I Met Roll-Up and Serial Acquisition Outliers. Here’s What I Learned

How Europe's serial acquirers actually build roll-ups

European roll-ups are being built by operators who treat acquisition as an operating function rather than a deal. The groups on stage in London started in 2017 or later, stayed in markets narrow enough to learn faster than anyone else, and now buy dozens of companies a year while keeping local brands and founders in place. Their common regret is that buying is not building, and the survivors start on value creation earlier.

Takeaways

• Pick the pain you can tolerate for years. Bart of Strata told the London summit to find the pain they enjoy. Rejected deals and long negotiations are unavoidable, and a transaction can run six months and still fall through. The work is driving four days a week and calling 200 founders to find five who are interested.
• Narrow markets beat huge ones. Mikk argues that with zero acquisitions you do not need a $100bn market, you need one where you can become unusually knowledgeable unusually quickly. Specificity is what teaches you why one company runs at 20% margins and another at 8%.
• M&A is not value creation. Ramsay, co-founder of Evergreen, which has completed roughly 160 acquisitions, said he wished the group had started focusing on organic growth and value creation much earlier. Its first four and a half years went almost entirely on buying businesses.
• Decentralised does not mean passive. Satep keeps local brands, culture and technical decisions with founders and technicians while standardising accounting, ERP, IT, HR and supplier terms. Mikk says buying 20 companies and leaving everything untouched forever is passive rather than decentralised.
• Sellers want to keep building. Many owners are 35 to 55, still love the business and do not want to retire, so price matters but is not the only thing being sold. Satep calls its owners partners, whose average age is 49 and who typically roll 30% or more into the group.
• Negotiation is a form of diligence. Mikk treats the acquisition pipeline as part of the research rather than something that comes after it. Bart of Strata said negotiation is one of the best forms of partner diligence, since a deal that ends badly shows the other side is not the right partner.

The acquirers on stage

• Evergreen, founded in 2017 by Ramsay and Jeff Totten in their mid-20s, has completed roughly 160 acquisitions, 47 of them in 2025, and runs $1.8bn of revenue with more than $250m of EBITDA.
• Hippocrates, an Italian pharmacy group founded in 2018, has about 680 pharmacies, €1.2bn of revenue and 3,000 employees, and acquires around 100 a year at €30,000 of diligence per deal.
• Satep, a French HVAC roll-up, made its first acquisition in 2023, paused for about a year to test the model, and now has 20 businesses and roughly €85m of run-rate revenue.