Ask a roomful of MSP owners about their endgame and you’ll hear the same word over and over: exit. It’s the word everyone reaches for, the word the brokers trained the whole industry to say. But here’s the sharper question Rick Murphy puts on the table in this episode—what if “exit” is the wrong word for what most owners actually want?
In this episode of Cogent Conversations, Rick draws the line between an exit and a liquidity event, and it turns out that line changes everything. You can own a company and sell it multiple times. You can take real money off the table, stay in the chair you love, and ride the same business through three, four, even five paydays. The owners who understand this early tend to build more wealth and keep more control than the ones racing for a single door marked “out.”
This is a conversation about thinking like the professional investors already think—about arbitrage, optionality, and what life actually looks like the morning after the wire hits.
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Key takeaways from this episode
- “Exit” is broker speak; “liquidity” is the real game. A liquidity event means turning something you own into money—without necessarily walking away. An exit implies you’re leaving to go do something else. Knowing which one you actually want reshapes the entire deal.
- You can sell the same company more than once. The “first bite of the apple” is rarely the last. Owners who roll equity forward—rather than cashing out entirely—often watch that rolled-over stake become worth far more in the next chapter.
- Dual arbitrage is what the pros are chasing. When you add profitable scale, you’re not just multiplying more free cash flow—you can lift the multiple itself. More earnings and a higher multiplier, working together, is where serious value gets created.
- Big fish, small fish—both win in an expanding pond. Rick’s view is that the IT services market keeps growing, the long-predicted “Microsoft will own everything” outcome never arrived, and size matters far less than simply staying in the water and fishing.
- The real question before you sell: are you employable? Many founders assume selling means leaving. But a strong owner often stays on as a senior executive—with less stress, a real team around them, and a seat that still matters.
- Run it like you’ll sell it tomorrow. Clean books closed on a tight cadence, contracts you can produce at the push of a button, tidy records across the board. Diligence-readiness isn’t just for the sale—it’s how you run a sharper, more profitable business right now.
The owners who do best aren’t the ones who time the market perfectly or tell the flashiest story. They’re the ones who build optionality into the business so that when opportunity shows up—on its own schedule, as it always does—they get to choose the terms.
If you’d like an outside read on what your own liquidity options might look like today, we’re always happy to talk it through.
