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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Holding Companies are a parsimonious lot. They love nothing more than acquiring businesses for 4-6x EBITA. This can be a handicap if you’re competing against Private Equity. There’s a workaround: cosplaying as the anti-PE. “Permanent owners, not micro-managing jerks” - that type of thing. 

Meanwhile, the competition in Lower Mid-Market is heating up. As we learnt at our New York Serial Acquirer Conference, ingenious new models are emerging. Shore Capital, the mid-market O.G., has expanded into search funds. New Long Term Hold focused funds like Reef Pass and Telos North are nabbing prized operator talent from PE. 

Not to be outdone, HoldCos are fighting back in two important ways: 

One, their M&A strategies are increasingly thematic. Cue the proliferation of “HoldCos of HoldCos”: decentralised federations of PE-style rollups. 

Two, forever no more! Divestments of single assets as well as entire divisions are picking up. It’s not only over-leveraged HoldCos like Storskogen (our primer) shedding assets. 

The upshot is that it’s increasingly difficult to tell Private Equity and HoldCos apart. What better illustration than Volati - a 23-year old, listed Swedish industrial compounder: 

Next month, Volati is due to spin off Salix Group, hitherto the largest division (58% of the 2025 EBITA), leaving it with a bizarre portfolio of excellent (Ettiketto) and frankly mediocre assets (what used to be called “Industry” - a collection of cyclical, subscale assets). 

This isn't Volati’s first ever reshuffle. In 2020, it sold Besikta Bilprovning, a Swedish chain of car inspection stations, to a PE-owned aggregator. Price paid: SEK 1.05B. Profit: SEK 750M. Then, the following year, Volati spun off and listed Bokusgruppen, Sweden's leading book retailer (market cap today: SEK 1.2B, 2x vs. spinoff). 

Question for you, our readers: shouldn’t all HoldCos be like Volati and actively prune their portfolios to maximise shareholder value? 

In this article, we take a closer look at Volati and its best-performing business, Ettiketto, covering the following topics:

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An important announcement before we get down to business. Following success of the debut Rollup Bootcamp in Q1, we've just opened registrations for Cohort #2 starting in late May. What is Rollup Bootcamp? A part-time, 6-week hybrid programme designed to build Europe’s emerging Serial Acquirers:

Key value prop? Compressing your ETA timeline from 6-12 months of exploration to 6 weeks of execution. More information + application link.  

OK, let’s go and draw some inspiration and lessons from the Volati/Ettiketto story!

Salix, a supplier to the construction industry and building materials retailers, is being spun off for 3 reasons. One, like its construction clients, it’s a cyclical business. Two, because it’s large enough to be independent. Three, because Volati’s best-performing asset - a label printing rollup called Ettiketto Group - is decidedly not cyclical. 

HoldCos are meant to be capital allocation machines that pump out consistent ROCE across the portfolio. A glance at Volati’s statements reveals very un-Swedish inequality levels: 

It would appear that Volati’s Board is responding to shareholder pressure in the face of a comatose share price:

The slimmed-down Volati consists of 5 wildly different businesses producing SEK 4.3B ($460M) in run-rate revenue. The first 4 used to be grouped into a single BU called “Industry”. A supplier of telecom masts. A water damage restoration specialist. A manufacturer of landscaping products. A manufacturer of grain silos. 

The 5th business is Ettiketto: a manufacturer of self-adhesive labels with SEK 1.6B+ ($180M+) in pro forma revenue. Ettiketto’s clients in the food, chemical and electronics industries are relatively insulated from economic cycles. Our regular readers will know that this newsletter has a sweet spot for label printing Tikedo: the Italian search fund printing labels, deals and serious cash flows. 

As befits Europe’s (and possibly the world’s) most efficient label supplier, Ettiketto is ripping. The rest of the slimmed-down Volati is not: 

So what exactly is Ettiketto - and why do we believe it’s such an outstanding business? 

Ettiketto is one of the best compounders we’ve researched since starting this newsletter 3 years ago. Today, according to public filings, it sports run-rate revenues exceeding SEK 1.6B ($180M), up six-fold since 2019. Ettiketto’s EBITA margin is above 20% for all but the recently acquired businesses.

Ettiketto’s working capital management too is next level. In 2025, it pumped out an EBITA to Net Working Capital ratio of 160%+. For context, anything above 45% is considered an excellent result. Further reading: P/NWC>45%: the magic formula from a Swedish HoldCo clan. 

The craziest part is that Ettiketto almost didn’t happen!

Volati’s disclosures show that after acquiring the starter asset in 2011, initially it ran Ettiketto as a standalone business. Even though revenues flatlined for a while, profitability doubled thanks to a radical efficiency programme (which we detail below). It took 8 years, and the change of CEO, for Ettiketto to become acquisitive. It has since acquired 7 companies, most recently in Continental Europe: 

How did Ettiketto pull this off?

In 2011, Volati acquired GSS, a label printing company based in southern Sweden. Thank god for spam! Peter Glückman, the “G” in GSS, randomly opened a package that contained a Volati corporate newsletter. 

Proprietary deal flow → excellent buy-in price. Volati paid SEK 143M ($22M), including deferred consideration and 80% debt financed. This, for a business producing SEK 229M ($35M) in revenues, SEK 33M ($5M) in EBITDA and SEK 24M ($4M) in EBITA. Works out to a very reasonable EBITDA multiple of 4.3x. 

As Volati explained, GSS “had a proven business model, stable profitability and good cash flow, but it was a label printing business…. A lot of prospective buyers got cold feet. A lot of printing businesses were for sale at that time, many of which faced challenges”. 

As to why the buyers were getting cold feet: “A large part of the customers work with consumer products, food, cleaning agents, and tobacco. They constantly increase the product range with more variants, seasonal products, flavors, scents. For our part, this means that the print runs do not increase dramatically, but that the variants become ever more numerous. As a supplier, we must handle the increased complexity.” (source). 

Label printing companies also operate with short delivery times and the flip side of that is a fragmented market characterised by local and national suppliers. 

A fertile ground for a rollup! In fact, GSS was a rollup, albeit a struggling one. Ettiketto in Malmö was responsible for self-adhesive label printing. It also owned Fillpak, which  manufactured labelling machines in Svedala, a 15 min drive from Malmö. And, Printcom in Åtvidaberg, a town halfway between Malmö and Stockholm, specialised in graphic and flexo label printing. Ettiketto had bought Printcom out of bankruptcy in 2003.  

Volati appointed a new CEO to replace GSS’s retiring founders, Philip Schwarz, who wasted no time in reforming GSS: 

This was Phase I. During Phase II, which commenced in 2014, Ettikettoprintcom developed best practices in areas such as sourcing, digitization, production and commercial execution. It implemented a group-wide ERP system. 

According to the Volati CEO (CFO at the time) Andres Stenbäck, “It's harder than you think to document processes how to do what you’re doing yourself, and to apply them to other companies”. In 2015, a dedicated Marketing Director was hired to develop premium labels for consumer brands. In 2016, Volati parachuted in a young engineer called Hanna Petterson to build out the customised labelling business. She ended up running a 12-person team. 

The upshot: Ettiketto’s absolute profits doubled between 2011 and 2017:

With the heavy lifting out of the way, it was time for Phase III: M&A. This phase went much faster than the first two!