Evergreen Services Group, a permanent owner backed by Alpine Investors, is the most active buyer of managed IT service providers in our ranking: 71 IT services acquisitions in our records, 45 of them in 2024 and 2025 alone. It publishes very little about price. A price is on record for only 2 of the 71 deals, both below $20M of enterprise value, too few for a median. It pays in several forms, from 100 percent cash upfront to earnouts, seller notes and rollover equity, so how much of the price is certain on the day you sign is worth negotiating on its own terms.
Founded in San Francisco in 2017, it buys across the US, Canada, the UK, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand. Its targets are small and built on recurring revenue. The minimum is $3M of revenue and $500K of EBITDA, and the median company it bought employs 39 people. For an MSP or ERP partner selling for cash at closing, Evergreen is a strong home.
Evergreen’s releases and websites describe its criteria, structure and life after closing, and with Mergermarket they also fed our list of its 71 completed acquisitions announced from 2018 to 2025. The sections below also explain how the group is organized.
Evergreen Services Group Companies: Lyra, Pine and Cedar
Evergreen holds its companies in three groups by line of business, and an approach can come from Evergreen itself or from one of the groups:
| Group | What it holds | Footprint |
|---|---|---|
| Lyra Technology Group | Managed IT service providers, including managed security | Companies across North America, the UK, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand |
| Pine Services Group | ERP and business software partners: Acumatica, Microsoft Dynamics, NetSuite, SAP, Sage and QAD | Firms in the US, Ireland, Scotland, England and Australia |
| Cedar Solutions Group | IT services for defense and intelligence customers | More than 100 contract vehicles across defense and intelligence markets |
A fourth name, Redwood Services Group, appears beside Evergreen as the buyer on several UK and Australian MSP acquisitions from 2024, and Lyra has a regional chief executive for Australia and New Zealand.
Jeff Totten is founder and chief executive. His co-founder Ramsey Sahyoun has described the plan as copying the Berkshire Hathaway model to build the best home for MSPs, and the advisors Evergreen lists include Will Thorndike of Compounding Labs, a partner of Alpine Investors and a co-chief operating officer of TransDigm. Evergreen launched in 2017 as a spinoff of Alpine with a $100M equity commitment, and Alpine still backs it with committed capital. In June 2025 Pax8, the cloud marketplace, named Evergreen the first of its partners to pass $1bn of IT services revenue.
How Many Companies Evergreen Has Acquired
The 71 acquisitions start with Wolf Consulting, a Pittsburgh MSP, announced in January 2018. Evergreen made 9 in 2018, between 2 and 6 a year from 2019 to 2023, then 18 in 2024 and 27 in 2025, so the pace stepped up sharply from 2024. Of the 71, 58 were bought by Evergreen or one of its groups and 13 by companies it already owned, mostly Executech, the Utah MSP it bought in 2018, which made nine acquisitions of its own over the next four years.
ERP partners account for 12 of the 45 acquisitions in 2024 and 2025, and markets outside the US for 23 of them. In 2025 alone Evergreen bought 17 MSPs, 9 ERP partners and one government IT firm.
What Size of Company Evergreen Buys
Evergreen states its minimum plainly: $3M of revenue and $500K of EBITDA. Above that line, the companies it buys are small firms with a few dozen staff.
A headcount is on record for 46 of the 71 acquired companies. The median is 39 people, with an interquartile range of 28 to 61, and 31 of the 46 have fewer staff than 50. Those figures are today’s headcount, after years of growth inside Evergreen in some cases, so some of the companies were smaller when they sold. ERP partners and MSPs are close in size: a median of 35 people across 12 ERP partners and 39 across 31 MSPs. Evergreen’s releases point the same way: a Hertfordshire MSP with 25 full-time staff and more than 200 managed customers, and an Oxfordshire MSP with about 30.
Evergreen’s own valuation tool uses an MSP with $6.0M of revenue as its worked example. Taken together, the minimum, the headcounts and the example place Evergreen’s typical target, by our estimate, at a few million to the low tens of millions of revenue.
Size matters to the price, and Evergreen says so: its valuation tool lists scale first among the drivers of value, and larger businesses earn higher multiples in our research too. A company close to the $3M minimum is squarely in range, and one with $10M or more of revenue has room to ask for a better multiple.
What Evergreen Buys
Evergreen describes its target as a technology services company with high recurring revenue, in one of three categories: MSPs, ERP partners and government IT, and the 71 deals fall along those lines.
| Line | Acquisitions | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Managed IT services (MSPs, including managed security) | 54 | 76% |
| ERP and business software partners | 14 | 20% |
| Government and defense IT | 2 | 3% |
| Other IT services | 1 | 1% |
Evergreen has also bought a software company, which sits outside the IT services counts on this page.
MSPs are the core: of the 24 deals from 2018 to 2022, 23 were MSPs or managed services businesses, and the MSPs include specialists such as an Apple-focused IT firm in San Diego, a dental IT provider in Las Vegas and managed security providers in Nashville and Ireland.
ERP partners are the fastest-growing line, with 9 of the 27 acquisitions in 2025, against 5 in all earlier years combined. The targets are resellers and implementers of Sage, NetSuite, Acumatica, SAP and Microsoft Dynamics serving small and midsized companies, in the US, Ireland, Scotland, England and, by May 2026, Australia. Pine also buys practices from other firms: in April 2025 it moved an Acumatica practice of about 40 clients from a Kansas company into one of its own businesses.
Evergreen’s valuation tool sets out what it looks for in an MSP. Recurring revenue supports a higher multiple. Organic growth above 10 percent commands a premium, and flat or declining revenue compresses it. Churn below 5 percent signals durable contracts. A top customer above 20 percent of revenue, or a top five above 50 percent, materially affects buyer appetite. Those thresholds are a checklist for preparing your numbers before the first conversation.
Where Evergreen Buys
Its IT services acquisitions in our records span six countries. The United States leads with 44, followed by Australia with 10, the United Kingdom with 8, Canada with 6, Ireland with 2 and New Zealand with 1.
The map widened from 2023: from 2018 to 2022, 21 of the 24 acquisitions were in the US and the other 3 in Canada. From 2023 to 2025, 24 of 47 were outside the US, and every deal in Australia, the UK, Ireland and New Zealand dates from that period. Australia is now the second market, with 10 deals from 2024 and 2025, and Canada added 3 in 2025.
Outside the US Evergreen sells its permanence directly. Its UK team describes Evergreen as the one MSP acquirer in the UK that promises to keep every business it buys. Against buyers owned by private equity funds, which sell their platforms on, that is Evergreen’s main point of difference.
What Evergreen Pays: Acquisition Multiples
Evergreen keeps its prices private. A price is on record for 2 of the 71 deals, both with an enterprise value below $20M, and the target’s revenue for one, too few for a median, so the best evidence on what Evergreen pays comes from Evergreen itself.
Its valuation tool, mspvaluations.com, works through an example: an MSP with $6.0M of revenue, $1.1M of EBITDA, 65 percent recurring revenue and 8 percent growth, valued at $8.0M, or about 7.2x EBITDA. By our arithmetic that is 1.3x revenue at an EBITDA margin of 18 percent. Evergreen says the tool usually lands within 10 to 20 percent of where a transaction would happen.
Against our research, the example sits below the market for deals of its size. Across IT services deals with an enterprise value of $5M to $20M, the median EV/EBITDA is 7.9x, and below $5M it is 6.7x. Across all MSP deals the median is 9.9x EBITDA and 1.1x revenue, and across IT services as a whole 10.4x EBITDA and 1.1x revenue. The all-MSP figure covers larger deals than Evergreen’s, with a median deal size of $36M, which is why size bands are the fairer comparison. In our MSP research, deals under $20M sold at a median of 8.1x EBITDA (34 deals).
Margin accounts for the gap between the two measures. At the medians, 1.1x revenue and 10.4x EBITDA imply a margin of about 10 percent. Evergreen’s example earns 18 percent, so against those medians it is worth more on revenue, 1.3x, and less on EBITDA, 7.2x. A buyer pricing on EBITDA pays for current profit, and an MSP growing faster than 10 percent can argue for a higher multiple of that profit using Evergreen’s own list of drivers.
The figures in this section describe a market. Your company will be priced in a negotiation, by a buyer with its own valuation tool and a record of past deals to compare it against.
Has a buyer approached you?
The buyer’s team has done this dozens of times. You may be doing it once. You even that out by hiring an advisor with experience in this. We run a competitive process among the buyers with a real reason to want your company, so you choose between the best offers. Book a confidential consultation.
How Evergreen Structures a Deal
Evergreen buys the whole company. Its criteria page states that it buys 100 percent of the business, and every deal in our records that states a stake was for 100 percent. Its earliest releases described each deal as an investment, and one version of its FAQ refers to majority investments, so confirm the stake in the first conversation.
Payment comes in several forms: one answer on its criteria page describes its structure as 100 percent cash upfront; another says it is open to earnouts, seller notes and rollover equity. Sellers can occasionally roll part of their proceeds into Evergreen shares. A rollover into a permanent holding company is a long-term investment with a different exit from a rollover into a private equity platform, which is sold again at the end of its fund life, so ask how and when Evergreen shares can be sold before you agree to take them.
Evergreen says a letter of intent can arrive within a couple of weeks of first contact, diligence takes up to 60 days after it is signed, and the full process can finish within 90 days, though some deals take years. That speed favors the side with the larger library of past deals. Set your own timetable, and prepare the numbers its valuation tool asks for, recurring revenue, growth, churn and customer concentration, before the first meeting.
For an owner, the choice between cash at closing, an earnout, a seller note and a rollover changes how much of the price is certain on the day you sign, and each form is worth negotiating on its own terms.
What Happens After Closing
Evergreen runs a decentralized model. Each operating company keeps its own chief executive, profit and loss and scorecard of indicators. Totten describes a “razor thin” corporate team and holds up a ratio of 100 or more operating employees for each corporate employee as the mark of a decentralized company. Lyra and Cedar both say the companies that join keep their brand, employees and culture, and Evergreen says it aims to keep every employee after closing. Evergreen says 80 percent of the owners who sold to it cited the decentralized model as a key consideration.
Succession comes with the offer: Evergreen recruits recent MBA graduates into operating roles inside its companies and runs an executive in residence program that it says can make a participant a chief executive within a year. When a Charlotte MSP joined in 2025, its founder retired and Evergreen named a new chief executive in the same announcement, presenting the deal as an example of its executive placement program for founders. If you plan to stay, agree your role and your reporting line before signing; if you plan to leave, ask who would run the business and meet them.
Acquired companies can become buyers in turn. Executech made nine acquisitions after joining, and Integritek, Pact-One and Beringer added four more between them, so a strong company can grow inside Evergreen by acquisition. Scale also reaches services: in June 2026 Lyra’s cloud services business announced a partnership with Anthropic to give its customers access to AI models.
Evergreen holds what it buys: it describes itself as committed to acquiring and holding businesses indefinitely, and in our records it appears only as a buyer.
Permanence Against Private Equity: Evergreen’s Offer to MSP Owners
Evergreen leads our ranking of MSP buyers worldwide from 2015 to 2025, ahead of The 20 MSP, Thrive, Your.Cloud, and Riverdam and Smizer. Across all of IT services it is the most active strategic acquirer in our ranking after Accenture. In ERP partners, it went from 1 acquisition in 2023 to 9 in 2025.
Several of the other leading MSP buyers are owned by private equity funds: Thrive took on Court Square Capital in 2021 and Berkshire Partners in 2025, and Riverdam, a Dutch investment firm, set up Smizer as a buy-and-build platform for regional IT firms. A private equity owner sells its platform on at the end of a holding period. Evergreen’s offer is permanence, and by its own account it is the one MSP buyer in the UK making that promise. For an owner who cares where the business goes after the sale, that has real value.
Is This a Good Time to Sell to Evergreen?
Evergreen is at its most active: 27 acquisitions in 2025 against 18 in 2024, expansion into the UK, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand from 2023, a second line in ERP partners and further deals announced in 2026. A buyer adding about two companies a month brings demand to the market, and demand helps sellers.
MSP prices have come back from their peak. In our MSP research the half-year median ran from 7.8x EBITDA in the second half of 2018 to 17.5x in the first half of 2021, and stood at 11.4x in the second half of 2024. In our IT Services Valuations 2026 webinar we put cybersecurity, AI-led and vertical specialist firms at 7x to 14x EBITDA and undifferentiated outsourcing and staffing at 5x to 8x. An MSP with a specialism in managed security or in one industry belongs in the first group.
The case for selling now is strongest for an owner who is ready to step back and whose business meets Evergreen’s own drivers: high recurring revenue, growth above 10 percent, churn below 5 percent and a spread customer base. Evergreen pays for that profile and offers a succession plan with it. For an owner who is growing and wants to keep building, holding on is a good option too. The latest prices are in our MSP valuation multiples and IT services valuation multiples research.
About Aventis Advisors
Aventis Advisors is an M&A advisor for technology and IT companies with an enterprise value of €5M to €100M. We run global competitive sale processes, drawing on a database of 300,000 financial and strategic investors, so you choose between the best offers for your company. We take on a limited number of mandates each year.
Contact us for a confidential conversation about your company.
