MSP Broker vs. Sale Readiness Consultant

If you're starting to think about selling your MSP, you'll come across two types of people offering to help. It's easy to assume they do the same job. They don't.

A broker sells your business. A sale readiness consultant gets it ready to be sold. Both matter. They just matter at different points.

	MSP Broker	Sale Readiness Consultant
What they do	Value the business, find buyers, run the deal process, negotiate terms.	Review the business against what a buyer will actually check, close the gaps, get documentation in order.
When you engage them	Once you're ready to go to market.	Months, sometimes years, before you go to market.
What “done” looks like for them	A completed sale.	A business that stands up to buyer due diligence, whether or not you use them for the deal itself.
How they're usually paid	A retainer or daily fee and/or a percentage of the sale value	Retention or a fee for the preparation work, regardless of outcome.
Who else is in the room	Solicitors and accountants handling the legal and financial side of the deal.	Your own accountant and solicitor, briefed and pointed at exactly what the deal will need from them.
What they don't do	Dig into your operational, HR, IT and process gaps before a buyer finds them.	Value your business, find buyers, or negotiate the deal.

Why the order matters

Skip the readiness stage and go straight to a broker, and the gaps in your business get found for the first time during buyer due diligence, at the worst possible moment to be dealing with them. That's when deals slow down, valuations get chipped away at, or buyers walk.

Get the readiness work done first, and you go to market already knowing what a buyer will ask, with the answers ready before the question comes. A stronger position, not just a faster one.

Where MSP Sale Readiness fits

We don't value your business. We don't find buyers. We don't negotiate your deal. That's not our job, and we won't pretend otherwise.

What we do is the work that happens before any of that: reviewing your business across the nine areas a buyer will look at (finance, tax, legal, HR, operations, processes, cyber and security, IT, and marketing and sales), closing the gaps, and briefing your accountant and solicitor on exactly what the deal will need from them. Our preparation is designed to complement their work, not replace it, through a structured Assess, Guide, Brief, Confirm process.

By the time you do talk to a broker, or take the business to market yourself, you're not hoping it holds up. You already know it does.

If this has you wondering how ready your own business is, the free readiness assessment will show you where to look first, in about three minutes.