Master Mega-Merger: Sandler Partners Acquires X4 Solutions

**Editor’s Note: Please click here for a recap of the biggest channel-impacting mergers in May-June 2016.**

Master agency Sandler Partners is getting a whole lot bigger, expanding its national footprint by acquiring X4 Solutions, the Midwest-based master.

Sandler Partners said the acquisition positions it as the nation’s second-largest telecom and cloud services master agency. Together, the companies serve more than 4,000 sales partners in the West, Northwest, Southwest and Midwest. The combined company will generate about $65 million in revenue this year.

Terms of the deal are not being disclosed.

Alan Sandler, Sandler Partners’ founder and managing partner, tells Channel Partners the “most important thing to us is not to disrupt the employee and partner relationships at X4, so there will be no immediate changes.”

“X4 will operate as X4, a Sandler Partners Company,” he said. “We will work together to take the best practices from each company and, eventually, consolidate them under the Sandler Partners brand.”{ad}

Sandler Partners has agents nationwide, but its presence is heavily concentrated in California, Nevada, Texas, Arizona, Georgia, Washington and Oregon. The X4 acquisition will expand that to include Illinois (Chicago area), Michigan, Indiana, Missouri and Wisconsin. X4 also has micro market presence in Texas (Austin, Dallas and Houston), Georgia (Atlanta), Ohio, Florida and Colorado (Denver).

Sandler Partners has more than 3,400 and X4 has 1,200 sales partners.

“In conversations with more than 60 key partners, we had unanimous support for this deal,” said Curt Allen, previously X4’s president and now Sandler Partners’ president of channel. “Our similar cultures of fanatical service to agents and always doing the right thing in the space seems a great fit to everyone we spoke to. The only concern any of them had was with the potential for disruption to their working relationships with X4, which is completely mitigated by our strategy to change nothing operationally and only add features to their program this year. They will use the same X4 portal, they will maintain the same X4 contacts and will continue to do business with X4 the way they have.”

No layoffs are planned, according to Sandler Partners. X4 staffers “possess significant proprietary knowledge of the markets and agents they serve, and are welcomed as valued new members of the Sandler Partners family,” it said.

Sandler Partners has always grown organically and has a “strong organic growth engine that will continue to power significant growth for our company,” Sandler said.

“However, we are actively looking for other companies and agencies that would benefit the partner and customer ecosystem, and integrate with our culture,” he said.