Buyers and Builders
00:00:00 · Mikk, Felix Jander
[00:00:00] S0: My guest today is Felix Jander, co founder of Arsipa, one of the Europe's most impressive recent Buy and Build success stories. Founded back in 2021, so not so long ago, Arsipa has completed 80 acquisitions, grown to more than 1,100 employees across 60 plus locations and scaled to over €100,000,000 in annual revenue, becoming German's leading provider of occupational safety and occupational medicine services. Great to have you with me today, Felix. [00:00:32] S1: Yeah. Thanks a lot for inviting me, Mikk. [00:00:34] S0: It's July 2026. But back in 2024, the company partnered with Warburg Pincus, one of the world's largest private equity firms, and you rolled a significant portion of your equity and remain heavily involved in the business, meaning the Arsipa story is far from over. Let's start from the early days. Where did it all started? And very importantly, I would like you to bring out if you can share, how did you finance all of this in the early days and where were you financially when you're starting Arsipa? That is the question I get so often. Please, Sure, as much as you
00:01:15 · Felix Jander
[00:01:15] S1: I can tell you more about that. Just to make the facts correct, we did like approximately a little bit over 40 acquisitions to date. Yes, so 80 is a bit too many. I wish it were 80. No, but 40 is a lot as well. Yeah, no, back in 2020, I was pretty much just coming out of a startup that I joined previously. So first I was at BCG, for a few years after studying business and then I was at Comtravo as it was named back in the days. It was a B2B travel startup where I started building up the sales team, the marketing team. It's nowadays named Navan and it's actually IPO ed last year, so quite recently. But for me, corona was kind of a turning point because COVID hit and then business travel was kind of dead, right? So that was pretty sure no one was traveling. And so the company was also difficult times. And yes, so we had like a restructuring going on. So out of the 50 employees that I previously hired for my sales team, we had to get rid of most of them, like I would say like a 40, 45 people. So down to five to 10 people. And back in those days, I figured, look, this is going to be in tough times for a few months, the startup Comtravo and so I started looking at a new business. And together with a friend of mine Alex back then who I met at university in Zagreb, We started looking at different topics but we actually started with venture then search fund and then got into roll up. We were not wealthy at all right. It was all self financed this ideation period and we were living off our savings that we had made up to date.
00:02:55 · Mikk, Felix Jander
[00:02:55] S0: Okay and self financed for a year? [00:03:00] S1: More or less, yeah. [00:03:01] S0: Yeah, okay. And also when doing the research, I found you were using those unemployment benefits which you were [00:03:08] S1: Yeah it's actually true. I mean I figured look in Germany it's actually part of the federal unemployment program is that you can apply for such a thing that is like a founder's aid so to say. Yeah let's call it founder's aid and you can apply for it which we did and then it's kind of the same money that you get but it's for a different reason so to say and that's what we did. But it's basically unemployment benefits for founders. And [00:03:35] S0: let's get into this. How was the you mentioned, okay, you were looking at VC firms, tech startups, then search funds and then eventually roll ups. So what was the process and the thesis there?
00:03:35 · Mikk, Felix Jander
[00:03:35] S0: let's get into this. How was the you mentioned, okay, you were looking at VC firms, tech startups, then search funds and then eventually roll ups. So what was the process and the thesis there? [00:03:48] S1: Alex and I, we were coming out of this venture bubble, right? Contravo was VC financed I think by Project A, Creandum, some other larger funds I don't recall. And so that was kind of where we came from. So obviously we started ideating also around that but at some point we figured like dude we actually are not so much into this like hyper growth and finding product market fit and also this kind of hiccup growth so to say yeah you hire a lot then then you size down again because of the burn rate and then you go again with the next funding round and so on. So we wanted to do something more profound something even more boring so to say so we didn't go after something fancy right and that's how we got more involved with German Mittelstand so SMB businesses and especially search funds. And back in the days I was talking a lot to Tobias Reber who also was one of the first search funders in Germany. Then together we started looking more into smaller segments because we even figured with these 2 or 3,000,000 EBITDA companies it's a crowded space as well you have like small cap private equity funds family offices and the likes going into it and that's how we went into smaller segments and then started developing around okay let's consolidate something yeah and build up a group of companies.
00:03:48 · Felix Jander, Mikk
[00:03:48] S1: Alex and I, we were coming out of this venture bubble, right? Contravo was VC financed I think by Project A, Creandum, some other larger funds I don't recall. And so that was kind of where we came from. So obviously we started ideating also around that but at some point we figured like dude we actually are not so much into this like hyper growth and finding product market fit and also this kind of hiccup growth so to say yeah you hire a lot then then you size down again because of the burn rate and then you go again with the next funding round and so on. So we wanted to do something more profound something even more boring so to say so we didn't go after something fancy right and that's how we got more involved with German Mittelstand so SMB businesses and especially search funds. And back in the days I was talking a lot to Tobias Reber who also was one of the first search funders in Germany. Then together we started looking more into smaller segments because we even figured with these 2 or 3,000,000 EBITDA companies it's a crowded space as well you have like small cap private equity funds family offices and the likes going into it and that's how we went into smaller segments and then started developing around okay let's consolidate something yeah and build up a group of companies. [00:05:08] S0: What are your thoughts of, okay, acquiring companies, reaching out to people? Let's talk more about the human side and what were you actually doing when it comes to sourcing, writing those letters and overall the sourcing phase of you building this roll up?
00:05:24 · Felix Jander
[00:05:24] S1: So when we first started, we had like a list of 60 niche segments like boring niche industries in German. So we had things from orthopedics to logopedics but yeah also to occupational medicine. So we were looking into different small niche segments. And so the first let's say two weeks or three weeks was more like broader outreach. So we did some cold calls yeah and and after narrowing down this long list of 60 segments to let's say three four five segments that we found specifically interesting and then we got deeper into it and then we started out reaching specifically to associations in the market. There's like these SMB associations where we started reaching out to the presidents of these associations. Then we also started just cold calling owners of businesses so we get kind of feeling for financials, how they think about valuations. We also started just meeting some of them and we were pretty much honest. So our pitch was look, we're two guys from Berlin, we're entrepreneurs, we want to start something in your industry. We're still not completely sure about how it's going to look like, but we might build up a group of companies. Are you interested in talking for half an hour? And that got us like 10 meetings. That's how we got a feeling for how many companies are there in the market, how their financials and margins, how willing are they to sell at what price and so on and so forth. So that was like the weeks three to 10 let's say.