In the last five years, a significant proportion of UK MSPs have been rolled up into larger, investor-backed groups. Some of the names you’ve known for a decade are now trading under the same brand, but the people answering your tickets, the team running your account, and the person who decides whether your contract gets renewed in its current form - none of that is necessarily the same as it was two years ago. And here’s the uncomfortable bit: you may not actually know who owns your IT provider right now.
I’ve been in this industry for twenty years. I’ve watched the UK MSP market go from a cottage industry of owner-operators and regional specialists into something that looks much more like the big four consultancies, with private equity money sitting behind a lot of the logos you recognise. I don’t think that’s inherently a bad thing. Some of the PE-backed MSPs in this country are excellent, well-run businesses with genuine depth. But it is a different thing. And for hospitality operators in particular, the differences matter in ways that don’t always show up until you’re mid-service and need help that doesn’t fit the standard playbook.
This piece isn’t an attack on investor-owned MSPs. It’s a buyer’s guide. If you run restaurants, hotels, bars, or multi-site groups, you should understand the trade-offs so you can make an informed choice - and ask the right questions before you sign.
What consolidation has actually done to the MSP market
The model is straightforward. A PE house raises a fund, buys a platform MSP - usually one with decent recurring revenue, a good client book and a respected name - and then uses that as the base for a roll-up strategy. Over three to five years they’ll acquire ten, twenty, sometimes forty smaller MSPs across the UK and fold them into the platform. Back office gets centralised. Tooling gets standardised. Service desks often get consolidated into one or two locations, sometimes onshore, sometimes not. The individual brands either disappear or get repainted.
At the end of the hold period, the group is resold to a larger PE house or floated. The maths is about multiple arbitrage: small MSPs trade at perhaps 5–7x EBITDA; a £50m revenue group trades at 10–12x. Buy small, roll up, sell big. It’s a legitimate and well-understood strategy, and it has produced some genuinely capable businesses.
But the model has consequences that flow downhill to you, the client.
The genuine benefits of scale
Let me be fair. A bigger, investor-backed MSP can do things a small independent cannot, and for some clients these benefits are decisive.
You get a bigger bench. A 300-engineer shop has specialists in things a 30-engineer shop simply doesn’t have on staff - deep Microsoft 365 tenancy work, advanced networking, SIEM, cloud architecture, compliance programmes. You get 24/7 rotas staffed by multiple shifts rather than one engineer on call with a mobile. You get formal process maturity: ITIL-aligned ticketing, change control boards, proper problem management, monthly service reviews that actually happen. You get breadth of certification - Microsoft partner tiers, Cisco, Fortinet, CREST, ISO 27001, Cyber Essentials Plus - because the group can afford to carry the overhead. And you get a balance sheet behind the contract, which matters if you’re a large operator worried about supplier resilience.
For a big corporate with standardised needs and a procurement team that wants to tick boxes, those things are worth a lot. I’m not going to pretend otherwise.
The trade-offs nobody puts on the tender response
Where it gets interesting is the other side of the ledger, which tends not to appear on the glossy pitch deck.
Financialised decision-making. When an MSP is owned by a fund with a five-year hold and an EBITDA target, the business gets run to the numbers. That’s not villainy, it’s just reality. Margin pressure cascades into tooling choices, staffing ratios, and what’s in scope versus out of scope on your contract. Things that used to be “we’ll just sort that for you” quietly become changes requests with a line item.
Service desk consolidation and offshoring. To protect margin, service desks get centralised, and increasingly the first line sits offshore. The engineers are often technically competent, but they don’t know your site, your GM, or the fact that your Friday night hinges on a kitchen printer in the back prep area that has to be reseated in a specific way. They’re working from a runbook.
Standardised service that doesn’t flex. The operating model of a big group depends on standardisation - same tooling, same process, same SLAs, same ticket templates. That’s efficient, but hospitality is not a standard industry. Your busiest hours are everyone else’s evenings. Your critical path runs through EPOS, payments, kitchen displays, PMS and guest WiFi, not through Exchange and SharePoint. A contract that treats you like a 200-seat office doesn’t serve you when it’s 8pm on a Saturday.
Reduced personal accountability. In a small MSP, if something goes wrong, the person who answers the phone probably knows the engineer who installed the kit and can walk over to their desk. In a 500-person group, your ticket is one of several thousand that week. The account manager you signed with has likely moved on within eighteen months - account manager churn in the rolled-up MSP world is a real thing, and it’s something I’d genuinely encourage you to ask about.
Longer escalation paths. When the service desk can’t resolve it, the ticket goes to second line, then third, then to a specialist queue, then maybe to the account team. Each handoff loses context. For most IT problems that’s fine. For a restaurant losing £400 a minute on a Saturday night, it’s not.
Why hospitality is particularly exposed
Hospitality is a bad fit for the standardised-service model for reasons that are worth saying out loud.
You need out-of-hours cover that actually means something. Not a “P1 escalation after 6pm” clause buried on page fourteen, but a human who picks up and understands that a kitchen down in service is different from a kitchen down on a Tuesday morning.
You need people who understand operations, not just technology. The difference between a good hospitality IT person and a generalist is whether they know what a KDS is, what a cover is, why the EPOS needs to reconcile against the PMS at 3am, and why the guest WiFi and the back-of-house network absolutely must not be on the same VLAN.
You need on-site response. Hospitality has physical kit in physical sites. When a network switch dies in a basement plant room in Soho, a remote session isn’t going to help. You need someone who can be on-site, ideally within an hour for a Zone 1 property, and who isn’t billing a £200 call-out on top.
You need flexibility. The contract that says “three site visits per quarter included” is the contract you grow to hate. Hospitality moves. Menus change, sites open, refits happen, the CEO decides to add a rooftop bar in six weeks. A rigid scope makes every change a negotiation.
Our hospitality IT support offering is built specifically around these realities, because we’ve watched too many operators get let down by arrangements that looked fine on paper and failed in service.
The independent counter-position
The honest case for an independent, owner-run MSP isn’t that we’re nicer people. It’s structural.
We’re smaller, so we know your estate. The same two or three engineers will be on your account for years, not months. You’ll recognise their voices on the phone, and they’ll recognise your GM’s.
We’re closer to the decision. When you need something out of scope, I can say yes or no in an hour because I’m the person who decides. There’s no group operations committee and no margin approval.
We’re quicker on the ground. London-based, Zone 1 response, people who’ve been to your sites and know where the comms cabinet lives.
We’re more accountable. When you’re unhappy, you can ring me. That’s not a marketing line - it’s what “independent” actually means when the founder is still running the business.
We don’t churn the account team. If an engineer leaves us, it’s news. Continuity of people is one of the most under-valued things in managed services, and it’s one of the first things to go when a business is being run to a five-year exit.
We can flex for hospitality. Our managed network and security services are designed around how restaurants and hotels actually operate, not around how a 9–5 office works.
None of this is to say we can do everything a 300-engineer group can. There are clients we’re not right for, and I’ll tell them that. But for a multi-site hospitality operator with between three and fifty sites who wants real responsiveness and real accountability, the maths usually favours an independent.
What to ask any potential MSP
Whether you end up with us, with a PE-backed group, or with someone else entirely, these are the questions I’d push you to ask on every beauty parade.
- Who owns you? Not the trading name - the actual ownership structure. Is there a private equity fund behind the group? When does their hold period end?
- How has that ownership changed in the last five years? Have you been acquired? Have you acquired others? Is another sale on the horizon?
- What’s the average tenure of engineers in an account team? How long has your longest-serving account manager been with the business? What’s your engineer churn rate?
- Where does the service desk sit? Onshore, offshore, or a mix? Who picks up the first call at 9pm on a Saturday?
- What in your SLA flexes for evening service? Can you give me a named engineer who knows my sites for Friday and Saturday night cover? What’s your actual on-site response time inside Zone 1?
- Who decides if something is in or out of scope? And how fast can that decision happen?
If the answers are vague, or if the person you’re talking to has to “check with the group”, that tells you something useful.
Where we stand
CloudMatters is independent, founder-owned, and intends to stay that way. We’re based in central London, we specialise in hospitality, and our team stays put. You can read more about who we are and how we work, including the engineers who’ll actually be on your account.
I’m not asking you to take my word for any of this. I’m asking you to ask the questions - of us, and of anyone else you’re considering. The market has changed a lot in the last five years, and the label on the door isn’t always the same as what’s behind it.
Ask the question before you sign. You deserve to know who you’re actually working with.
Thinking about your next MSP review? Have a look at our hospitality IT support approach, or get in touch and we’ll arrange a conversation - with me, not a sales development rep.