From a Borrowed Office to Two Decades Independent: The IP Consulting Story

 

Twenty years ago, Milton Moore was doing the kind of work that doesn't leave much room for looking ahead. He had just relocated for a promotion at Cisco, been passed over for it once he got there, and decided it was time to build something of his own instead. He didn't know then that the company he was about to start would still be standing two decades later, still privately owned, still answering only to its own clients rather than an outside board.

 

That's a bigger deal than it might sound. The managed IT services industry has spent the past several years consolidating at a pace that's hard to overstate. Private equity-backed platforms closed 466 acquisitions of independent MSPs in North America in 2025 alone, worth more than $4.3 billion, and industry trackers expect the pace to continue in 2026. A lot of the companies IP Consulting (IPC) came up alongside have been bought, folded into bigger platforms, and renamed. IPC hasn't. Twenty years in, it's still Milton's company, run the way it's always been run.

 

Here's how it got there.

 

 

Before Milton Moore had IPC, he had three other businesses, and none of them looked much like IT consulting. The first, back in college, was a food delivery service called Hot Food Express, essentially a local version of what GrubHub would become years later, run with about 20 part-time drivers and a handful of restaurant discounts. It lasted a couple of years before it fell apart. Two more ventures followed, Miracle Technologies and Network Professionals, before Milton eventually took a job at Cisco as a sales engineer.

 

He picked Cisco over a comparable opportunity at Microsoft largely because the Microsoft role would have meant a near-constant travel schedule as a consultant, while the Cisco role kept him closer to home. It turned out to matter a great deal: the Cisco years, spent first in Research Triangle Park and eventually back home in West Michigan, earned Milton two of the highest certifications in the Cisco ecosystem and a front-row seat to a technology shift that would shape the next twenty years of his career.

 

That shift was voice over IP.

 

 

“Voice over IP was almost like saying AI right now, or cloud, fifteen years ago,” Milton says. “It was a game changer in every aspect.” Cisco was pushing hard into a market that legacy phone-system vendors like Avaya weren't defending fast enough, and Milton, still stinging from the promotion he didn't get, decided it was the moment to go out on his own. He founded IP Consulting in 2006, focused on security and voice.

 

The first real project was enormous for a company that didn't exist a few months earlier: a 45,000-phone migration for the State of Michigan, moving the state off Avaya and onto Cisco, won through a subcontract with AT&T Consulting. Milton worked on it nearly full time for two years. Word of mouth and Cisco's own referrals brought in more work from there, including an early relationship with Bissell, the Michigan-based vacuum company, that came through a mutual Cisco contact.

 

Somewhere in that stretch, Milton met Cherri Mosey, introduced through a chain of contacts that started with a friend who'd had a bad experience with a previous IT provider. Cherri was starting her own project management practice at the time, and the fit was obvious: Milton could solve the technical problems, but the business needed someone who could actually run them. She joined, and the two of them spent the next several years doing the work themselves, one client at a time, eventually working out of a small office in Cascade, Michigan that one of their clients had given them space to use.

 

 

The 2008 financial crisis hit right as IPC was finding its footing, and it forced a real strategic shift. Rather than staying a pure services shop, the company expanded into hardware sales and became a Cisco Premier Partner, a move that meant securing lines of credit and getting the whole team certified almost overnight. It worked. Revenue doubled in the years that followed, even as the company stayed narrowly focused on Cisco networking, voice, and security.

 

That focus came with a cost. Despite doing strong technical work for cities and municipalities across Michigan, including the City of Grand Rapids, IPC was often passed over for larger contracts simply for being too small. What the company built instead was a reputation for taking on the messiest problems other vendors wouldn't touch. Milton still describes those years in fairly blunt terms: “We were like a SEAL team. Like snipers. The team you called when things were already a mess.”

 

That reputation eventually opened bigger doors. In 2013, IPC earned its SBA 8(a) certification, a federal small-business designation, years before the company had built out any real push into government work. A chance conversation at a Cisco event in San Francisco turned into a small firewall order for a major federal contractor, and that small order grew into one of IPC's longest-standing client relationships.

 

The same pattern showed up closer to home. Kent District Library and the City of Lowell both started as one-off technical projects and, over time, became long-term managed services relationships built on trust rather than a sales pitch. It's a pattern Milton points back to often: “We are technology. We are business people who happen to know technology.”

 

 

Two decades later, that approach has added up. IPC has grown to a team of 20 people serving more than 100 clients across 10 industries, with a 98% client retention rate and revenue up more than 500% since its founding. The company has been named a four-time Inc. 5000 honoree, recognized among Michigan's 50 Companies to Watch, named a finalist for the EY Entrepreneur of the Year award, and this year earned its second consecutive ranking on the Channel Futures MSP 501, a list of the top-performing managed service providers in the world.

 

Cherri, who's spent as much of the last twenty years building the company as Milton has, puts it simply: “We're a startup. We look like a startup, but we're not.”

 

 

The technology has changed more times than either of them can probably count. What hasn't changed is the instinct that got IPC through each shift: watch for the disruption before it becomes a crisis, and adapt before someone else forces the decision. Voice over IP was that disruption in 2006. AI is that disruption now, and IPC has spent the past year building out Navigate AI, a governed AI platform powered by Hatz AI, along with a broader push into what the company now calls AI business operations, helping clients turn raw data into something usable instead of just more noise.

 

It's the same instinct Milton described twenty years ago, just pointed at a different problem now: “We understand that this is evolve or die time.” A lot of the value-added reseller business he grew up in has, in his words, completely fallen off a cliff since then. The companies still standing are the ones that changed before they had to.

 

IP Consulting is one of them. Twenty years in, still independent, still founder-led, and by every account still looking for the next shift before it becomes a requirement.