly that it is not a registered broker-dealer, investment advisor, or financial service provider, and that it operates as a buy-side consultant and deal-sourcing intermediary. Reading its research and hiring it to represent you in a sale are two different decisions. On the second one, the relevant question is the oldest question in this business: whose interest is the intermediary paid to advance. Ask directly which side of your transaction the firm represents and how it is compensated, and get the answer in the engagement letter rather than the conversation.

Best for: buyers seeking MSP acquisition targets, and sellers who want its research without mistaking it for representation.

Auxo Capital Advisors

Auxo Capital Advisors is a middle-market generalist that places Technology and Software among eleven industry verticals rather than treating MSPs as a specialty. It offers sell-side and buy-side advice, valuation, and capital advisory work, and it is not a broker-dealer; securities transactions run through Weild & Co. It publishes no MSP transaction count and no typical client size.

Listing its services would not distinguish it, because every firm on this page does buyer outreach, materials, management preparation, diligence, and negotiation. What is specific to Auxo is that it publishes its own MSP valuation commentary, making it one of two firms here whose price guidance you are likely to encounter while researching what your business is worth. Read it knowing who wrote it.

Best for: owners who want a generalist middle-market perspective, or who need capital advice alongside a sale.

Firms We Did Not Include, and Why

Two omissions are worth naming, because leaving them out would make this comparison look more complete than it is.

martinwolf has focused on IT services M&A for roughly three decades and reports approximately 300 completed transactions across more than 20 countries, a longer record than anything else in this category. It is excluded here only because its work skews toward IT resellers, systems integrators, and cross-border technology deals rather than the owner-operated managed services shops this guide addresses. If your business sits closer to the integrator end, put it on your list. Cogent Growth Partners reports more than 60 MSP transactions since 2010 but works buy-side only, by policy, so it cannot represent you as a seller.

Several firms market aggressively to MSP owners while publishing nothing that can be evaluated. We left them out rather than pad the list. If a firm approaches you, ask for a closed-deal list with dates, sizes, and the firm's role, plus two references from owners of comparable businesses. The firms worth hiring supply it.

What It Actually Costs to Sell an MSP

Six of the seven firms above publish no fee information, which is a finding rather than an oversight. It also leaves an owner with no way to tell whether a proposal is normal. Here is the benchmark those proposals should be measured against.

The Firmex M&A Fee Guide, run annually with Axial and Divestopedia, models a sell-side success fee of about 6.3% on a $5 million transaction, 3.9% at $20 million, and 2.0% at $100 million in its 2023-24 US edition, built from 189 US respondents of whom roughly six in ten were investment bankers. Its 2024-25 global edition, with 456 respondents, models 3.4% at $20 million. So for a typical MSP sale in this range, expect something between roughly 3.4% and 6.3% depending on size, and treat a materially higher number as something the advisor needs to justify.

The fee that costs owners more than they expect is the other one. Around three-quarters of advisors charge an engagement or work fee payable whether or not the deal closes, most commonly $5,000 to $10,000 per month, and only 54% credit that money back against the success fee at closing. On a process that runs nine months, an uncredited work fee at the top of that range is $90,000 that leaves whether or not you ever sell. Ask two questions of every firm: what is the monthly fee, and is it credited in full against the success fee. The gap between a credited and an uncredited work fee is usually larger than the gap between two firms' success-fee percentages, and almost nobody negotiates it.

Who Is Actually Buying MSPs Right Now

An advisor is only as useful as the buyers it can reach, so it is worth knowing who is on the other side of the table before you choose one. Drake Star Partners counted 466 MSP M&A transactions during 2025, carrying $4.3 billion in disclosed value, up roughly 20% year over year. This is an active market, and it is dominated by private equity-backed platforms rather than by individual buyers or one-off strategics.

The most acquisitive of those platforms, per ChannelE2E's platform tracking, include Evergreen Services Group, backed by Alpine Investors, which closed 47 transactions in 2025 and passed its 100th MSP acquisition since inception while growing from $6 million to more than $600 million of revenue in seven years; Ntiva, backed by PSP Capital, the Pritzker family office, which acquired it from Southfield Capital in 2022; Thrive, backed by Court Square Capital Partners and Berkshire Partners, approaching $400 million of revenue with a security-first strategy across the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic; and New Charter Technologies, backed by Oval Partners, which has maintained a steady add-on cadence.

The distinction that matters most to your outcome is platform versus add-on. A platform investment is a sponsor buying a company large enough to build around, usually well north of $5 million of EBITDA, and it commands the highest multiples because the buyer is purchasing a management team and an operating model. An add-on, or tuck-in, is that same platform buying a smaller shop to fold into what it already owns. Most independently owned MSPs are add-ons. It is not a lesser outcome, and it changes what you are negotiating: an add-on buyer is pricing your recurring revenue and your customer list, is often indifferent to your brand, and may want your technicians more than your management. Evergreen is the deliberate exception, buying and holding while leaving names, leadership, and autonomy in place, which is a materially different proposition for an owner who cares what happens to the business afterward. Ask any advisor which of these outcomes they are aiming your process at, and why.

What the Published MSP Valuation Ranges Actually Say

The multiple ranges circulating for MSPs mostly come from advisors who would like the mandate, and they do not agree with each other.

N2M's published ladder puts MSPs below $1 million of adjusted EBITDA at 2x to 6x, the $1 million to $5 million band at 4x to 8x, and strong businesses above $5 million at 8x to 10x or more. Set that against the GP Partners figures published by ConnectWise, which we cover in the MSP valuation multiples guide, putting $250,000 to $1 million of EBITDA at roughly 4x to 5x and $1 million to $2 million at roughly 5x to 6x. N2M's bottom band is four turns wide and its floor sits below anything in the transaction-guided data. A range that wide cannot be wrong, which is also why it cannot help you price a business.

The best-sourced figure available is also the one that applies to you least. Aventis Advisors, analysing Mergermarket records in its July 2026 update, reports a median of 10.7x EV/EBITDA across 83 disclosed MSP transactions. Before anyone anchors on that, read the sample: the median deal size is $23 million to $37 million, and disclosed deals skew large because small private transactions rarely publish terms. That median is real, and it describes companies several times the size of most owner-operated shops. Anyone quoting it at you as a general MSP multiple is either not reading the footnotes or counting on you not to.

What moves your number is narrower than any of these ladders suggest: the share of revenue under recurring contract rather than project work, gross revenue retention, whether your largest client is 8% or 30% of revenue, whether contracts survive a change of control without customer consent, and whether the business runs when you are on holiday. Those are the variables a buyer underwrites. The multiple is the output, not the input.

Questions to Ask Before You Sign

Ask every finalist the same set, and compare the answers side by side. The differences are usually more revealing than any single firm's pitch.

1. What is your closed-deal list for MSPs specifically, with dates, approximate sizes, and your role on each? A total is not an answer.
2. Who performs any securities-related work on my transaction, under which registration or exemption, and does that change if the deal is structured as a stock sale?
3. What is the monthly work fee, and is it credited in full against the success fee at closing?
4. What is the tail period after termination, and which buyers does it cover?
5. Which named buyers would you approach for my business, and which of them have you closed with before?
6. Are you aiming this at a platform investment or an add-on, and what does that mean for price and for my team?
7. Who does the daily work: the person in this meeting, or someone I have not met?

The Question Worth Asking Instead

“Best” is the wrong frame for this decision, and the evidence in this article is why. The dimension owners rank advisors on hardest, the size of the track record, turns out to be the dimension with the least verifiable evidence behind it in this entire category. The dimension nobody asks about, who holds the license and under what exemption, is the only one with a public record. And the firm doing the best job of reaching MSP owners through search is one that represents buyers.

The better question is which firm will run a competitive process for a business like yours, on terms you understand before you sign. That is answerable in three conversations. Run two or three firms through the same seven questions above, ask each of them to show rather than assert, and notice which ones volunteer their limitations without being asked. If your MSP falls within the ranges described here, we would welcome the chance to be one of the firms you compare.