‘I Was The M&A Guy For GCI... I Fancied Having A Go Myself’

The former “M&A guy” for GCI – a Microsoft partner that sold up to Mayfair in 2018 for almost £200m – has opened up on his decision to launch an MSP that has already gone on to make eight acquisitions.

Mark Allen and Phil Smith launched Everything Tech Group in 2021, having left GCI shortly after its sale.

The Manchester-based MSP today announced its eighth purchase in the form of Sire Technology and GiBVault.

The double swoop boosts Everything Tech Group’s revenues to £24m, EBITDA to £4.8m and headcount to 130.

“My skill set was 27 acquisitions”

Talking to IT Channel Oxygen, Allen – who is CFO at Everything Tech Group having held the same position at GCI – helped build GCI to an enterprise value of £197m via a string of 27 acquisitions.

GCI went on to acquire – and rebrand as – Nasstar, before doubling in size via its acquisition of Kcom’s national IT business. It ranked 20th in Oxygen 250.

“I was the M&A guy for GCI,” Allen said.

“My skill set was 27 acquisitions with an enterprise value of anything from a £250,000 to £35m.

“Seven or eight months after the Mayfair acquisition, I left. I had a year of holidays and not doing a lot, because it had been a long, hard time at GCI. I decided that we’d made an awful lot for somebody else doing what we’d done at GCI, and I fancied having a go myself.

“I got together with Phil, who was the COO for GCI at the time, and we realised that the buy and build had come together by me doing all the M&A and Phil doing all the heaving lifting on the other side with the integration of the businesses. So I felt like we were the key people to have a go at it ourselves.”

M&A “scars and wounds”

While SIRE Technology adds server and networking prowess to Everything Tech Group’s stronghold in the end-user computing space, Gibraltar-based GiBVault hands it a presence in regulated industries, Allen said.

Run by the same management teams, the two firms are “inextricably linked”, he added.

“We are more end-user based IT requirements, whereas [SIRE] are more that next level down, looking after the servers for bigger customers. So it’s very complementary from that perspective,” he said.

Allen said each one of his 35 acquisitions have inflicted “scars and wounds that made me very good at doing M&A”.

“I think there were definitely some deals at GCI that probably shouldn’t have gone ahead,” he said.

“You’ve got to look at how the future financials are going to look in your business.”

“You buy a few [businesses with shrinking bases] and before you know it, if you don’t start selling £20,000, £30,000 a month of recurring revenue, you’ll never show organic growth in your business, and that’s massively going to hurt your own sale multiple. So you’ve got to look at the bigger picture of the stuff you’re trying to buy, as opposed to just trying to find a deal that works financially.”

“We’re quite proud”

Having the backing of high-street bank NatWest boosts Everything Tech Group’s credibility with potential acquisition targets, Allen said.

But Everything Tech Group, which is owned by Allen and Smith as well as a few other private individual shareholders, has already built a platform “we’re quite proud of”, Allen added, meaning organic growth will be a focus in 2025.

“There are no specific products we believe are missing from that platform,” he said.

“We’re sat on quite a decent pipeline of sales opportunities, and we now have lots of cross-sell opportunities to some very decent-sized customers as well. The expectation is that we will have a reasonable amount of organic growth during 2025, as well as doing more M&A.”