The seven drivers that decide what your MSP is worth.
A buyer does not pay for revenue alone. They pay for a handful of structural drivers — and most of them can be built on purpose.
A buyer does not pay for revenue alone. They pay for the quality of that revenue, how much of it recurs, and how little of it depends on the owner. Valuation is rarely an accident. It is the sum of a few drivers that can be built on purpose.
The mistake most founders make is to focus on growing the top line and assume value will follow. It does not, automatically. Two MSPs with the same revenue can sell for very different multiples, because the drivers underneath are different.
Revenue gets you in the room. The drivers underneath decide the price.
The seven drivers
These are the factors a buyer or investor weighs. None is a secret. What is rare is treating them as something to design, rather than something to discover at exit.
What a buyer pays for
Move these, and you move the multiple.
The seven value drivers a buyer weighs. Improve these, and the multiple moves with them.
Leadership dependency is the silent multiplier.
Every other driver is read through one lens: what happens if the founder leaves? High dependency drags down the value of strong revenue, good margins and a healthy growth rate all at once. Reduce it, and every other driver is worth more.
Build them early
The drivers take time to move. Recurring revenue has to be designed into contracts. Customer concentration falls only as you win new accounts. Leadership dependency drops only when the business learns to run without you. None of this happens in the quarter before a sale.
The founders who exit well start years early — treating enterprise value as something built alongside growth, not bolted on at the end.
- A buyer pays for value drivers, not revenue alone.
- Two MSPs with the same revenue can be worth very different amounts.
- Leadership dependency is the driver that multiplies or drags all the others.
- The drivers take years to move — start building them long before a sale.
See which value drivers are costing you the most.
A Growth Review reads your business against the Enterprise Value Framework, and shows which drivers are holding your valuation back — and what improving them is worth.