Acquire.com vs Flippa: Selling an IT Consulting or MSP Firm

Say an MSP does $3.2M in annual revenue, split roughly 70% managed-services contracts billed monthly and 30% project work like migrations and hardware refreshes. The owner wants to sell within a year and has never gone through an acquisition process before.

The firm has eleven employees, including two senior engineers who could plausibly run client escalations without the owner, and a PSA system that already tracks contract renewal dates automatically. That last detail turns out to matter more than the owner expects.

Because the managed-services revenue is recurring and billed on a predictable schedule, the owner can treat it almost like SaaS MRR for verification purposes: connect the billing or PSA system, show month-over-month retention by client, and separate the managed-services share, 70% of revenue in this example, cleanly from the lumpier project revenue. Acquire.com's buyer pool includes strategic acquirers, often other MSPs looking to add a book of contracts, who will specifically want that recurring number verified before they'll engage seriously.

One early buyer conversation stalls when the owner can't immediately produce client-level churn for the trailing two years, only the current snapshot. Pulling that history together from old invoices takes a week the owner hadn't planned for, and it's the kind of delay that costs momentum in a live process.

Flippa's broader marketplace would put the listing in front of a wider range of buyers, including some who value the whole business on blended EBITDA rather than separating recurring from project revenue. That can work in the owner's favor if the project revenue is consistent year over year, since a generalist buyer may not discount it as heavily as a software-focused buyer would.

A generalist buyer coming through Flippa in this example turns out to run a small portfolio of local service businesses and isn't especially interested in the technical detail of the managed-services stack, just the cash flow and the client list. That buyer moves faster through diligence than the strategic MSP acquirer, but offers a lower multiple.

In this example, a $3.2M revenue business selling for something in the $2M to $4M range depending on structure would find that Acquire.com's zero seller commission on a standard listing saves real money compared with Flippa's listing fee plus a success fee at close. The owner should still weigh that against Flippa's brokerage support for a deal this size, since a broker running outreach can sometimes produce a higher final price even after fees.

In a case like this, the deciding factor is usually contract assignability. MSP client agreements often need explicit consent to assign, and a buyer's attorney will want every major contract reviewed before closing regardless of which platform sourced the buyer. The owner who gets ahead of that, contacting top clients before a buyer asks, tends to close faster and with fewer last-minute price reductions.

In this example, three of the firm's top ten clients had agreements silent on assignment, which the owner's attorney flagged before any buyer did. Getting signed consent letters from all three ahead of the letter of intent turned what could have been a month of renegotiation into a footnote in the closing checklist.

The owner's biggest regret, in hindsight, was waiting until an offer was on the table to build the trailing two-year churn history a buyer wanted immediately. That data existed the whole time, just scattered across old invoices and a PSA system that wasn't being used for reporting. Building that report once, before listing anywhere, would have saved a full week of momentum during the most fragile part of the process, the window right after a buyer signals real interest.

Takeaways from this example:

• Build the trailing two-year churn history before listing, using invoices and the PSA system, instead of waiting until a buyer asks for it.
• Separate managed-services revenue from project revenue, and connect the billing or PSA system so the recurring share can be verified.
• Contact your top clients about assignment consent before a buyer's attorney raises it, since MSP agreements often require explicit consent.
• Compare the zero-commission listing with what a broker could add through a wider buyer process, because the fee saved is not always the proceeds gained.