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

But was it mostly a research role or outreach role?

you know, complete, like this guy could have been a searcher, right? So obviously we were instructing him on what type of companies we wanted to look at the metrics beyond financial that we were looking at, but he would do the outreach, the structuring, the LBOs, so full integrated stack. A lot of value. Oh yeah, he's a very smart guy and very hardworking, yeah.

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And then returning to the other question, Luis, about Spain and what the lower middle market is like in Spain, or at least in particular industries, you know where I'm going with this. Say more about that, what it looks like and how it differs from some of its European neighbors.

Yeah, so look, Spain, it's a market in general Europe, right? But more so in Spain, where SMEs account for a large part of the GDP. So in Spain, it's around 65% of the GDP coming from SMEs.

In the U.S. it's less than 45. In the northern Europe, it's less than 50. So you have way more fragmentation. You also have the average size of the companies tend to be small.

And in some sectors, you know, the capital providers were not, now we have way more private credit funds and different ways of providing capital for entrepreneurs. But until very recently, that wasn't the case. So for example, Italy might have a similar kind of fragmentation.

However, in the North, It's more concentrated. You have more sophisticated capital providers from a long time ago.

So those conditions, right, like the nature of the SME market, the lack of capital provider has made it so that companies have stayed fragmented for longer. Now we're seeing more consolidation in the classical spaces like... clinics, veterinary, insurance brokers.

And now we're starting to do it in business services. There's still plenty of low-hanging fruit, at least in terms of M&A. We'll talk about operations later.

And the last factor is that I believe compared to the Nordics, again, which sometimes... have similar structure in some industries. Businesses here are way less professionalized.