IT Lab hits £75m revenue following third acquisition in three years

London-based firm announces takeover of Mirus IT

Microsoft partner IT Lab has made its third acquisition in three years, with a deal for MSP Mirus IT taking its revenue to over £75m.

Milton Keynes-based Mirus will add another location to IT Lab's geographic footprint, according to IT Lab CEO Peter Sweetbaum, and will also add a managed print services operation to its portfolio.

"The choice vis-à-vis Mirus itself was an easy one," he told CRN.

"It's a very successful business in the space and has been growing for several years. What they have built is a very high-quality business for its size. That's very important to us, as an organisation, and they also have a fantastic team.

"By bringing them into the group, one of the things we can do is enable their team to leverage the whole scale of our portfolio."

The deal for Mirus follows IT Lab's move for Content and Code last year, and Perspective Risk in May 2017.

It also acquired £10m-revenue Manchester firm JMC in 2015.

The IT Lab group reported sales of £40.2m for the year ending 31 March 2018, but said revenue is now over £75m when including Mirus and Content and Code.

Sweebaum (pictured) said that M&A will continue to be buoyant in the MSP space because bosses are finding themselves at a crossroads as they continue to grow.

"In the M&A space people, frankly, have a choice," he explained. They either invest or they sell, but the investment route can be hard to go down.

"I think Paul Tomlinson (Mirus CEO), like the boss of many organisations of that scale, was faced with a choice. Do they continue to invest and grow, and really invest in what is a rampant need to train and develop people, or do they do something else?

"Paul looked around. He and I met and realised the two companies fit really well and decided to do that deal."

The CEO said that Mirus' leadership team will remain with the business post-acquisition, as they have done with IT Lab's previous three takeovers.

Mirus boss Tomlinson said: "In early 2019 we reviewed our long-term strategy and felt our clients' needs and the industry were changing rapidly.

"After thorough review we felt that the right way to address this was to join a larger organisation that had the range of additional skills our clients needed and of course the same approach to providing an exceptional experience when delivering service.

"I'm incredibly pleased and excited to be joining such an amazing organisation that shares a very similar culture to our own. We believe the breadth of skills within the IT Lab group will allow us to address our clients' changing needs and provide exciting long-term career opportunities for me and our people."

Sweetbaum said that IT Lab will continue to seek further acquisition targets, but added that the firm is also seeing good organic growth.

"M&A is not, for us, a proxy for a bad sales and marketing function," he said.

"Do we think there are more acquisitions to come? Absolutely.

"In terms of the types of deals and timings, our strategy is heavily focused on leveraging the capabilities of Microsoft's three clouds with a very strong cyber wrap and service capability.

"Things that fit in that ecosystem make a lot of sense to us, with its Azure capabilities, DevOps, Dynamics 365… there are lots of things we think we can leverage across our customer base."