Two profitable cybersecurity resellers that didn’t need to merge – doing it anyway
Ipswich / Borehamwood, UK – 15th January 2026
Spear Shield and Koncise Solutions are joining forces. But this isn’t your typical merger & acquisition announcement.
Why we’re doing this differently
Most cybersecurity announcements tell you about sophisticated threats and comprehensive solutions. Most of our customer conversations start with the thing that actually keeps mid-market security leaders awake: that board meeting where you have to justify why you’re spending money on preventing something that might never happen.
Because here’s the truth: mid-market IT and security teams don’t struggle because they don’t understand threats. They struggle because they can’t get budget approval, can’t prioritise with limited resources, and can’t prove ROI to finance leaders who think in completely different terms.
Mid-market IT and security teams face an impossible situation: they’re expected to prevent the same attacks targeting FTSE 100 companies, but with a fraction of the resources. Most cybersecurity resellers respond by trying to sell more products.
Most teams don’t necessarily need another product, they want help building business cases, prioritising investments and demonstrating value to boards who often see security as a cost centre. Most resellers don’t do this because it doesn’t immediately generate revenue. It takes time, requires expertise and most resellers are built to transact, not consult. Spear Shield built their business doing the opposite.
What Spear Shield does differently
Rather than leading with product demos and pricing, they help customers make informed decisions:
- Phishing assessments that quantify human risk with data (not vendor fear tactics)
- Defence-in-depth assessments against CAF, CIS Controls or NIST that show gaps and help prioritise
- Weighted scorecards for solution evaluation that demonstrate due diligence
- Security roadmaps that match real budgets – not vendor wishlists
This helps IT Directors justify spending to boards, helps Information Security Managers prioritise with limited resources, and helps Infrastructure Managers understand what implementation actually requires and how it might impact their environment and users.
The result? A fiercely loyal customer community.
Why now
Success became a problem. The more customers who saw value in this consultative approach, the more Max Harper (CEO & Co-Founder) and Josh Broadbent (CTO) found themselves spread impossibly thin between customer delivery, business administration, and service development.
Quoting, invoicing, chasing payments, making payments, paying utility and tax bills. The boring admin work that doesn’t help customers but has to get done – that’s what was drowning the thing they’re best at and enjoy most: helping customers assess risk and build defensible strategies.
Why Koncise Solutions
Koncise has spent 14 years building something similar: a cybersecurity reseller focused on long-term relationships over short-term transactions. Customer retention sits at 99% because doing right by customers matters more than quarterly targets. It’s become a standard they refuse to let slip – and a constraint that keeps them honest.
They’ve also built robust operational infrastructure – exactly what Spear Shield needed.
Here’s why this merger is happening: both businesses are profitable, growing, and have retention rates above 99%. That’s rare. What’s rarer is that both achieved it by explicitly prioritising long-term relationships over quarterly targets.
The merger isn’t fixing a problem. It’s proof the model works – so well that we can invest in expanding it when we don’t have to.
What’s actually happening
By April 2026, the businesses will operate as one. But this isn’t a typical integration:
For Spear Shield customers:
- Services, pricing, and contracts stay the same
- Max and Josh remain involved and accessible
- Less operational burden means more time with customers, not less
- Access to Koncise’s broader portfolio and vendor partnerships
For Koncise customers:
- Access to Spear Shield’s consultative approach
- Business case templates, framework assessments, and board-ready materials
- Practical help justifying security investment internally
For vendor partners:
- The same vendors who’ve told both businesses privately ‘we wish you were bigger so we could do more together’ – now we can
- The same straightforward, collaborative approach – with the capacity to do more together
For all:
- Combined community events (With plans to expand the hugely successful Suffolk Security Socials, the most recent of which drew 70+ local security leaders, to London, Herts and Berks)
- Broader expertise across managed detection and response, email protection, and human risk
- Expanded vendor ecosystem: Sophos, CrowdStrike, N-able, KnowBe4, Abnormal, dope.security, Mimecast, Arctic Wolf, and Okta
What’s definitely not happening
If you’re thinking “What’s the catch?” – fair question. If you’ve been through a partner acquisition before where a partner you’ve enjoyed working with has had the soul eroded out of them as targets go up and costs get driven into the ground, then you might be understandably cautious about this announcement.
This isn’t:
- A cost-cutting exercise where service drops
- A play to upsell things you don’t need
- Six months of operational chaos
- The usual M&A playbook of squeezing margins
Both businesses are profitable in their own rights and 100% privately owned. Neither of us needed to do this deal. No PE firm pushing for growth. No bank demanding we sell. We’re choosing to merge because we both think it makes our customers’ lives better – and we’re both so dependent on retention we can’t afford to get that wrong.
This isn’t a PE play, it’s genuinely different, it’s a straightforward multiplier effect of Koncise’s business operations and Account Management resources and Spear Shield’s service offerings.
Leadership perspectives
Max Harper, CEO & Co-Founder of Spear Shield:
“Most partners seem to overlook the obvious that if you focus on helping customers make informed decisions they’ll want to work with you long-term and instead focus on driving short-term revenue/profit generation over customer outcomes.
Our success was beginning to limit what we could offer and Josh and I found ourselves stretched increasingly thin. Joining forces with Koncise solves that. They’ve built the operational infrastructure we need whilst sharing the same customer-first philosophy.
Our clients in Suffolk won’t see disruption – they’ll see us with more time to focus on what we’re actually good at: helping them build defensible security strategies their boards understand and approve.
Spear Shield’s clients get operational infrastructure and account management they’ve never had. Koncise’s clients get consultative support they’ve been asking for. Neither group loses what they already valued – they just gain what the other business is brilliant at.”
Ben Konopinski, CEO & Founder of Koncise Solutions:
“For 14 years, we’ve operated on one principle: do right by customers, even when it conflicts with short-term revenue.
When we met Max and Josh, it was clear they’d built something special by applying the same philosophy – just with a more consultative approach than we’d developed.
Our customers have been asking: ‘Can you help us build the business case? Can you show the board why this matters?’
Honestly? We’ve wanted to. But fear of getting it wrong held us back. It wasn’t our core strength – but it is Spear Shield’s. Seeing what they’ve built gave us confidence that together, we could finally offer this properly.
This isn’t about getting bigger. It’s about getting better at the thing that actually matters: helping mid-market IT and security leaders survive an impossible job without becoming the scapegoat when things go wrong.”
About the companies
Spear Shield
Founded four years ago, Spear Shield has built a reputation for doing cybersecurity differently: helping organisations make informed decisions through phishing assessments, framework-based gap analysis, security social customer networking events, and practical security roadmaps. Based in Ipswich, Suffolk, they’ve built a loyal customer community across East Anglia who value their no-pressure approach.
Koncise Solutions
Koncise Solutions has spent 14 years proving that cybersecurity should be a business enabler, not a barrier. With 99% client retention, they’ve built long-term partnerships by focusing on practical outcomes over transactions. Based in Borehamwood, they work exclusively with UK mid-market organisations facing sophisticated threats without enterprise-level resources.
For any further enquiries, please reach out to:
Ben – ben@koncisesolutions.com
Or
Max – maxharper@spearshield.co.uk
