Disclaimer: Unless noted otherwise, views and analysis expressed here are the author's own and based on public sources. The article is intended for informational and entertainment purposes only. This is not financial advice. Please consult a professional for investment decisions.

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4 weeks ago in London, we welcomed Cohort 2 of our Rollup Bootcamp: 28 fledgling serial acquirers from all over Europe. What better way to kick off their journey than a fireside chat with Alexander Preussner - an early supporter of RollUpEurope and, on the numbers, one of Germany’s top-performing Independent Sponsors? (By the way, the waitlist for Cohort 3 kicking off on 23 September is now open).

In 7 years, Alex’s vehicle NGC Nachfolgekapital (NGC) has spawned 6 platforms and exited 5, generating 6.8x MOIC and 96% IRR - both on a gross, realised basis, across 24 acquisitions. The portfolio, past and present, spans language schools (GfW), access control & fire protection (ENTRO), facility services (ARUDI) - and more. Altogether €100M+ in revenue and 1,000+ employees.

Alex is a high-conviction, but ultimately opportunistic acquirer, who focuses on high-quality businesses in succession situations. His playbook is Step 1, identify an attractive industry niche, and Step 2, build a rollup around it. 

There’s a lot to choose from. Alex calculates that, out of Germany's roughly 3.6 million companies, 115,000 are family-owned B2B businesses with €2-50M in revenue that will hit the market over the short-to-medium term. Many people are mesmerized by Germany’s Succession Eldorado. Very few are as equipped to prevail as Alex:   

Further reading: We spent a week among management consultants chasing Germany’s blue-collar succession dream. 3 things we learnt

Alex and we discussed:

This article is sponsored by PPH Financial, led by the industry’s best Fractional CFO (and our former colleague 💪) Pavleta Pavlova. PPHF specialises in building the financial backbone for serial acquirers scaling from pre-revenue to 9 figures and beyond. Get in touch today on [email protected] 

RollUpEurope (RUE):  Alex, please introduce yourself and tell us how you got started as an Independent Sponsor.

Alex Preussner (AP):  I’m based in Munich. Before founding NGC in 2019, I spent 7 years in lower mid-cap Private Equity - first at Pinova, then at Maxburg Capital Partners. Eventually I got frustrated that I couldn’t do the deals I wanted. A lot of time is spent in very competitive auctions. Not winning them. So I decided to strike out on my own.

Great decision… but very naive. The terms “search fund” and “Independent Sponsor” were unheard of in Germany at the time. I pressed ahead anyway. My first acquisition as an Independent Sponsor was a tiny company selling zip ties over the phone, at a 20% EBITDA margin. Somehow, I managed to buy it with very little equity of my own. I was funded by the-then MEDIQON, today Chapters Group.

Further reading: Chapters Group: how to build a billion-dollar search fund investor.

That deal took me on a multi-year journey. I first assembled a portfolio of assets inside Chapters, and later bought it out - except the software piece. To date, across NGC, we’ve completed 24 acquisitions into 6 platforms. We’ve already exited 5 of them. Gross MOIC stands at 6.8x, with a 96% gross IRR. The team is deliberately lean: myself and one Investment Manager, plus a handful of strong operators in each platform.

Our starting point was pure opportunism. As my old boss used to say, “strategy follows opportunity.” I bought into succession situations, often partnering with people who wanted to operate - people who lacked the capital or the dealmaking skillset to do M&A, but knew a specific industry inside out. 

RUE:  You’d started out as part of Chapters Group, and eventually bought them out of every platform. How, and why?

AP:  A couple of years ago, Chapters decided to become a pure-play Vertical Market Software HoldCo - which helped their valuation at the time. We, on the other hand, wanted to keep building our existing platforms across B2B Services and education, and to back new businesses outside the vertical market software space.

With a willing seller on the other side, and after some hard negotiating, I was able to buy the portfolio out. It was a win-win: their valuation rose substantially, while I had my portfolio and could keep building - and keep my promises to my operators. This autonomy has been good for us – all our platforms continued to thrive even more. Being smaller and truly independent has a lot of advantages. 

RUE:  Education, zip ties, facility services, a bit of software… pretty eclectic. How did you approach industry selection?

AP:  It was eclectic by design. At the start, the only filter that mattered was actionability and a self-developed investment score card combining everything that I learned about investing. We still use that scorecard today. 

Germany was full of good businesses coming up for sale through succession, and the real challenge was simply getting in front of them. So we bought the ones we could win. 

But opportunism has a ceiling, and we hit it fast. Two experiences taught us that. 

The first lesson was about scalability. 

In 2019 we bought Vetera, a veterinary VMS business with an excellent market position that hadn't raised prices in ten years - but it generated only €500K of EBITDA and offered no obvious roll-up case. A solid business on its own, but a dead end for us: with no way to build a group around it, there was nothing to compound. So we exited to a strategic after 3 years. A good outcome financially, but it taught us that a strong single asset isn't the same as a platform. 

The second lesson was about capacity. 

Even when you pair 3 or 4 small companies with excellent operators and partner closely with them, you can never fully let go - and before long you have no bandwidth left for new deals. Scattered single assets don't build anything.

So the model deliberately changed. We stopped asking “what good business can we buy?” and started asking “which niche do we want to own?” Today we pick attractive industry niches - resilient, fragmented, recurring revenue, rich in succession - and we build a real company group inside one, rather than collecting unrelated assets across the map. 

And the payoff compounds in a way single deals never did. Industry mastery becomes its own source of alpha - there’s an upper bound on how many industries one team can truly master, and once you’re past your fifth deal in, say, access control, you’ve got the market figured out and incremental M&A gets far easier. It even shows up in sourcing.

We send a lot of snail mail  and the conversion rate is materially higher when the sender isn’t “NGC” or a generic search fund, but the platform itself. “We’re ENTRO, and we’re an access-control specialist” is a far stronger way to open a conversation with an owner who lives and breathes that industry than anything we could say as a financial buyer.

RUE:  A major part of your success is down to partnering with high-quality operators. How do you find them - and keep them?