Ask George Sierchio what winning looks like when an MSP owner sells the company, and he won’t lead with a number — even though the number matters plenty. A winning deal, in his book, is one where the price gets the owner where they actually want to go, the structure is fair enough that nobody’s white-knuckling the earn-out, and the customers and employees land somewhere just as solid as where they started. Everything else is negotiable. That part isn’t.
This episode of Cogent Conversations, recorded with Joey Pinz, catches George mid-answer on the questions every MSP owner eventually sits with: what actually counts as a win, and how much of it comes down to ego versus money? And can an owner really know their company’s warts before somebody else finds them first?
Short version: yes — and the owners who do the looking before a buyer shows up tend to like how the story ends.
Watch the episode and be sure to subscribe: Watch Cogent Conversations Episode 15
Key takeaways from this episode
- A winning deal is bigger than the check. The number has to work, sure. But George’s real scorecard includes the deal structure, how the payout actually arrives, and whether customers and employees are set up well on the other side — whether or not the seller sticks around to see it.
- Leave the ego at the door — buyers included. George’s read: everybody sitting across the table is smart, so trying to out-smart them is a losing game. It’s a big reason Cogent built its whole approach, Transaction Therapy™, around treating a sale as a relationship first and a transaction second.
- Every company has warts. Finding them before diligence does is the whole game. Cogent runs sellers through exactly that exercise inside its Enterprise Valuations — separate what’s fixable from what isn’t, then tell the honest story around both. George’s phrase for the ones you can’t fix: “avoiding the iceberg on the Titanic.” The move is to explain it well.
- Getting grilled in diligence is a compliment wearing a disguise. Somebody looked at the company closely enough to want it in their family of companies, or to build a platform around it. That’s the win hiding under the scrutiny — though it still calls for thick skin.
- The company after closing won’t run exactly like the one before it. New decisions, a shifted culture, maybe a new name over the door — that’s the trade for liquidity, and George thinks the owners who plan for it going in land a lot softer than the ones who don’t.
- There are more real paths today than there were ten years ago. Sixteen years into Cogent’s own run, George has watched the menu expand: full sales that keep the storefront looking exactly the same, smaller platform plays that didn’t used to exist, structures built for owners who are big enough to matter but not big enough for classic PE. A decade ago, most owners had one real option. Today, George counts three or four.
Here’s the question worth sitting with before a buyer ever asks it: if the right number showed up tomorrow, attached to the structure you actually wanted, would the rest of it — the culture, the team, the version of the company that outlives you — hold up the way you’d want it to? Most owners, George suggests, haven’t actually worked that out. The ones who do walk into a negotiation from real strength.
If you want a clearer read on where you’d land, and which of today’s several paths actually fits your company, that’s worth mapping out before you’re mid-deal. We’re happy to help you think it through anytime.
