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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Q: Where can you meet America’s most prolific allocators to lower mid-market Private Equity? The obvious answer would be the McGuireWoods conference in Dallas. Or perhaps next week’s iGlobal Independent Sponsor Summit in New York (I’ll be there on the sidelines fyi). 

But no! 

3 days ago, in London, at the Chartered Accountants’ Hall, our readers rubbed elbows with illustrious US LPs like Westerly, East Rock, Eothen, Moore - and more. Why? Because European serial acquirers are attracting more American capital than ever before.  

We’re not trying to antagonise European LPs. But look who’s filling out deals:

The Nordic mid-market specialist Aspira recently bagged $41M for its debut fund from Texas County & District Retirement System. The Independent Sponsor Guy Ellis (Broadfield) is the talk of the town. Who backed his first deal? Two US LPs. Norwest led a growth round in Naviam, a phenomenal British IT services rollup born out of a search fund. 

These LPs are keen to deploy. They are clamouring for deal flow. 

Struggling for ideas? How about TICC: Europe’s number one growth industry. Fact: the continent is mired in red tape. Stop complaining about it - leverage it. So many protected industries are crawling with subscale, archaic, but at the same time highly profitable companies that are begging to be consolidated. 

Same goes for healthcare and professional services that face ownership and operating restrictions that make them unappealing to most PE buyers. Think Italian pharmacies 10 years ago; German tax advisors 5 years ago (and again now given the reactionary legislation); and so on. 

Proof? A glimpse at the growth trajectories of 3 European aggregators founded on the eve of COVID: Hippocrates (Italian pharmacy rollup - big interview coming out in October); Simago (French radiology rollup; our deep-dive) and Phenna (UK TICC rollup; our deep-dive).  

OK, enough with Euro-boosterism. Let’s run through 4 of the 6 conference panels:

Next week, come back for the BIG FISH: writeups from the panels featuring Rodolfo Guarino from Hippocrates Holding; Charles-Henry Beglin from Simago / Builders Associes, and Ramsey Sahyoun from Evergreen Services Group… the 3 unicorn rollups referred to in the title. 

How’s this for Sunday reading? 

Three things to note before we get out of the way. 

One, the transcripts have been significantly shortened and edited so the length of this article would be manageable. So it doesn’t replace attending the conference, but still gives you some excellent insights. 

Two, this week’s sponsor is Reef Pass: THE serial acquisition investors. If you are seeking HoldCo or rollup funding in North America or Europe, you should talk to Reef Pass Investors. Interested? Apply directly on RPI’s website or simply hit reply with a description of your idea + pitch deck. 

Three, our friends at Antilop Group have asked us to share a job advertisement.  

Antilop is a Stockholm-based investment firm backed by operators and investors from Harvard, Bain Capital, McKinsey and Altor. They currently run two Nordic buy-and-build platforms in parallel: Restra, in forestry waste-to-energy, at SEK 400M+ revenue, and a still-undisclosed infra-services platform at SEK 350M+.

They're now hiring an off-cycle Investment Intern for Spring 2027 to work across the full M&A cycle: sourcing, modelling, execution. If you want to see one of the Nordics' most active roll-up players from the inside, apply here. Fluency in Swedish 🇸🇪required.

Chloe Chiew (CC): Luis, Anders, how did you each end up building roll-ups, and why in technical services sectors like fire safety (Iberian Ventures / Grupo Fire - read our interview) and roof refurbishment (Aspira; read our interview)?

Luis Reyes (LR): My background is software engineering, then Google, McKinsey and Bain, mostly in the US. Upon moving to Spain in 2019, I noticed that 90% of the local PE industry was mid-market, with low operational involvement. Meanwhile, huge, fragmented services industries sat below their radar. We chose fire safety for two reasons. One, recurring revenue profile. Two, lack of competition from institutional PE. 

Our thesis is to buy illiquid companies with <€1M in revenue, build a platform, and exit to an institutional buyer who still sees plenty of runway. 4 years in, we have a repeatable model built around operations, integration and underwriting discipline.

Anders Barklöf (AB): We founded Aspira in 2020 and bootstrapped it with no investors at the start. We looked at technical installation in the Nordics, and roof refurbishment stood out: completely unconsolidated and untouched by private equity at the time. AI wasn't a theme back then, but the niche gave us a proprietary opportunity.

Our first raise was €20M from Nordic family offices, alongside 3 anchor companies. Since then we've done 47 add-ons across the Nordics and DACH - and we're now entering the UK.

CC: What convinced investors to back you at the start?

AB: A clear industrial rationale. Deep industry research. And recruiting the former chairman of the Swedish Roofing Association helped us spot procurement synergies in specialist waterproofing and insulation materials, which in turn made the pitch tangible.

CC: How important is technology to the model? Is Grupo Fire an "AI roll-up"?

LR: We’re not! We started building our own OS in late 2021, before raising capital. Every acquisition gets 100% of its data ingested: invoices, contracts, customer history going back to the 1990s. The system classifies revenue into maintenance contracts, recurring corrective work and installation, and feeds straight into our finance systems. We built our own call-centre front end on third-party infrastructure, so we keep full data ownership. We use AI for automation, however, our main focus is on service quality. Increasing the number of customers per technician and reducing time to resolve issues.

CC: What is your competitive edge in deal sourcing?

LR: Relationships and hyper-specialisation. We target 15 in-person meetings a week across Spain, mostly outside Barcelona. Our M&A people are embedded in local business communities. We closed one deal at the founder's house with a notary present. We won another, after 15 meetings, partly because a team member's grandmother knew the seller's wife. We know fire safety in Spain better than anyone, and we're deliberately humble about adjacent sectors.

AB: We follow the same approach: boots on the ground. We hire local teams in every market. We once flew to southern Sweden on a Friday to meet founders face to face and signed at their kitchen table over shrimp sandwiches. We do not try to compete on price with large PE firms. Instead, we offer reinvestment, earnouts, and partnership.

CC: What are common fallacies in technical-services roll-ups?

Both: First, that recurring revenue and high retention automatically mean growth. Many sellers lack commercial instincts because they never had to win customers. If you lose 5% to churn, you may not win it back for a year or more unless you build a commercial organisation from day one. 

Second, that integration is optional. In small-ticket roll-ups, customer density only creates value if the businesses are actually integrated. Back-office integration - accounting, procurement - is standard, but customer-facing integration needs real care. The cautionary tale is a Nordic office-coffee roll-up that centralised its call centre in Estonia and destroyed its local customer relationships. 

Third, that you should “maximise TAM”. A broad market focus makes sellers less willing to transact with you. A niche with a clear industrial rationale and a defined exit buyer is the right frame.

CC: How do you keep sellers engaged after the deal?

Both: In earnouts, we set base price conservatively and tie upside to growth and productivity. That works well with founders who don't care so much about roll-up mechanics. Others want equity, partnership and a say in decisions. We target founders aged 35 to 55 so they stay engaged. Peer group is a powerful retention tool.

CC: What size do you need to reach for a strong exit, and when will you sell?

LR: In Spain, at least €20M of EBITDA. Below that you mostly attract local and regional PE.

AB: In the Nordics it's closer to €30-40M. Above that you get significant inbound interest from European and North American mid- and large-cap PE. But we build as if we'll never sell. There's no urgency to exit; the businesses can compound and return capital without a transaction.

Andrea Allegrini (Lindbergh) shared the stage with Louis-Clair François-Poncet (SATEP) and Florian von Villiez (Legacy Partners). Never heard of these companies? Check out our primers on Lindbergh and SATEP.   

Florian von Villiez (FV): What do you pay for acquisitions - and how do you structure them?

Louis-Clair François-Poncet (LCFP): On average, we pay 4-5x EBITDA. We buy small B2C HVAC businesses, with €500k of EBITDA on average. In 4 years we’ve closed c.20. Approx. 80% of sellers stay on and roll roughly 1/3 of proceeds into the HoldCo. A typical seller is in their late 40s. These are not retirement trades: alignment matters. Finally, speed is a real edge over legacy consolidators: we can issue an LOI the day after the first meeting.

Andrea Allegrini (AA): We pay similar multiples, structured 30-40% upfront and the rest over 3-4 years, at zero interest. We deduct cash on the balance sheet and severance liabilities from the price. The target is that each deal pays for itself out of operating cash flow.

FV: How do you run businesses after acquisition?

LCFP: Our formula is: highly decentralised management - highly centralised back office. Every company runs on the same ERP, which enforces pricing discipline - our quote calculator shows green or red - and handles planning. This reduces dependence on the founder. By running digital marketing and CRM centrally, we turned local teams from "farmers" into "hunters". After Acquisition #2 we paused M&A to build out the HQ.

AA: We centralise accounting, finance, IT and HR. We target a 20% productivity uplift from centralising logistics: warehouse visibility, route optimisation, night deliveries. Sharing engineers across companies smooths seasonality and can add up to €2,500 of revenue per technician per week. We run an internal academy that trains engineers across brands and technologies, and we have an AI project to capture senior technicians' knowledge. One thing that didn't work is centralising credit collection. Big customers like condominiums want a local relationship, so that has to stay local.

FV: What are red flags in diligence?

LCFP: High employee turnover. We also avoid high-growth, low-maintenance businesses. We only buy companies that are 30+ years old and have an active maintenance team.

FV: Where is the market opportunity in HVAC right now?

LCFP: In France, AC penetration is c.25% and for heat pumps, c.20%. Because heat pumps carry a “green premium”, demand is strong.

AA: Italy is electrifying more slowly because electricity costs 30-40% more than gas. Hybrid systems dominate, which sustains maintenance demand. You can introduce maintenance contracts after acquisition if the company already does informal maintenance - formalising it creates value directly. Installation-only businesses are much harder to convert because you need new hires.

FV: How do you deal with the technician shortage and the competition?

LCFP: When you speak to a seller or business owner, he’ll tell you, “Finding technicians is the bane of my life”. And then you ask how many hours a week you take to find technicians, and he’ll tell you, “Probably 5 minutes”. Last year our dedicated recruitment team helped hire 40 technicians and sales staff. But it’s not only that. Proper onboarding is essential too. You can’t have a new technician rock up with no structured welcome or training, just have him put a shirt on and go into the field!

Arne Allewaert is a co-founder of Amavi, a Belgian Independent Sponsor focused on real assets. Thibault Dabas is an MD at Antin Infrastructure Partners, the majority owner of the Italian pharmacy rollup Hippocrates Holding since 2021. The panel was moderated by Linus Eriksson from TechCredit Partners, a debt advisor. 

Linus Eriksson (LE): What does it take for a buy-and-build to qualify as infrastructure?