Karl Bickmore and Randy Crockett came together to open their own IT consulting company in 2009, and like the owners of any new business, they had plans to grow.

Seven years later, their Phoenix-based company – SNAP Tech IT -- employs more than 80 people in four locations across the United States.

But Bickmore (pictured) said the company isn't done growing, nit until it multiplies its client base by 10, mainly through acquisitions. Since its founding, SNAP Tech has acquired four companies.

Because the managed service provider market is “particularly ripe” for acquisitions, Bickmore said, it has always been a part of his plan for SNAP Tech IT.

The growth that drives his company’s development has overwhelmed many other MSP owners who did not plan for the complexities that accompany acquisitions, according to Bickmore.

Growing a company is a complicated endeavor, he added, especially when it's driven by acquisitions, and many MSPs are launched by technicians, not by businessmen with a lot of management experience.

“Most of them kind of run out of their ability to run their company,” he said. In his experience, he added, few companies have the sophistication to successfully acquire another firm or integrate it after they buy it.

“I think they go into (an acquisition) and make huge assumptions, like ‘I am going to go in and acquire this business, which is going to stay just the same as it is.’ They get weird ideas, but they don’t really know how to do it, and really analyze the financial mechanisms that go on in that business to determine what the opportunity is there,” Bickmore said.

Fundamentally, he said, an MSP’s leadership is what can stall its growth. 

“Almost all managed service providers are really capped at the level of the ownership's capability,” especially, he recalls from his experience, the owners of smaller companies who end up halting their firms' growth because they feel comfortable staying at a certain size, not hiring middle management and restricting themselves to a certain geographic area, Bickmore said.