The 3 Execution Mistakes That Cost Me Most (Part 2: The Execution Mistakes)

Why building relationships matters more than I thought

Hello, and welcome back to Buyout Diary.

Last week I shared the four strategic and planning mistakes I made in 2025, the foundational errors that cost me clarity before I even started seriously looking at deals. This week I’m sharing the three execution mistakes that cost me the most time and momentum once I was actually in the market.

These execution mistakes are harder to spot because they don’t feel like mistakes when you’re making them. They feel like work, like progress, like you’re doing what you’re supposed to be doing. It’s only months later, when you look back and realise how much more effective you could have been, that you see them clearly.

Mistake #5: Not Building a Network Before Searching for Deals

This was a costly mistake, and it’s one I see constantly among European searchers. I started looking at deals before I had relationships in place. I didn’t have an accountant I trusted, I didn’t have a tax advisor who understood acquisition structures, I didn’t have brokers who knew what I was looking for, and I hadn’t connected with other searchers who could share their experiences. This was not smart.

Here’s the reality: deals come through relationships, not through brokers alone. If you’re spending your time cold calling and cold emailing, you’re building from scratch every single time. You need warm connections, trusted relationships, people who understand what you’re trying to do and can help you get there. The best deals never make it to the open market because they’re handled through relationships before they’re ever formally listed.

What happened to me? I spent time on cold outreach instead of building genuine connections. I sent emails to brokers who didn’t know me and had no reason to prioritise my inquiries over the dozens of others they received. I looked at publicly listed opportunities where I was competing against everyone else rather than getting early access to off-market deals. I wasted weeks chasing opportunities that were never going to work because I didn’t have the relationship capital to get real information before investing time in due diligence.

The transformation came when I started building ETA Amsterdam. Suddenly deal flow became easier. People knew what I was looking for, they understood my criteria, and they started bringing opportunities to me rather than me always having to chase them. Brokers who attended our events remembered me when interesting businesses came across their desk. Other searchers shared opportunities that didn’t fit them but might fit me. Sellers who heard about ETA Amsterdam wanted to talk to me because they saw I was building something larger than just my own search, something that cared about continuity and community.

What should European searchers do? Spend your first three to six months building relationships before you seriously start looking at deals. This isn’t wasted time, it’s foundational work that makes everything else more effective. Meet other searchers, connect with brokers and intermediaries, find accountants and lawyers who understand SMB acquisitions, build relationships with investors who can advise you even if they’re not funding your search.

Here’s exactly how I built my network, and this is the tactical framework you can use: I sent ten coffee invitations every week for twelve weeks. That’s one hundred and twenty invitations total. Sixty percent responded, forty percent actually met with me, and three became close advisors who I still speak with regularly. The math works if you’re consistent about it.

The people you need in your network:

• Accountants who understand business acquisitions and can help you structure deals properly

• Tax advisors who know the structures and can optimise for your situation

• Brokers and intermediaries who have deal flow in your target industries and regions

• Other searchers who can share experiences, lessons, and opportunities that don’t fit them

• Operators who might become CEOs in your portfolio if you go the fund route

• Investors who understand the European market and can provide strategic advice

This network becomes your competitive advantage. Build it early, build it deliberately, and maintain it consistently. Every coffee meeting, every event you attend, every email you send to someone in your target ecosystem is an investment that compounds over time.

Mistake #6: Treating Community Building as Separate from Deal-Making

I felt guilty about the time I spent on ETA Amsterdam. It felt like a distraction from the “real work” of finding and closing deals. I thought I should be spending every hour sourcing businesses, calling brokers, running financial models, doing the hard analytical work that would lead to an acquisition. The community work felt like something I was doing on the side, almost as a hobby, something that was nice but not essential to my core mission.

This was completely wrong thinking, and it cost me months of momentum. Community is deal-making infrastructure. The ecosystem you build is not separate from acquisition work, it is acquisition work. What happened when I finally understood this? The more I built the community, the more opportunities appeared. People started bringing deals to me instead of me always having to hunt for them. Sellers wanted to talk to me because they knew I was building something larger than just my own search, something that cared about continuity and preservation rather than extraction and flipping.

Other searchers shared opportunities that didn’t fit them but might fit me, creating a collaborative deal flow that wouldn’t have existed otherwise. Investors reached out because they saw I was building real infrastructure and wanted to be part of it. Service providers like lawyers and accountants offered to help because they saw the ecosystem as valuable to their own practices. The community created gravitational pull that made everything else easier.

The transformation was realising that ecosystem building and acquisition aren’t separate activities. They’re the same work viewed from different angles. When you build community, you’re building trust, visibility, relationships, and deal flow. You’re creating the infrastructure that makes acquisitions possible, especially in Europe where relationships matter more than in transaction-driven markets like the United States.

Here’s what most people miss: building community isn’t about hosting events or creating formal structures, though those can help. It’s about genuinely caring about the success of others in your ecosystem, sharing what you learn, connecting people who should know each other, and being consistently present and helpful. It’s about giving value before you extract value, building trust through reliability and authenticity, and creating a reputation that precedes you.

What should European searchers do? Build your own ecosystem from day one. You don’t have to organise events or create something as formal as ETA Amsterdam, but you need your own circle of experts, your own network of people you can trust, your own community that gives you support and brings you opportunities. This isn’t separate from searching for businesses, it’s how you search for businesses effectively in Europe where trust and relationships are the foundation of everything.

Start small. Host a monthly dinner for other searchers in your city. Create a WhatsApp group for people in your target industry. Share what you’re learning publicly through a newsletter or LinkedIn posts. Connect two people who should know each other. Give feedback on someone’s investment thesis. Share an opportunity that doesn’t fit you but might fit someone else. These small acts compound into an ecosystem that serves everyone, including you.

Mistake #7: Underestimating How Long European Deals Actually Take

I came into this with American timelines in my head: six to twelve months from search to close. This is what the search fund model teaches, and it’s what many American acquisition entrepreneurs experience. But European deals don’t work like this, and expecting American timelines led to frustration, disappointment, and poor decisions when I tried to force speed that wasn’t appropriate for the market.

Why are European deals different? They’re relationship-based, which means you need to build trust with sellers over time. You can’t rush trust. The due diligence process is slower, more thorough, more careful, with multiple advisors often involved and every detail examined. There are different cultural approaches in every country, different languages creating barriers even when everyone speaks English, different ways of doing business that you need to understand and respect. The process simply takes longer, and if you’re not fluent in the language of the country where you’re acquiring, it takes even longer because everything needs to be translated, explained, and verified.

What happened to me? Frustration when deals took longer than expected. I thought something was wrong with me or my approach when actually this was just the reality of European deal-making. I pushed for speed when I should have been building trust. I tried to compress timelines when I should have been deepening relationships. I interpreted slow progress as lack of interest when actually it was normal, healthy caution from sellers who wanted to make sure they were choosing the right buyer.

The transformation came when I accepted that slower is normal in Europe, and that this slowness is actually a feature rather than a bug. Why is slower better? Because European sellers care about continuity more than speed. Yes, in the end everything involves money and price, but the business is often like a family member to them. They’ve built it over decades, they care about their employees, they worry about their customers, they want to know the buyer will take care of what they’ve created. This takes time, and rushing it destroys trust rather than building it.

Sellers who take time to build relationships with you are more likely to close because they’ve convinced themselves you’re the right buyer, not just a buyer. They’re more likely to structure deals favourably because they trust you to do right by the business. They’re more likely to support you after the transaction because the relationship matters to them. Slow deal-making often leads to better outcomes, more seller financing, better terms, and smoother transitions.

What should European searchers do? Plan for eighteen to twenty-four months from serious search to close, not six to twelve months. Adjust your expectations, your runway, your timeline, and your mental model of what success looks like. Build this into your planning from the start so you don’t run out of money or patience halfway through. The European advantage is that sellers who take time to build relationships with you are dramatically more likely to close with you and support you afterwards.

Here’s the tactical reality: your first meeting with a seller is almost never about the deal. It’s about building trust and understanding each other. Your second meeting is about demonstrating you understand their business and care about what they care about. Your third meeting is when you start actually discussing terms, and even then it’s exploratory. By the fourth or fifth meeting you’re into serious negotiations, and by the sixth or seventh you’re hopefully moving towards closing. This takes months, not weeks, and you need to have the patience and runway to let it unfold naturally.

The Resource You Asked For

Several of you have replied to previous newsletters asking for help with writing your investment thesis. After making Mistake #1 myself and realising how much time I wasted without clear criteria, I created a workbook that walks you through the process of defining what you’re actually looking for.

The workbook helps you articulate your selection criteria, think through AI resistance and recession resistance, define your geographic focus, identify your target industries, and create a framework for filtering opportunities quickly. It’s the resource I wish I’d had at the start of my search.

👉 ​Download the Investment Thesis Workbook​

Use it, adapt it, make it your own. The goal isn’t to create a perfect thesis that never changes, it’s to create enough clarity to start and the discipline to refine as you learn.

Closing

Thank you for reading Buyout Diary. We’ve now covered all seven mistakes I made in 2025: the four strategic and planning mistakes from last week, and the three execution mistakes from this week. If there’s an eighth mistake, it’s probably not learning from others and trying to figure everything out yourself. Don’t make that mistake.

Keep building, not flipping. Keep focusing on succession, not extraction. And most importantly, keep learning from those who’ve gone before you.

Reply to this email and tell me which of these three execution mistakes resonated most with you.

• Are you making any of them right now?

• What have you learned from your own mistakes that others should know about?

I read every reply and I learn from your experiences just as you’re learning from mine.

See you next Monday.

Until next Monday,

Alexander