The MSP industry doesn't look the way it did when we started entrustIT in 2006. Most of the providers we knew back then have been bought, merged, or quietly absorbed into something larger. Private equity arrived, decided IT services were a good rollup, and started consolidating. A lot of clients now work with companies that didn't exist three years ago, run by people who didn't sign their original contract.

2026 marks 20 years of entrustIT. We're still independently owned, still family-run. This piece isn't about how we got here. It's about what we're building.

We've written before about why ownership matters more than scale, what family-owned actually means for clients, and what staff continuity does to service quality. Those arguments stand.

The industry will keep consolidating. More MSPs will be bought. More clients will go through the disruption of a forced switch. The pressure to scale, sell, and exit will get harder to resist for anyone who isn't structured to resist it.

What the next 20 years look like

We're not being run for an exit. Decisions here aren't shaped by a fund's timeline or by what an acquirer would pay extra for. The questions we ask are whether something is right for the client, and whether it's right for the business in ten years' time. That's a different starting point to most of the industry, and it leads to different answers. We've put ourselves in a position where we can afford to take the long view with a client, and make decisions that pay off years out rather than next quarter.

We're growing, and we're growing on purpose. The plan isn't to stay the same size we were last year. It's to keep adding the capabilities our clients need, so that more of your IT stack sits with one provider that takes responsibility for the outcome. The acquisition of DWM earlier this year is part of that. It widens what we can do under one roof, and it supports the same long-term strategy we've had since 2006: be a local MSP with national reach, built to last.

We'll keep investing in the people who deliver the service. Service quality in this industry is mostly a function of who you deal with and how long they've been doing the job. We're going to keep developing our team and building a culture they want to stay in.

Building the MSP of the future means owning the whole picture. A lot of MSPs are help-desk-led, with someone else's infrastructure underneath. We're not. We design, run, protect and improve the solution end to end, which reduces fragmentation and gives clients one accountable partner. Clients shouldn't have to coordinate three providers to get one outcome. The direction we're growing in is the one that makes us responsible for more of the work, not less. That's a bigger commitment, and it's the right one to make.

Whatever ownership model fits your business, choose it on purpose. Most MSP selection processes weigh up capability, price and references. Very few weigh ownership. And the factor that most often determines whether your provider still feels the same in three years' time isn't on the scorecard at all.

There's nothing wrong with engaging an MSP with a five-year plan that ends with a sale, if their strategy supports yours. Just make it a conscious decision rather than an accident.

If you've been thinking about what your IT looks like five years from now, and whether your current MSP will be in the same shape it's in today, that's the kind of conversation we're here to have.