We’ve always had hospitality customers. Restaurants, hotels, bar groups, a couple of late-night venues that keep our on-call engineers busier than they’d like. But until this year, we were a generalist London MSP that happened to have a lot of hospitality on our books. That’s changed, and I want to explain why - partly because the people who already work with us deserve a straight answer, and partly because if you run a restaurant or a hotel group in this city and you’ve been frustrated by your IT, I’d like you to know we’re now built for you in a way we weren’t before.
This is an editorial piece rather than a marketing one. There isn’t a special offer at the end. It’s just me being honest about what we’ve learned over six years and what we’re doing about it.
The honest backstory
CloudMatters was founded in 2020, which - in case you’ve blocked it out - was not the easiest year to start a company. We were a small team of engineers who’d worked together previously, we knew how to run a service desk, and we believed there was room in London for an MSP that took service standards seriously and didn’t treat tickets like a conveyor belt. We opened a small office in Fitzrovia, picked up our first few customers through referrals, and got on with it.
Through 2020 to 2025 we grew the way most independent MSPs grow: word of mouth, a couple of contract wins, the occasional cold outreach that actually landed. Our customer base looked the way most London MSPs’ customer bases look. Some professional services firms. A media agency or two. A couple of charities. A small fund. And - almost by accident - a steadily growing number of restaurants, bars and hotels. Tortilla came on board and is still with us today. Smaller groups followed. By 2024 something like a third of our recurring revenue was hospitality, and we hadn’t really planned for any of it.
What we noticed
It took us longer than it should have to notice the pattern, but here it is.
Our hospitality customers liked us more than our office-based customers. They renewed faster. They referred more - usually to other operators they’d worked with at previous groups. They churned less. When we lost a hospitality customer it was almost always because they’d been acquired or because their head of IT changed and brought in a previous supplier; it was very rarely because we’d disappointed them.
The service desk noticed it too. Tickets from a restaurant group at six on a Friday evening are stressful - a card terminal that won’t take payments while there’s a queue at the door is about as high-stakes as IT support gets - but our engineers found that work more interesting, not less. They started learning Zonal and Tevalis and Oracle Micros at a depth that wasn’t strictly necessary for their job grades, because the problems were genuinely interesting and the gratitude when you fixed something at the right moment was real in a way that resetting an Outlook profile for a partner at a law firm just isn’t.
When we ran our internal CSAT analysis at the end of 2024, hospitality customers scored us higher than every other vertical we served. Not by a small margin either.
The realisation
We were getting better at hospitality every year, and our generalist marketing was hiding it.
That’s an uncomfortable thing for a CEO to admit. We had a website that talked about “Microsoft 365 for SMBs” and “cyber security for London businesses” and all the other phrases that everyone in our industry uses and nobody actually searches for. Meanwhile, the work our engineers were proudest of - the new site openings, the EPOS integrations, the guest WiFi rebuilds, the PCI scoping conversations - was nowhere on the page. We were attracting customers who wanted commodity IT and turning away the customers we were actually best placed to help, because they couldn’t tell from looking at us that we were any different from the next MSP in their inbox.
The market gap
There are, by the latest count I can find, somewhere between two and three thousand MSPs trading in London. Most of them do a perfectly competent job for the kind of office-based customer they were built around. Very few of them specialise in hospitality. The ones that do - and you know who you are - are mostly good. That’s not a complaint; it’s the validation. When the existing specialists in a niche are credible operators, it tells you the niche is real and the work is worth doing properly. If the field were full of cowboys, I’d be more worried about whether we were chasing a mirage.
There’s also a structural reason hospitality is underserved. A good chunk of the UK MSP market has been consolidated by private equity over the last five years (I wrote about this previously - well, near enough), and the roll-ups tend to optimise for repeatable, standardised work. Hospitality isn’t that. Every site is slightly different. Every brand has its own quirks. Every Friday night is its own small drama. It’s not a vertical that rewards a centralised service desk reading from a script.
What we’ve changed
Concretely, here’s what’s happened in the last six months.
We rebuilt the website around hospitality. The new hospitality IT support page is the front door now, and the case studies and content underneath it are all written for operators rather than for office managers. That sounds like a small thing. It isn’t. It changes who finds us and what they expect when they call.
We introduced a dedicated hospitality service desk rota. The same engineers, but organised so that the people on shift during peak service hours are the ones who know EPOS and PMS environments inside out. Friday and Saturday evenings now have dedicated cover from engineers who’ve been specifically trained on the platforms our hospitality customers run.
We’ve built out formal training paths on the major EPOS platforms. Zonal, Tevalis, Oracle Micros and a couple of the newer cloud-native systems. Not surface-level familiarity - proper, certified, get-under-the-bonnet training, the kind we used to leave to whichever engineer happened to take an interest.
Our hiring plan for the next twelve months is weighted toward people with hospitality experience. Former in-house IT managers from restaurant groups. Engineers who’ve worked at EPOS resellers. People who already know what an end-of-day cash-up failure looks like at eleven on a Saturday night.
And we’ve started building proper partnerships with EPOS and PMS vendors rather than treating them as third parties we occasionally have to escalate to.
What stays the same
Everything that mattered before still matters. Our service standards haven’t moved: 98% CSAT, sub-fifteen-second call pickup, response times under thirty minutes, our 90-day service guarantee. We’re still independently owned - no PE on the cap table, no plans to sell, no roll-up exit on the horizon. The team is the same team. Same engineers, same account managers, same person at the top of the org chart writing this post. You can read more about who we are on our about us page if you want the full picture.
If you’re already a customer and you’re not in hospitality
Nothing changes for you. I want to be very clear about that because I know it’s the question that matters most to the customers reading this who run agencies and law firms and charities.
We’re not dropping anyone. We’re not raising prices on non-hospitality contracts. We’re not deprioritising your tickets. The same engineers will pick up your calls in the same time frames against the same SLAs. What’s changed is our marketing and our hiring focus, not the service we deliver to the people who are already with us. If anything, the work we’ve done to sharpen up our service desk for hospitality has made the desk faster and better organised across the board.
If you ever feel that’s not the case - call me directly. You have my number.
An invitation
If you run a restaurant, a hotel, a pub group, a bar, a members’ club or anything in between in London, and you’ve been frustrated by an IT provider that doesn’t quite get how your business works - the rhythm of service, the cost of EPOS downtime, the way Friday night isn’t like Tuesday morning - come and talk to us. Not for a sales pitch. For a conversation. We’ll tell you honestly whether we think we can help, and if we can’t, we’ll usually know someone who can.
You can find the full picture of what we offer on our hospitality IT support page, or just reply to this post - it lands in my inbox.
Thanks for reading. And to the customers who’ve been with us through six years of figuring this out: thank you. You’re the reason we know what we’re doing now.
Mark