Fund vs solo. I made my decision.
I set a deadline of 28 February. I kept it. Here is what I decided and why.
Hello, and welcome back to Buyout Diary.
In December I told you I had until 28 February to make my decision.
I kept it.
Most people set deadlines and quietly let them pass. I did not want to be one of those people. I made that commitment in public, in front of you, in this newsletter. And that matters to me more than it probably should. Because building in public is not just about sharing the wins. It is about honouring the commitments too. Even when nobody would notice if you quietly moved the goalposts.
So here it is. The decision. How I got there. And why I think it is the right one.
23 December 2025. Münster, Germany.
The day before Christmas Eve.
I was sitting across from a local M&A lawyer. Two hours, one table, a lot of coffee. Most people were already mentally on holiday. Shops were closing early. The streets had that particular quiet that only comes on the last working day before Christmas. I was in Münster for a meeting I had been looking forward to for weeks, and I was not expecting anything earth shattering from it. We were talking about ETA in Germany, in the Benelux, in Europe more broadly. The difference between private equity and search funds. Whether the distinctions even matter anymore in the European context.
Then he asked me something I was not ready for.
“You have the mindset of an acquisition entrepreneur but your skills are more like an investor. Why aren’t you raising a fund?”
I sat there quietly for a moment.
Not because it surprised me. More because it felt like permission. Permission to finally see myself clearly, without the story I had been telling about what I was supposed to be doing. I had been circling this thought for two months already. This man just named it out loud, calmly, on a quiet December afternoon while the rest of the world was wrapping presents.
What was I feeling in that moment? Honestly, relief. The kind of relief you feel when someone says out loud the thing you already knew but were not quite ready to say yourself. I drove home that evening and the decision, the real one, had already started forming.
Part 1. August 2025: I Was Betting on HoldCo
Let me take you back to where this started properly.
In August 2025 I published an article called The Three ETA Models Explained. It came directly out of my MBA research at the University of Greenwich, where I had been studying governance and post-acquisition integration in small business acquisitions. Real research. Interviews with acquisition entrepreneurs, investors, HoldCo founders. Not just reading the primers but actually talking to the people living these models.
My conclusion was clear: the HoldCo model was the right fit for my temperament and my goals.
Three reasons stood out. First, governance design. My MBA research was deeply focused on how principal-agent conflicts can be managed through incentives, trust, and organisational structure. The HoldCo model gave me the opportunity to apply those lessons directly, designing equity programmes for operators, building reporting rhythms that balance autonomy with accountability. Second, compounding. Where a traditional search or self-funded path often ends in a single company exit, a HoldCo compounds value across multiple businesses over time. That appealed to me fundamentally. Third, long term fit. I am less interested in a buy, grow, sell cycle and more interested in building something enduring. The HoldCo model is patient. It is resilient. It has room for creativity.
I already had a holding company structure set up from previous ventures. I believed in this conclusion. It was not a random choice.
And I still believe in it, by the way. The HoldCo is still the right model for me, long term. But at the time I wrote that article, something was missing from the picture. I could not quite name it yet.
The honest gap? Cash flow. In the beginning, before you have deals generating returns, before you have a track record, before investors are committed, the HoldCo is a structure waiting for capital. And the independent sponsor model, which I had not yet named as my opportunity, was sitting right there in the European market, underdeveloped and overlooked. Not because it does not work here. Because nobody was building it properly for this context.
If you want to read the full thinking behind this, I published the original article on LinkedIn in August 2025. It goes deeper into the governance and compounding case for each model. You can read it here: The Three ETA Models Explained — Which One I Am Betting On
Part 2. September 2025: The Independent Sponsor Article
One month after the HoldCo piece, I published something called Independent Sponsors: ETA’s Best-Kept Secret.
I called it ETA’s best-kept secret because that is genuinely what it felt like. In the traditional ETA conversation, everyone talks about the same three models. Traditional search fund, self-funded search, HoldCo. But there is a fourth model sitting between private equity and acquisition entrepreneurship that rarely gets the spotlight. The independent sponsor.
Here is how it works. You do not raise a fund upfront. You invest your own time and energy in sourcing and structuring deals. When you find an attractive target, you bring it to investors, family offices, high net worth individuals, private equity firms, who then fund the acquisition. You earn carried interest, typically ten to twenty percent, though I want to be honest and say the equity piece in practice is often one to five percent. You stay involved in governance. You place the right operator to run the business day to day.
What pulled me toward this model was not just the capital efficiency. It was something more personal. I kept observing, in my research and in my conversations with searchers, that not everyone who does a search actually wants to be CEO for life. Some people are genuinely great at finding deals, structuring them, building relationships with sellers. But they are less interested in running daily operations indefinitely. The independent sponsor model gives those people a real path.
And in Europe specifically, I believe this model fits better than a traditional search fund. European deals are smaller. Institutional capital is scarcer. The market is fragmented. The independent sponsor model is built for exactly that environment. You can build a portfolio of pieces of SME businesses, learning from each one, without needing a single large capital raise upfront.
When I wrote that article I said I was considering applying the independent sponsor approach to select deals alongside my HoldCo. I was already moving toward a hybrid. I just had not committed to it fully yet.
The full article is on LinkedIn if you want to understand the model in more detail before reading the rest of this issue. It covers the mechanics, the carried interest structure, and why I think this is the most underrated path in European ETA right now: Independent Sponsors: ETA’s Best-Kept Secret
Part 3. What 2025 Actually Taught Me
Let me be honest about what the year actually looked like from the inside.
I pivoted between industries more times than I would like to admit. Digital businesses. Accounting firms. Retail. Maritime. Agri-logistics. Craftsmanship. Local services. From the outside this probably looked like indecision. From the inside it felt like wandering without a map.
But here is what I have come to understand. I was not lost. I was researching. Searching for businesses that are AI resistant and recession resistant, businesses that serve fundamental human needs regardless of economic cycles. Each pivot taught me something about European deal structures, about what sellers actually want, about where the real gaps are between what buyers expect and what sellers are willing to do.
Something else happened in 2025 that I did not plan for. In the December newsletter I wrote about finishing my MBA. What I did not say clearly enough then was what that moment actually felt like. I started my academic journey almost two decades ago, always with the idea that one day I would complete a master’s degree. When I finally held that certificate in my hands, it mattered more than I expected. Not because of the title. Because it closed a long chapter and left something behind: not ambition, but clarity.
The MBA did not redirect me. It sharpened me.
What stayed with me from those two years was not finance or valuation or strategy frameworks, though those were useful. What stayed was a much deeper understanding of governance, delegation, and stewardship. Writing my thesis forced me to think beyond the moment of acquisition, past the excitement of closing, into what happens in the years that follow when the responsibility remains. Ownership is not an event. It is a condition. And that condition requires more than intelligence. It requires systems, people, and environments that support good judgement over long periods of time.
As I shared that research publicly, something unexpected happened. Conversations multiplied. People reached out, not because they wanted answers, but because they recognised the questions. Searchers in the Netherlands, Germany, Belgium, France, Spain. All circling the same uncertainties. All learning in isolation. That experience planted a seed I had not been expecting to plant.
The thing I did not plan was this: while I was searching for a business, I was actually building an ecosystem.
ETA Amsterdam was not founded as a strategic move. It started as a response to absence. I was looking for people who cared deeply about long-term ownership, and when I could not find that space, I created it. Europe needs its own voice in the acquisition entrepreneurship movement. Copying the American search fund model was never going to work here. The market is different. The culture around ownership is different. The capital structures are different. What Europe needed was its own infrastructure, built from the inside.
The community grew faster than I expected. The conversations were richer than I hoped. And somewhere along the way I realised I was spending more energy building that ecosystem than I was closing deals.
That should have told me something. It eventually did.
There is a difference between hosting meetups and building an ecosystem. Meetups are events. Ecosystems are relationships. What I was building, quietly and without fully naming it, was the connective tissue that European ETA had been missing. A place where thinking continues between conferences. Where trust builds through repetition. Where learning compounds rather than resets every time someone new enters the room.
My wife has been part of this journey from the beginning. When I started talking to her about where all of this was heading, about the decision I needed to make, her answer was simple. Do what you think is right. Do what you actually like doing. That clarity, from the person who knows me best, mattered more than any strategic framework.
The December newsletter where I first wrote about the ecosystem shift, the MBA, and where I was heading is still available in full on Substack. If you are new to Buyout Diary or want to understand the context behind this issue, that is the right place to start: Building Something Bigger Than My Own Search
Part 4. The Decision: What I Am Actually Building
People sometimes ask me why I write every Monday when I could be spending that time on deals.
The honest answer is that I like it. I like thinking through ideas in writing. I like sharing what I am learning about ETA with people who are asking the same questions I am. It does not feel like a marketing exercise to me. It feels like thinking out loud, in public, with people who care about the same things.
That is also, I think, the best way to understand the decision I made.
Here is what I am building.
The core deal-making model is independent sponsor. No upfront fund. No permanent capital needed from day one. I source the deal. I do the diligence. I raise capital deal by deal from family offices and high net worth individuals who want exposure to European SME acquisitions without the operational complexity. I place the right operator to run the business. I keep skin in the game through carried interest and equity. Everything goes into my holding company and compounds over time.
The portfolio logic is important to understand. The first investment does not have to be a million euro deal. Taking minority shares in a few deals makes me smarter and more credible faster. Each deal teaches me something the next deal benefits from. I am learning with real skin in the game without carrying the full operational weight of being CEO. This is not a backup plan. It is the actual plan. Start smaller, learn faster, build the portfolio gradually.
Why am I not a CEO and not a fund manager?
I do not want to run daily operations. I tried to imagine myself in that role, genuinely, and I know now it is not where I create my best work. I also do not want to raise a blind pool fund with LP obligations. That is just another job where you are earning money for other people. I want to do this my own way. I do not want to help already rich people get richer. I want people like us to become good acquisition entrepreneurs and investors. To have fun with this. To live it, not just execute it.
I am not building an empire. I am building a portfolio of good European businesses that deserve to continue, with operators who care about them, and a community that makes the whole thing possible.
The minority investment layer comes later. Once the first deals are closed and the track record exists, I want to take small equity positions in deals brought by other searchers in my community. Learning from each deal without leading it. That is how the portfolio gets smarter over time.
Part 5. This Is Not Five Things. It Is One Thing.
I want to address something directly because I know some of you are thinking it.
Is this too many things at once?
It is not five things. It is one thing with five expressions of it.
The one thing is: portfolio builder and ecosystem connector for European ETA.
Here is how each piece fits.
Buyout Diary is how I build trust and deal flow publicly, every Monday. Every issue tells the market who I am and what I am building. Investors read it before they ever meet me. It is my public track record in real time. It is also how I stay honest with myself. Without the discipline of writing this every week, I think I would drift. The writing keeps me grounded.
ETA Europe is the infrastructure. Most independent sponsors have to build their networks from scratch. I already have mine. You, this community, are the best thing I have found in ETA. I learn from you as much as I contribute. Sourcing engine, operator pipeline, investor network, all in one place. It is not a side project. It is the foundation that makes everything else possible.
Guest lecturing at universities is where I reach the next generation of searchers and, importantly, the investors and professors who back them. Universities are where capital and talent meet. Every lecture is a relationship I did not have before. And teaching the model I am living builds the kind of credibility that makes investors trust you before you ever pitch them a deal.
Independent sponsor deals are where the real learning happens. Each deal sharpens my eye, builds my network, grows my reputation. Everything goes into the holding company.
Minority investments in ETA deals come later, once the track record is there. Other searchers in my community close deals. I take a small position. I learn. I earn. The portfolio compounds quietly in the background.
Each piece feeds the others. Buyout Diary builds the audience. ETA Europe builds the network. Lecturing builds the credibility. Independent sponsor deals build the track record. Minority investments compound the portfolio. None of this works without the others. All of it works together. And all of it is European. Built for this market, not imported from another one.
The Honest Bit
Let me say the thing most people are probably thinking but nobody has asked yet.
Is this too many things at once?
No. Because it is the same thing. Everything I do circles around ETA. The newsletter, the community, the lecturing, the deals, the investments. It is all one ecosystem I am building, from different angles, at different speeds. The newsletter reaches people who have never heard of ETA. ETA Europe connects the people already in it. Lecturing reaches the institutions that fund it. The deals are where I learn by doing. The investments compound what I learn over time.
And I want to be honest about one other thing. I overestimated my desire to be a CEO. I said that in the December newsletter and it was true then and it is still true now. But I also want to add something I have not said clearly before: I overestimated my desire to be a fund manager too. Both of those paths felt like they required me to become something I am not. The independent sponsor model lets me be what I actually am. Someone who finds good deals, structures them well, connects the right people, and builds a portfolio that grows over time.
That is not a compromise. That is clarity.
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Back to the Lawyer
Let me go back to 23 December. Münster. The question he asked. The silence that followed.
Seven months ago, when I published the HoldCo article, I would have pushed back on what he said. I would have said I am an operator, not just an allocator. I would have defended the CEO path because I thought that was the acquisition entrepreneur’s path.
Now I think he was right.
I am not a CEO. I am not a fund manager. I am something in between, and that is exactly right for what I am building and for who I am building it with.
I do not have a deal closed yet. I do not have investors committed yet. What I have is a decision, a direction, and a community that makes both more possible than they would be without it. You are, genuinely, the most important project I am working on this year. Not as an audience. As a community of people doing the same hard thing I am doing, in the same underserved market, with the same stubborn belief that this works here.
The solo search with my wife continues. That is personal. That is skin in the game on a different and more intimate level.
Buyout Diary keeps publishing every Monday. ETA Europe launches next month. The lecturing starts. The portfolio gets built one deal at a time.
This is a building year.
Not a victory lap.
A foundation year.
And if you are also still figuring out your direction, what kind of acquisition entrepreneur you are, what model fits your temperament, what you actually want versus what you think you should want, I hope something in this issue helped. The decision matters. Whatever it is. Make it, commit to it publicly if you can, and then get to work.
See you next Monday.
Alexander