PE is turning the channel into the thing we all ran away from

Let me tell you how the channel started. Not the textbook version. The real one.

Some guy at a carrier got tired. Tired of the territory games, the comp plan changes every February, the SVP who took credit for his work, the "realignment" that moved his best accounts to someone's nephew. So he quit. Started his own thing. Maybe an agency. Maybe a VAR. Maybe just a guy with a Rolodex and a cell phone who knew how to get deals done without seventeen layers of approval.

He wasn't building a business because he read a Harvard Business Review article about entrepreneurship. He was building a business because he'd rather eat ramen in his garage than sit through one more all-hands where the CEO talks about "alignment" while the direct sales team poaches partner deals in the parking lot.

That's the channel. That's who we are. Refugees. People who got burned by corporate and decided to bet on themselves instead. The whole industry is built on the backs of people who couldn't stand the politics and were willing to trade a steady paycheck for the right to do things their way.

Now look who just walked through the door.

Private equity.

PE firms spent 2024 and 2025 buying channel companies like they were clearing shelves at Costco. MSPs, agents, VARs, consulting shops. If it had recurring revenue and a customer list, someone from a firm you've never heard of was taking the founder to dinner. And the pitch was always the same: "We love what you've built. We just want to help you scale."

You know what scaling looks like when PE says it?

Org charts. KPI dashboards. A new CFO named Brian who's never sold anything in his life but has very strong opinions about your margins. Weekly pipeline reviews. Monthly board decks. Quarterly business reviews with people whose LinkedIn titles have words like "operating partner" and "value creation." Your top sales rep now reports to a regional VP who reports to a division president who reports to the CEO that PE installed after the founder "transitioned to an advisory role," which is PE-speak for "we paid him enough to stop arguing."

Look familiar?

It should. It's the exact same structure these people left carriers and big tech to get away from. Except now it's wearing a Patagonia vest instead of a corporate badge, and it's calling itself "a platform."

I watched this happen to a buddy of mine. Built his MSP from nothing. Fifteen years. Knew every customer by name. His team loved him because he treated them like adults, not headcount. PE came in, wrote him a check, told him nothing would change. Within 18 months: new CRM he didn't pick, new comp plan he didn't design, two of his best people quit because they didn't leave corporate jobs to fill out corporate paperwork at a company that used to feel like family. My buddy's still there technically. He has an office and a title. But it's not his company anymore. He knows it. Everyone knows it.

Here's the part that really gets me. PE looks at the channel and sees inefficiency. They see a bunch of small, independently run businesses that could be "optimized" through consolidation. And they're right. From a spreadsheet perspective, the channel is a mess. Fragmented. Redundant. Full of people doing things in weird, non-scalable ways.

But that's not a bug. That's the whole point.

The channel works because it's human-scale. Customers call their rep directly. Problems get solved by someone who gives a damn, not a ticket queue. Deals get done on handshakes and relationships, not procurement portals. It's messy and personal and inefficient and it works precisely because of those things, not in spite of them.

PE doesn't understand that. PE understands EBITDA multiples and platform consolidation and exit timelines. And I'm not saying that's evil. These are smart people doing what smart people do with money. But there's a collision happening right now between a culture built on independence and a financial model that requires standardization. Those two things cannot coexist forever. One of them is going to win.

I'll tell you which one it usually is. And it's not the one with the Rolodex.

If you're a channel owner and you haven't gotten the call yet, you will. When it comes, ask yourself one question. Not "how much?" That's the easy question. The hard one is: "Am I ready to work for someone again?" Because that's what you're signing up for. A very well-compensated version of the thing you swore you'd never do again.

Some people are fine with that. Honestly. Take the money, do your three-year earn-out, go buy a boat. No judgment. You built something and someone wants to pay you for it. That's a win.

But don't pretend it's still your company. And don't be surprised when Brian from finance asks why your top rep expensed a customer dinner without pre-approval.

The channel was the Wild West. Rough, chaotic, full of characters who'd rather fight than follow. Now the railroad is coming. It always does. And the people building it are very polite and very smart and they will absolutely pave over everything that made this place worth running to.

They just don't know that yet. Give it 18 months.