Consilien Ranked #123 on CRN's 2026 Fast Growth 150 List
CRN ranked Consilien No. 123 on its 2026 Fast Growth 150, published August 5, 2026, on a two-year growth rate of 35.20%. It landed in our 25th year in business, the same summer we made the Channel Partners MSP 501 for the second year running.
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Twenty-five years in, growth still surprises me. We didn't find a formula.
We didn't change the strategy either. What changed is how many companies needed the thing we've always done. Show up, solve the problem, and tell the client what their environment actually looks like and what it's going to take to fix it, even when that isn't what they were hoping to hear.
Where the growth came from
Retention, mostly.
A growth number like this usually gets read as a sales story. New logos, a bigger marketing budget, maybe an acquisition. Ours is mainly clients who stayed and then asked us to take on more of the work.
A company that first calls for help desk support at 30 people is a different business at 300, and the work grows with it. Help desk turns into co-managed IT once they hire their own IT staff. Then the cyber insurance renewal starts asking about multi-factor authentication and how long logs are kept, and managed cybersecurity gets added. Then a large customer sends a supplier security questionnaire, and they need compliance readiness, which we run as its own engagement instead of folding it into the managed IT contract.
The economics behind that aren't new. Research by Frederick Reichheld of Bain & Company found that raising customer retention by 5% raises profits by 25% to 95%. For a buyer, the practical reading is simpler. A provider's oldest clients tell you more about it than its newest ones.
Our client base runs from 20 to 1000 users, in manufacturing, distribution, food processing, real estate management, professional services, media, and nonprofits, served from Torrance and nationwide.
Why clients stay after something breaks
Nobody keeps an IT provider for 20 years because nothing ever went wrong.
Things go wrong. A Windows update breaks the ERP client on a Monday morning. A backup job has been failing quietly for a week. A firewall change locks a branch office out of the file server.
Some of our client relationships go back more than two decades. They didn't stay because we were perfect. They stayed because when something broke, we owned it and fixed it.
Owning it has a specific meaning. The client hears about the problem from us before they find it themselves, gets a plain explanation of what caused it, including when the cause was our own change, and then hears what we're changing so it doesn't happen again. The fix matters. So does the phone call before the fix.
The other half is saying the unwelcome thing early. If a server is past end of life, or the backups can't actually restore the ERP system inside a business day, the client should hear that in a planning meeting, not during an outage. That's the job of a vCIO, a part-time IT executive who owns the technology budget and roadmap rather than the ticket queue.
Two lists, two different scorecards
CRN's Fast Growth 150 ranks technology solution providers with at least $1 million in gross annual sales by their two-year growth rate. Managed service providers, integrators, resellers, and IT consultants all compete on the same number. It's revenue math. Nobody judges service.
The MSP 501 works differently. Run by the MSP Summit and Channel Partners, it scores managed service providers worldwide on revenue, growth, profitability, and recurring revenue. We first made it in 2025, and in 2026 we placed No. 306.
Neither list measures whether your provider picks up at 7 p.m. on a Friday. Both measure whether the business behind that phone is healthy. That's worth knowing. It's just a different question from the one you're asking when you sign.
What to ask a provider that shows you a ranking
Ask how long its oldest client has been with it. Then ask what happened the last time it caused an outage, and whether the client heard about it from the provider first.
And ask who owns the company. M&A Signal counted 466 MSP transactions across North America in 2025, up 20% year over year, with private equity involved in 72% of them. When a provider changes hands mid-contract, your account team, your escalation path, and your roadmap can change with it.
Consilien has been independently owned since 2001. A few of our client relationships have now outlasted three generations of the servers they started on.