The Roll-Up Playbook: From Zero to $100M Revenue | Felix Jander Interview

How Arsipa rolled up 40 German practices into €100m revenue

Arsipa is a German roll-up in occupational health and safety that reached over €100m in revenue and 1,100 employees in five years. Felix Jander and Alex chose an industry too small for private equity funds, where owner-run practices had gone decades without a price increase, and bought more than 40 of them. The hard parts were sourcing with no reputation and holding the team together through a founder split.

Takeaways

• Arsipa completed over 40 acquisitions in five years. The company now has more than 1,100 employees across 60-plus locations and over €100m in annual revenue. Felix corrects the 80 deals the host had heard and says the first deal was the hardest.
• Small niches beat crowded mid-market targets. At €2-3m EBITDA, small-cap private equity funds and family offices were already competing. Arsipa moved below that, buying a doctor's practice in Hildesheim with roughly €350,000 EBITDA, funded entirely with equity.
• Central systems and pricing created the value. Arsipa put finance and HR on LucaNet and Personio, recruited centrally, and ran value creation deep dives. Some practitioners charged €90 an hour against a €180 market rate, and some customers had gone twenty years without a price change.
• A founder split was handled with transparency. Felix and Alex emailed every shareholder, then called them all the next day to explain the terms. One or two left and the round was filled from a waiting list. Stefan joined as the only real entrepreneur among the candidates.
• €10m EBITDA is the exit threshold. Felix says reaching it takes 10 to 15 deals of about €1m EBITDA each and opens the company to a wider buyer pool. Warburg Pincus bought shares in 2024, and earlier investors earned roughly 80% IRR.
• AVEN backs small-cap roll-up platforms. Felix now runs the fund with Fredrik, an early Arsipa investor he knew from BCG, to invest in small-cap roll-up platforms in Germany, Austria and Switzerland.

How Arsipa sourced its first deals

1. Felix and Alex listed 60 boring German industries, from orthopedics to occupational medicine, narrowed them to a handful, then cold-called owners and association presidents.
2. Working students and interns researched each target, crawling websites and newspaper archives so every letter was specific.
3. Batches of 300 to 400 letters went out between week three and week ten, aiming at two to four deals within twelve months.
4. Reply rates reached 80%, against the 20-30% Felix knew from B2B sales. Prospects who said the timing was wrong were left alone and asked again after half a year.