M&A in managed services isn’t a side conversation anymore. It’s the main event. As we pointed out when rounding up 2026’s must-attend MSP conferences, M&A is everywhere right now: whether you’re buying, selling, or just trying to figure out your own valuation, it’s the conversation happening in every hallway. So let’s do what we do best and use a real deal to unpack what’s actually going on.
The deal
HIG itself is a tidy platform: roughly 1,300 customers, six regional partner companies, 60-plus employees, and a service mix spanning managed services, cybersecurity, cloud and modern workplace. Nothing flashy, just a stable, contractually recurring revenue base that’s grown steadily.
Why this is a textbook buy-and-build
NLI Capital didn’t invest in HIG for its size. They invested for its position. The Dutch MSP market has more than 3,000 providers, which means it’s exactly the kind of fragmented landscape that rewards consolidation. Rutger Nuij, Director Private Equity at NLI Capital, put it plainly: this deal works because of three things happening at once—organic recurring revenue growth, an active buy-and-build pipeline, and a foundation strong enough to support the next phase.
That’s the buy-and-build playbook in three moves: find a platform with defensible recurring revenue, bring in operational firepower (hence Bronzwaer’s appointment), and use the fragmentation of the market as fuel rather than a threat. It’s the same logic Alex Mclaughlin, Director of Enterprise Accounts at Claranet, described to us when talking about scaling MSPs ahead of MSP GLOBAL: acquisitive growth is about buying either capability or scale, and the strongest players balance that against organic growth rather than betting everything on one lever.
The model matters as much as the money
The part of the HIG deal worth stealing for your own thinking isn’t the capital, it’s the structure. HIG runs on what they call “centralized intelligence with decentralized identity”: local partner companies keep their own brand and customer relationships, while sharing one operational backbone for finance, HR, compliance and information security. That’s a deliberate answer to the classic post-acquisition failure mode, where a platform buys good businesses and then smothers the customer relationships that made them valuable in the first place. NLI Capital called this model scalable specifically because it protects the thing being bought while still centralising the boring-but-critical operational stuff.
Compare that to a strategic, sector-focused roll-up like Harbor IT in the US, which has built a cybersecurity-first platform through nine-plus acquisitions concentrated on compliance depth and vertical specialization. Different geography, different thesis, same underlying pattern: capital plus a clear operating model beats capital alone.
What it means if you’re the one being approached
The forces behind the HIG deal—SME digitalization, tightening cybersecurity requirements, and an IT talent shortage that keeps pushing outsourcing demand upward—aren’t Dutch-specific. They’re the same tailwinds driving MSP consolidation everywhere. If you’re running a smaller MSP watching platforms like HIG absorb regional peers, the read isn’t “sell now.” It’s: get your recurring revenue mix, your margins and your operational metrics in a state where you’re a credible platform partner rather than a distressed target, whenever that conversation comes.
Because as every M&A adviser will tell you, and as this deal’s line-up of six advisory firms confirms, these transactions reward the businesses that were ready long before anyone made an offer.
Curious how M&A and scaling strategy will shape the MSP conversation this year? We’ll be digging into it live at MSP GLOBAL, 21–22 October, Barcelona.
