ConnectWise Acquires Service Leadership to Drive TSP Best Practices

ConnectWise has acquired Service Leadership, a data-driven technology solution provider (TSP) consulting firm.

ConnectWise will pair its TSP software and services platform, IT Nation – its community of IT professionals – and business maturity and leadership coaching program with Service Leadership’s value creation, financial performance and operational maturity benchmarking and best practices.

Integrating Service Leadership insights into the ConnectWise platform will begin immediately. It will offer both new and enhanced business insights tools and functionality.

Strategic Acquisition

Chris Timms is ConnectWise‘s executive vice president of growth. He said this is a very strategic acquisition for ConnectWise.

ConnectWise’s Chris Timms

“We want our partners to improve at a time of disruption in the market,” he said. “And it’s important to be able to access business-critical insights to deal with that disruption. Service Leadership has a world-class benchmarking tool, the SL Index, which helps partners understand how they’re doing. And they have their SLIQ operational maturity level tool. [It] helps partners get better by telling them what they need to do to increase their operational maturity and grow the financial side of their business. When you combine those two things with the operational data from ConnectWise, you can show me exactly what I need to be doing, in my specific business model, to drive results. That is going to be extremely powerful for partners.”

SL Index is the largest and longest-running benchmark of TSP financial performance, operational maturity and value creation globally. SLIQ allows TSP executives to play to their strengths, discover and drive areas of improvement and validate progress on their path to accelerated value creation.

Competitive Advantage

“[Service Leadership] will give our partners a competitive advantage by helping them navigate today’s challenging TSP market and position them for success operationally, financially and from a stock-value creation standpoint,” Timms said. “Prior to ConnectWise, I worked for a payments technology company. And at that time, disruption was altering the payments landscape. My main takeaway was learning how important it is to be analytical when it comes to navigating disruption and noise in the market. Similarly, we’re seeing disruption take over the TSP space today. That’s why we feel this acquisition is so important to our partners. It will provide them with the benchmarking and best practices they need to separate the signal from the noise. So they can not only survive in a tough environment like we have today, but thrive.

Service Leadership CEO Paul Dippell and his team will join the ConnectWise strategy organization. Dippell will continue to lead Service Leadership.

Significant Partner Overlap

The two companies have worked together for years, Timms said. In addition, there is a significant overlap in the companies’ partner base, but not 100%.

“We at ConnectWise saw an opportunity to combine their gold standard benchmarking and best practices tools with our business platform, along with our IT Nation leadership and coaching programs, and provide our partners with a blueprint for success,” he said.

“When we made the decision to seek a strategic acquisition, we were pleased to speak with almost a dozen key industry players,” Dippell said. “We came to recognize that ConnectWise was the right choice.”