What I Have Learned from a Year of Conversations with European Searchers
The community has been saying things the data does not capture. Here is what I have been hearing.
Hello, and welcome back to Buyout Diary.
Almost every European searcher I have spoken to in the past year has said the same thing within the first hour of conversation: if your family is not behind your search, do not search.
This issue is what I have heard.
I have spent the past year having one-on-one conversations with European searchers. Not interviews. Not formal calls. Conversations in coffee shops, on the margins of conferences, late at night on WhatsApp, in the hours after an ETA Europe meetup. Most lasted forty-five minutes to two hours. A few were shorter exchanges that surfaced one specific question and ended.
Roughly thirty this year. Close to a hundred since I entered the ETA space eighteen months ago.
Five patterns showed up three, four, or more times across different searchers in different countries. The frame for each is honest: what I expected before the conversations, and what I am actually hearing. Some patterns are specifically European. Some are universal and would be true of searchers anywhere. I will name which is which.
Anonymised throughout. Where a moment is too distinctive to anonymise, I have cut it. No names, no traceable deals, no specific cities or sectors where the combination would identify a single searcher.
The Reframe
Most writing on European ETA leans on two sources: published studies (Stanford, IESE) and the personal experience of the writer. Both are valuable. Both also miss the layer in between: what European searchers actually tell each other when they are not on a podcast and not on a panel.
That is the layer I have been listening to.
I am not speaking for the community. I am reflecting back what the community has been saying. The patterns below are what showed up three, four, or more times across different searchers in different countries. Anything that appeared only once or twice is in my notes, not in this piece.
Five patterns. One I expected. Four I did not.
1. Family is the variable nobody publishes
The pattern that surprised me most is the one almost every searcher I spoke to agrees on most strongly. Family is the largest single variable in a European searcher’s life, and it is the variable least discussed in public.
What I expected before the conversations: that family was a personal context that searchers handled privately, separate from the deal-related work of the search.
What I am hearing: family is not a personal context, it is a primary decision-making variable. Partners who supported the search a year ago are now exhausted. Parents who did not understand the search either now do, or never will. Children whose ages map onto the search timeline create their own pressure. Almost every searcher I have spoken to has said some version of the same line: if your family is not behind your search, do not search.
That is not a soft statement. It is a structural one. The searchers who are progressing toward a deal are often the ones whose family situation was resolved early. The searchers who are stuck often have a family layer that has not been worked out.
This is not specifically a European pattern. The same dynamic would apply to American or Asian searchers. But it has a European texture. European households tend to make decisions more communally than American ones, particularly in the Netherlands, Germany, and the Nordics. The partner who is not technically a co-searcher is often a de facto co-decider. The writing has not caught up with this.
The principle for any reader: name the family variable explicitly in your own search. Have the honest conversation with your partner about runway, about evenings, about the shape of the next two years. The decision you make together is the decision that holds. The decision you make alone gets renegotiated halfway through and the renegotiation is expensive.
2. The loneliness is structural, not transitional
This is the pattern that clicked first, and the pattern almost every searcher confirms within the first hour of conversation.
What I expected: that loneliness was a transition cost that would resolve itself once the search produced real deal flow, an LOI, a closed deal.
What I am hearing: loneliness is structural, not transitional. It does not resolve when the search produces deals. It resolves when the searcher finds even two or three other searchers who are doing the same thing in the same continent. The community matters more than the milestone.
Search is a lonely activity in any geography because most of the work is unobserved: reading reports, building lists, drafting outreach, sitting alone with the question of whether the next email will be ignored. Self-funded searchers feel it most acutely, because there is no investor on the other end of a quarterly call asking how things are going. Self-funded means self-accompanied, and that is hard for years.
What I have noticed is that the searchers who keep going past the eighteen-month mark almost all have a small group of two or three other searchers they trust enough to be honest with. Not their investors, not their advisors. Their peers. The community is the moat against the loneliness.
The principle for any reader: build the small group before the deal flow. Two or three real relationships with other searchers is the actual unlock, not the first LOI. Find them. Reply to the searcher whose post on LinkedIn felt honest. Show up to the ETA Europe meetup. The deal flow does not solve the loneliness. The relationships do.
3. The capital honesty gap is larger than the writing acknowledges
The public version of a European searcher’s capital position is louder than the private version.
What I expected: that searchers serious enough to leave employment had a clear funded path of at least two years.
What I am hearing: many do not. The honest version is often a six to twelve month runway with the unspoken expectation that something will work in that window or the search ends. Self-funded searchers in particular describe stretching personal capital, deferring investor conversations until they have something to show, and quietly funding the search out of savings that are running thinner than they would admit publicly.
The traditional search fund picture is different and more transparent on capital, but it has its own version of the gap: the searcher knows exactly who is on the cap table and at what cheque size, but the conversations I have had often surface that the actual usable working capital is smaller than the headline raise implies after fees, costs, and the realistic expense base of a multi-country search.
This is not a failure of planning. It is the structural reality of self-funded European search and a less-acknowledged reality of traditional search fund European activity. The published writing has not closed this gap.
The principle for any reader: be honest with yourself about your real runway. Not the version you would tell a potential investor. The version you would tell your partner if your partner asked tonight. That is the runway your search is actually running on. Knowing it lets you plan for the version of the search you can actually fund, not the version you would prefer to imagine.
4. The control question is shaping model choice more than people admit
This pattern showed up late in my conversations and it is the one that has stayed with me most.
What I expected: that searchers chose between models (self-funded, traditional search fund, independent sponsor) based on capital availability and deal size.
What I am hearing: control is doing more of the work in model choice than capital is. A meaningful share of European searchers I have spoken to have shifted away from traditional search fund toward self-funded or independent sponsor specifically because they want more control of the underlying business. They want to choose the deal, set the terms, run the timeline without a committee.
This is genuinely European-coloured, even if it is not exclusively European. European searchers I have spoken to come from cultures where ownership and control are more closely connected than they are in the American search fund template. Giving up forty percent of the company to investors before you have closed anything feels different to a Dutch or German searcher than it does to a Stanford MBA graduate. Not better or worse, different.
The honest caveat is that control should not be the only criterion. Model choice should follow deal size, industry, country geography, the capital you have, and the way you actually want to finance the deal. A searcher who wants control above all else but cannot fund the deal alone is in a worse position than a searcher who took investor capital and closed.
One specific story (anonymised) from the conversations captures this. A searcher I know in Europe began with a traditional search fund model, raised the initial capital, and then realised in the early months of searching that the model was not matching the country he was operating in. The deal sizes available, the seller expectations, the investor dynamics. He has been quietly shifting toward a hybrid model: between self-funded and independent sponsor. Not because his original model failed. Because the country revealed itself.
The principle for any reader: be honest about how much weight you are giving to control in your model choice. If it is a large weight, name it. If you are choosing self-funded because the writing says self-funded is faster, but the real reason is that you want to keep the cap table clean, name that too. Model choice is a country-fit problem and a personal-preference problem, not just a capital-stack problem.
5. Second-order ambition is real but more personal than the writing assumes
The last pattern, and the one I want to write honestly because the recording made me reconsider how universal it is.
What I expected: that most searchers, especially the ambitious ones, were thinking about a portfolio or HoldCo behind their first acquisition, but were not saying it publicly because the first acquisition is hard enough.
What I am hearing: this depends on the person more than I expected. Some searchers genuinely want a single business they will own and operate for years. They want to be the CEO of one thing, especially if they have never had an entrepreneurial role before, and the first acquisition is the destination, not the entry point. Others are dreaming of a portfolio, a HoldCo, a buy-and-build trajectory, and the first deal is the first step.
The personal note: I am in the second group. The long-term ambition is a portfolio. But it would be wrong of me to project that onto the community. The honest version of this pattern is that second-order ambition exists, but it is genuinely person-dependent, and the published writing should not assume every serious searcher has portfolio ambitions underneath.
The principle for any reader: name your own honest second-order ambition. If you want a portfolio, say so to yourself. If you want one business you will own for twenty years, say that too. The first acquisition looks different depending on which one you are actually pursuing.
What I have learned about my own search from these conversations
The patterns are not abstract for me. They describe my own search too.
The family pattern is mine. The loneliness pattern is mine. The control question shapes how I am thinking about the model. The capital honesty gap is one I have lived. Second-order ambition, the portfolio dream, is mine to name and mine to be patient about.
The single most useful thing I have done as a result of these conversations is small. I keep the phone numbers of two or three other searchers in a place where I can reach them quickly. Not for advice on a specific deal. For a fifteen-minute call when the search is loud in my head and I need to talk to someone who understands the texture without explanation. Those calls have done more for me in eighteen months than any framework I have read.
That is the gift the conversations have given me. I hope this issue passes some of it on.
What this all points to
When I look across the six patterns, what they are really pointing at is something bigger than any single search.
European small and medium-sized businesses are the backbone of the European economy. The Mittelstand, the family-owned services firms, the regional manufacturers, the trades businesses that have been passed down for two generations and now have no third generation to pass to. The succession gap is real. The numbers are public. Germany alone is roughly one million businesses needing a successor by 2030. Other European countries have their own version of the same problem.
If we cannot find buyers for these businesses, the consequences extend beyond the businesses themselves. Local employment shrinks. Tax bases erode. The funding that comes from healthy SMEs and supports universities, hospitals, regional infrastructure, gets thinner. The communities that depend on these businesses being there for the next generation lose something that does not come back.
Acquisition entrepreneurship is not the only answer to this. But it is one of the few answers that is actually scaling. The searchers I have been talking to are part of an asset class that is still small enough to be lonely and large enough to matter.
The next year of writing about European ETA needs to take this seriously. Not as ambition, as responsibility. The succession gap is a backbone-of-the-economy question, not just a deal-flow question.
That is what the conversations have shown me.
What you can do this week
Three actions scaled by ambition.
Smallest step. Pick one of the six patterns above that describes your own search right now. Write it down for yourself. Naming what you are actually living is the first useful thing you can do this week.
Bigger step. Have one real conversation with another European searcher this week. Forty-five minutes, no agenda beyond being honest about where each of you is. The relationship is the work.
Boldest step. Write your own version of one of these patterns and send it to me. Anonymised or named, your call. The next thirty conversations are how the next piece gets written.
Close
The community is real. The patterns are real. The writing should follow.
I want to thank the searchers who have given me their time across the last eighteen months. You have shaped how I think about European ETA more than any book or study has. The conversations have been the work.
The patterns above are not mine. They belong to the community. My role is to listen carefully and reflect back what is being said. The next set of patterns is already being formed somewhere I have not yet been listening.
If one of these five patterns describes your search right now, reply and tell me which one. I read every email. The next thirty conversations are how the next piece gets written.
See you next Monday.
Alexander