There is no front door. Here is how I built one anyway.
Three small moves that compound, and the one mistake most searchers make in their first six months.
Hello, and welcome back to Buyout Diary.
A different kind of issue this week. Not a deal study, not a structural argument against the American playbook. A practical one, on a question that comes up again and again, and that I have been working on for nine months myself.
How do you actually build a network in European acquisition entrepreneurship when you are starting from zero?
Here is the gap. A European searcher who picks up the American playbook expects an ecosystem to walk into. Alumni groups. Structured introductions. Conferences with name tags and matchmaking apps. A Slack channel that already exists with the right people inside it.
You do not find that in Europe. There is no front door.
So most searchers do one of two things. They drift, scrolling LinkedIn passively, attending the occasional event without a plan, hoping the right people will eventually appear. Or they wait, for an introduction, for an invitation, for permission that does not come. Both look like networking. Neither is.
When I finished my MBA last August and started searching, my network in European acquisition entrepreneurship was essentially zero. The interview subjects from my MBA thesis were American acquisition entrepreneurs, operators, and investors, useful for the research, not useful for finding a European deal. On LinkedIn I could not find people writing about this in Europe. On YouTube every video was American. The European searcher community, if it existed, was invisible to me.
At some point I stopped looking for it and started building it. Not because I planned to. Because the alternative was waiting forever.
So here is the reframe I want you to take from this issue, before anything else.
There is no front door. Build the room you need.
Not “join the community.” Convene one. Not “find a mentor.” Be a known, reliable presence. Not “wait to be invited.” Show up with something small and useful, repeatedly, until people start showing up to you.
Three principles, three small steps, all of which any searcher can start this week with no budget, no MBA, and no contacts.
1. Be a useful presence before you ask for anything.
2. Convene before you join.
3. Treat the network as your second product.
Let me take each in turn.
1. Be a useful presence before you ask for anything
Most searchers introduce themselves as people who need things. Investors to meet, sellers to find, advice to gather. That is the default mode, because the search itself is a list of things you do not yet have.
The networks that compound do the opposite. They show up with something small and useful, repeatedly, before they ever ask for anything in return.
In my first three months I reached out to the people I now think of as multipliers, not other searchers. Professors, lecturers, investors, service providers, marketplace owners, and a handful of business founders who had been through their own succession conversations. What I shared was one specific idea I was going deep on: the succession gap in Europe as a generational transfer of ownership that almost nobody was writing about properly.
In practice it looked like this. I wrote LinkedIn articles on the topics I was actually thinking about, not posts, longer articles that gave readers something they could chew on. The succession gap as a goldmine for first-time buyers. The three ETA models laid out plainly. Why the traditional search fund model did not fit my own situation. Each one had a clear point of view. None of them asked the reader for anything.
The articles were the format. The principle behind them was the same as a one-line email or a personal LinkedIn message: arrive with a useful idea, attached to your own thinking, attached to your name. People remember what you stand for, then they remember you.
If you want to see how that looked at the start, three of those articles are still up:
You do not need a newsletter and you do not need LinkedIn articles. A weekly note to four people you respect, sharing one resource you found useful, asking for nothing, would do the same work. Pick a format you can sustain.
The contrarian piece in this section is about where you do this. Most networking advice says go to the biggest events, the rooms with the most names. At the start, that is exactly the wrong move. Five searchers in a small regional meetup are worth far more than fifty at a London conference, because the relationships are real and the cohort grows together. The big rooms come later. The first year is built in the small ones.
Pick something small and useful you can do this week, and do it. The first person you help is the first edge of your network.
2. Convene before you join
Helping one person is the start. Convening four is the next move.
Most searchers wait to be invited to the right community. The faster move is to convene a small one yourself.
That sounds bigger than it is. At the smallest end it means three things. A coffee with two other searchers in your city: that is a meetup. A monthly dinner with the same four or five people: that is a community. A WhatsApp group around one shared question: that is infrastructure.
I ran the first Amsterdam meetup on 27 July 2025. I set it up on Meetup.com, ran one light push on LinkedIn, and six people showed up. None of them were acquisition entrepreneurs. They were curious about the topic, so I spent the evening sharing my MBA research and asking them what had drawn them in.
That was the first meetup. Six people, not a single searcher in the room. It would have been very easy to write that off as a failure. It was not.
Between the first meetup and the second, two things changed. My LinkedIn presence sharpened, because the articles I mentioned earlier were running every week. And I extended the invite to a wider circle of people I had spoken to since the first event. The second meetup drew over forty people. Investors, professors, MBA students, online business founders, people genuinely close to the European acquisition space. The cohort had appeared. It just needed the first room.
I have run five Amsterdam meetups since. This year ETA Europe also expands to Brussels, and I am planning to extend to Paris later in the year. The cadence I have settled on, after running too many in the early months, is twice per city per year, with the option of a larger gathering once a year. That is sustainable as a solo organiser. Monthly was not.
The contrarian piece in this section is about how you treat conferences. Most searchers attend conferences hoping to meet people. The stronger move is to use the conference as a forcing function to produce something the official programme does not.
The INSEAD ETA Conference in May is the example I lived. I did not arrive expecting to write a report. The idea came from an early follower and community member who suggested I capture what I would otherwise only experience in the room, so the people who could not be there would have access to it. I started by selling a conference pass bundle as a pre-sell before the event, then released single reports as standalone products afterwards. The INSEAD edition turned into 41 pages across seven chapters, four European searchers and investors on the record across Belgium, France, the UK, and Spain, plus the hallway and dinner conversations that gave the report its shape. It is now available here and people are reading it who never set foot in Fontainebleau.
The general principle: an existing event becomes the host for the smaller, sharper thing you build alongside it. Five people at a coffee the morning before a conference. A debrief dinner the night after. A document, an interview series, or a written summary that captures what only people in the room would otherwise know. You do not need to organise the conference. You need to produce something around it that did not exist before you arrived, and that other people will want.
If you are going to a conference in the next few months, ask yourself this question. What is the one thing you could capture, write, or organise around it that is not on the official programme?
3. Treat the network as your second product
Most searchers treat the network as a means to an end. They network hard until they find the deal, then go quiet during diligence, then re-emerge once they have closed. The problem is that a network is not a finite resource you build once. It decays the moment you stop showing up.
The searchers who actually find the deal treat their network like a product they ship. They invest in it on a schedule. They communicate predictably. They have a clear answer when someone asks what they are working on.
What that looks like in practice, for me, is a system. Notion is the spine. Every meaningful contact I make goes in there, not just on LinkedIn, alongside notes on what we spoke about and what they care about. There are pages for the ideas I am working on, the business models I am evaluating, the conferences I am considering. It is free, it lives on every device, and it means the network exists in one place rather than scattered across email, LinkedIn, WhatsApp, and memory.
The single most useful habit I have built around this, and the one I think genuinely separates a network that compounds from one that decays, is the voice memo to AI workflow. After a meaningful conversation I record a two-minute voice memo: who I spoke to, what they said, what I learned. The transcription goes into Claude or ChatGPT with a simple prompt, write me a clean protocol of this conversation. Within five minutes a structured record exists. Six months later I can search for “what did Adrian say about the Belgian deal market” and the answer is there.
That habit, repeated for nine months, builds something that no spreadsheet of contacts ever will. It builds a library. Every conversation you have ever had with someone in the network becomes searchable knowledge. The network is no longer a list of people. It is an evolving body of what those people know and what they have told you.
The contrarian piece, and the most honest line I can put on this issue: eighty percent of network building happens behind a computer. Not at events, not at coffees, not at conferences. The events are the catalysts. The work happens after, when you sit down, write the protocol, send the follow-up, log the contact, and decide who to reach out to next week. Most people skip this step because it is unglamorous. That is exactly why it compounds.
A network you can maintain in one hour a week, every week, will outperform a network you sprint at for a month and then abandon.
What you can do this week
Three actions, scaled by ambition. Pick the one that fits where you are.
Smallest step. Find the next local meetup in your country and go to it. If the nearest one is in a different city, make a weekend of it. Bring your partner, take three days, attend the event in the middle. Two hours in a room with the right people is worth a flight. If you are at university, check whether your school already has an ETA or search fund club. Most major European business schools now do. And if there is genuinely nothing within reach, join one of the online ETA communities and start there: a Slack, a WhatsApp group, a LinkedIn group. The first room can be virtual.
Bigger step. Fix your LinkedIn. Make it clear in your headline and your description that you are interested in acquiring a business. Then start posting three times a week about why, about what you are learning, about the specific corner of the European market you are looking at. Three posts a week, sustained for three months, will change how the ecosystem sees you. You will start to attract the right inbound.
Boldest step. Book a meeting with one institutional contact in your local economy this month. Your tax consultant. The local chamber of commerce. A local development agency. Your university career center. A business banker at your local bank. Tell them you are looking to acquire a small business and ask what they see. Most searchers never do this because it feels unglamorous. The ones who do find a layer of deal flow and intelligence that almost nobody else has access to.
Permission, not prescription. One of these is right for where you are.
The mistake I would warn against, the thing I would say if you only remembered one line from this issue: do not seriously search before you have built any network.
If that takes you six months, those six months are not lost. You will learn what kind of business you actually want to buy by talking to people who have done it. You will refine your thesis by stating it out loud and watching it bounce off real practitioners. You will be a sharper searcher when you start, and you will start with a small group of people quietly rooting for you. None of that happens when you are alone at a screen filtering broker listings.
You also need people outside the ETA bubble. The chamber of commerce officer who sees which family businesses are approaching transition. The tax consultant whose client mentioned over coffee that they are tired. The local development agency tracking succession in the region. These people are not in your search fund alumni group. They are in your local economy, and they see things you cannot.
Nine months in, the network I built from zero is what is now producing the rest of the work. The newsletter, the meetups, the report, the podcast launching in September. The proof is real, but the principle matters more, because you can start yours this week.
Before you go, hit reply and tell me one thing.
What is the smallest convening you could do this month?
I read every reply.
See you next Monday.
Alexander