Disclaimer: Unless noted otherwise, views and analysis expressed here are the author's own and based on public sources. The article is intended for informational and entertainment purposes only. This is not financial advice. Please consult a professional for investment decisions.

*********************

My favourite session from the recent Redeye Serial Acquirer Conference in Sweden (full writeup) was Jeff Totten’s presentation about Evergreen Services Group. For those of our readers who are not familiar with Evergreen, it is a serial acquirer of IT services businesses. It was founded in 2017 by Jeff Totten and Ramsey Sahyoun and is backed by Alpine Investors.  

Even though Evergreen is best known as a rollup of US Managed Service Providers (MSPs), 150 acquisitions later, it’s actually way bigger than that. A multinational HoldCo with 3 verticals: Lyra (the original MSP rollup); Pine (ERP implementation partners); and Cedar, which services US government agencies. 

9 years in, Evergreen is a tech services juggernaut:  

In the next 4 years, Evergreen aims to 3x revenue and 4x free cash flow, to $5B and $1B, respectively. How’s that for a stretch target?

In Part 1 of our Evergreen deep-dive, we share 7 learnings on their journey from 0 to $250M EBITDA:

Also, stay tuned for Part 2: my interview with Evergreen cofounder and Head of M&A Ramsey Sahyoun! 

***

This week’s sponsor is Strada Partners: builders of market-leading platforms in software, healthcare, and business services. Strada is Alpine’s European soulmate. Ready to build tomorrow’s Evergreen? Then apply for Strada’s LV8 programme - or simply hit reply!

Jeff and Ramsey met while working at the Private Equity firm Alpine Investors:

Yes, that Alpine: a Buy & Build powerhouse with an established Executive-in-Residence programme. Still, the initiative came from Jeff and Ramsey, who pitched the business case to Alpine’s Founding Partner Graham Weaver after attending the 2017 Berkshire Hathaway AGM. 

As Jeff put it: 

“On the way back home, I typed out an email to Graham during a layover in Denver and proposed creating a permanent entity within Alpine that could follow our playbook for acquiring and growing small businesses - but then not sell them… The next day I met with Graham for lunch and then I met with Dan Sanner, who has been my mentor at Alpine and is now our board lead at Evergreen. We decided to put a proposal in front of the partnership. A couple of weeks later, Evergreen was off to the races”. 

Alpine’s endorsement was not a foregone conclusion. After all, Jeff was only 26 and Ramsey 25.  Now all they needed was an industry to go after!

The way Ramsey described the ideation process, “Every Friday we'd go to Jeff’s apartment or a coffee shop across from Alpine’s offices [to work on the concept]. We had no idea what industry we were going to focus on”. 

The team went industry by industry. At first, they were put off by IT services due to perception of project-based, lumpy revenue structure. Serendipitously, a conversation with Wolf Consulting, a Pittsburgh, PA based MSP with a 30 year track record, convinced Ramsey that “the value proposition had shifted from time and materials to a true recurring revenue business”. 

This was Core Insight #1. To understand why the industry has evolved that way, let’s hear it from Gregory Zolkos, an MSP founder-turned-Evergreen executive: 

“The company was originally formulated to handle IT, accounting, and HR for a gentleman I had worked for over the course of 10 years. During the real estate crash in 2006 that company could no longer afford to pay me, so I began providing IT consulting services to external customers. I built that model up over time, moving away from billable-per-hour services” (source).  

Cue Core Insight #2: larger, regional players were poised to take market share of the SMB spend by delivering better service at scale. In fact, Evergreen’s early research showed that whereas most MSPs were eking sales growth of 9%, for larger firms the corresponding figure was 15-20%. This insight informed Evergreen’s subsequent strategy of creating regional platforms (more on that later). 

In January 2018, Evergreen acquired Wolf, thus firing the starting gun on the M&A marathon that has continued unabated to this day. Even though the idea of rolling up small outsourced IT services providers wasn't novel (after all, 20MSP has been around since 2013), PE-backed competitors were notably absent from the market.    

Evergreen seeks businesses that have:

Years of nurturing M&A expertise have got Ramsey’s team to a point where they crank out a deal a week. In 2025, Evergreen notched up 47 acquisitions - double the number the previous year (25). 80% of Evergreen’s deal flow is proprietary, honed through years of painstaking relationship building. With 12 FTEs solely dedicated to MSP M&A (source), it’s not a cheap setup, but whenever there’s an opening, Evergreen moves fast! 

Take GadellNet, a St. Louis based MSP acquired in 2022. Ramsey “got in contact [with the founder] in 2017, but that wasn’t the right time to consider selling. So, we continued to check in, were persistent over 5 years and finally in 2022 he called me and said ‘my other partners are open minded to selling. If you’re ready to talk about this we have to move quickly’. We ended up signing an LOI the following week and closed the deal within 2 months”. 

As the aggregator got bigger and more confident, the emphasis shifted from “not buying businesses and not messing them up” (source) to having a well-articulated value creation plan for every acquisition. As Ramsey put it, “Organic growth is top priority. Acquisitions only make sense if the businesses are growing.” Remember Wolf Consulting? Between 2018 and 2023, the business quadrupled even as the founder stepped back. 

Access to talent has been a key driver of organic growth in the double digits. Inspired by Alpine’s Entrepreneur-In-Residence (EIR) programme, Evergreen developed its own: a bench to draw on to populate new acquisitions. 

Being open-minded has allowed Evergreen to recruit top performers like Armando Huerta whose CV included stints at ExxonMobil and at Deloitte (but zero IT services experience). In 2023, Armando was parachuted into i-Tech, a Florida based ERP consultancy, as VP Growth, months after joining Evergreen’s EIR programme. Within months of the deal closing, i-Tech’s founders retired and Armando was promoted to the CEO. 

Here’s what Armando did next (source):

How did he figure it out? 

Evergreen maintains a relatively lean central team of 45 FTEs providing shared services including M&A and Finance. From the get-go, there was clear division of labour at the leadership level:

Evergreen does not centralise tech stacks but “provides expert resources and playbooks recruiting, sales, marketing, and finance” (source).