2 Years to $40m: The Anatomy of a High-Velocity Roll-up

It was kind of for all of us, but especially for consultants, a very weird period where you pass from traveling every week to now working remotely that me and two partners decided to, you know, tackle the opportunity on the very small market, so SMEs, and we came with the idea of applying some of the roll-up strategies that you see common in the U.S. and in the Nordic countries in Europe and…

And Luis, so just to flesh that out a little bit more, two specific follow-ups. First of all, do I have it right that you saw that there was this opening in the lower middle market or lower, lower middle market in Spain where private equity wasn't yet active? We're going to hear more about that.

Yeah, so I, before working at Bain and consulting, as you mentioned, I was an entrepreneur, right? So I studied computer science. I actually, the first five, six years of my career, I founded my own SaaS startup.

I had a small exit. So I'm a builder by nature in this position. So I knew that I wanted to do this again. As time passed, and I honestly love working in consulting business.

varied industries, you know, a lot of complexity, a lot of challenges. So time passed. And so at some point, probably the idea of starting a tech business wasn't that attractive anymore. But we found that our particular set of skills, me and my partners, we have M&A experience, integration, operations, and in my case, the startup...

experience we thought that we could give it a go and honestly the way we did it is we hired first while working at consulting a person to help us flesh out the thesis a bit more so we look into several verticals and industries and we found one that we taught had a good chance of us providing value. And this is because it was very fragmented, very small companies, no real platform.

So we knew we wouldn't be dealing with private equity. And we'd raise a bit of capital before. it was very small, it was less than one million to actually acquire the company.

And, you know, doing this in Europe sometimes as a mid-career professional, it's easier because you don't have to deal with healthcare issues, you're way more protected. So I personally felt that if I was to do this, it was going to be now and it was going to be in Spain.

and so i left consulting first and after we acquired a couple of businesses and had support from bigger investors that's what my partners left so it is it was kind of risk the risk was managed but we still had a little faith because we we wanted to do something of our own right

And that money that you raised, the million or less than a million, you did while you were still at Bain?

Correct. Obviously, the investors knew that when the first deal got completed, I personally would leave consulting. So it was one of the conditions, but the investors felt comfortable to commit before doing that, yeah.