You told me what you need. Here is what I am building.
Survey results, what they revealed, and the product I built in response.
Hello, and welcome back to Buyout Diary.
At the beginning of January, I sent out a survey to all of you. I was not entirely sure what I would get back. A handful of responses, maybe a few polite answers.
What came back was different.
Not just the volume, but the honesty. People shared where they actually are in their search. What is keeping them stuck. What they wish existed. A Dutch searcher stretched between a full time job and a part time search, feeling pulled in every direction. A German explorer who does not yet know what deal structure even makes sense before he starts. Someone watching European ETA from the Middle East, wondering if it will ever properly reach them.
What I heard was not a list of content requests. It was a picture of how hard this actually is, with almost no infrastructure built specifically for European searchers.
So first: thank you. Genuinely. You are the best audience I could ask for. People who are honest, who support each other, and from whom I continue to learn. I mean that.
Here is what you told me, and what I am doing about it.
Nobody Has Cracked the European Model Yet
The thing that came up most, and nobody had to prompt it, was this: the American playbook does not work here.
You see it everywhere. Stanford primers. Harvard Business School case studies. Search fund databases. All built for a US market with US deal sizes, US investors, and US broker driven processes.
But we are in Europe.
European deals are smaller. Typical targets sit at €1 to €3 million in revenue, 200k to 500k in EBITDA. Traditional successions are in this range. Investors are more conservative, sometimes outright sceptical of the model, though that is changing. We are a small but growing group of searchers, and the interest is spreading. Not just from Europeans, but from Americans living here and people from the Middle East watching our economies closely.
And then there is the seller conversation.
Yes, brokers are part of the process. Necessary and often helpful. But ultimately, you are sitting across from someone who built their business over 30 years. Someone who may never have heard the words acquisition entrepreneurship. Someone for whom this is not a transaction. It is a life’s work.
Cultural dynamics matter enormously. The way you approach a founder owned business in the Netherlands, in Germany, or in France is nothing like what any primer describes. The relationship has to come first. The trust has to be earned before the conversation about price even begins.
Let me be honest about my own experience here. About nine months ago I was deep into Codie Sanchez’s book, Main Street Millionaires. Great content. She has done more than almost anyone to bring acquisition entrepreneurship to a mainstream audience and I have real respect for that. But I tried to copy her approach directly. I was chasing seller financing deals, zero money down, the whole framework. And the doors were almost entirely closed.
What I learned was simple but important. You cannot just take the easy process from an American ETA guru and paste it onto the European market. The fundamentals are the same. The mechanics are completely different. Seller financing exists here, but not at 100 percent. The cultural dynamic around handing over a business is different. The seller needs to trust you as a person long before they will consider creative financing arrangements.
That is what is missing in European ETA content. Not more frameworks borrowed from across the Atlantic, but honest documentation of what actually works here. That is what I am trying to build.
People Want to Get Inside the Room
The second thing I heard clearly: people want to know what is actually being discussed at the highest levels of European ETA.
Not polished conference summaries. The real conversations. What are investors saying privately about the European market right now? What deal structures are actually working? What did the smartest people in the room at INSEAD, IESE, and RSM conclude about where this space is heading?
Most searchers cannot attend all three. Let me give you the honest numbers. The INSEAD ticket alone is €110. But by the time you add travel, hotel, and food, you are looking at around €800 to €900 per conference depending on where you are coming from. Multiply that across INSEAD, IESE, and RSM and you are somewhere between €2,500 and €2,700, plus three to six days away from your search. For a self funded searcher, that is a significant ask.
That gap is exactly what I built Conference Pass to fill.
I am attending all three conferences anyway, for my own Amsterdam search and to build ETA Europe. I take detailed notes. I sit in the breakout sessions. I have the hallway conversations that never make it into any official summary. Then I write it all up into an 20 to 35 page report and send it straight to you.
Here is what you get with Conference Pass:
The INSEAD ETA Conference Report in May covers session breakdowns, frameworks, and European deal structures. The IESE International Search Fund Conference Report in October covers investor trends, case studies, and valuation multiples. The RSM ETA Conference Report in November covers Benelux market intelligence and Netherlands opportunities specifically. And in December, a year end synthesis: a complete state of European ETA 2026 market analysis with trends and predictions for 2027.
Each report includes actual session insights, not just speaker bios. Real deal structures with numbers. What investors are looking for right now. What people are actually working on in those hallway conversations. And my own take on what matters versus what was noise.
If I attend additional conferences in 2026, LBS, SDA Bocconi, or others, Conference Pass subscribers get those reports as free bonuses as well.
Until 15 May, all four reports are available for €99. After the INSEAD report ships, the price goes to €149. The first 50 subscribers lock in €99 permanently.
I am offering you a free download of my report on the RSM ETA Conference 2025 to give you an idea of what the reports look like before you make your decision. Reply to this email, and I will send it to you. Read it and form your own opinion.
One more thing. This idea came from a conversation with one of mine newsletter readers. He planted the seed. If Conference Pass turns out to be useful to you, some of that credit belongs to him.
Get Conference Pass for €99, available until 15 May.👇🏻
The Personal Development Gap Nobody Talks About
This one surprised me the most.
Several of you are not just asking how to find and buy a business. You are asking how to become the kind of person who can actually run one.
How do you go from searcher mindset to operator mindset? How do you walk into a business on day one and earn the respect of people who knew the previous owner for fifteen years? How do you make decisions when suddenly twenty people depend on you getting it right, and you have never done it before?
I want to share a story from one of my Amsterdam meetups. Geza was in the room, and he had already closed his deal. He talked about what day one actually felt like. From the moment he arrived, he was the boss. There was no transition period, no grace period, no handover where someone else made the calls. The staff were looking at him. Waiting for decisions. Waiting to understand who this new person was and whether they could trust him.
The most challenging part, he said, was not the management. It was the learning. You jump into cold water. You have to understand the business you just bought, deeply and quickly, while simultaneously running it. The customers, the operations, the people, the processes. Everything at once.
But here is what stayed with me from that conversation. He liked his business. He liked his people. He was learning every day and genuinely enjoying it. The transition from searcher to operator is hard, but it is the kind of hard that feels worthwhile.
That story matters because it is honest. It does not make the post acquisition phase sound glamorous or easy. It makes it sound real.
I am not post acquisition yet. But I have thought about this deeply, and Geza’s experience is not unique. What the transition actually requires goes far beyond the deal mechanics. It requires a different relationship with uncertainty, with authority, with learning on the job in front of people who are watching closely.
Nobody in the European ETA space is writing about this seriously. I am going to start.
But first things first. Before you can think about becoming a great operator, you need to find your business. Do not let the post acquisition mindset become a distraction from the search itself.
The Structure Question Is Keeping People Stuck
Deal structure came up over and over, but not in a technical way.
Nobody was asking me to explain an LBO model. The ask was more like: I genuinely do not know how to think about this, and I cannot find a European specific answer anywhere.
And they are right. It is underdocumented. So let me give you a brief honest picture of what deal structure actually looks like for a European self funded buyer, and why it is more complex than anything you will read in an American primer.
The first thing to understand is that it will not be one clean financing structure. It will be a combination. Seller financing can be part of it, but you are unlikely to cover more than 15 to 20 percent of the deal that way in Europe. Sellers here are not accustomed to the concept the way American sellers are, and trust has to be built before anyone agrees to leave money in the deal.
Equity matters. If you want to bring in investors, you give them shares. If you want an operator to run daily operations while you focus on building the business, you give that person shares too. Aligning incentives through equity is one of the most powerful tools you have as a self funded buyer.
Earn outs are another option, particularly useful when there is a valuation gap between what the seller believes the business is worth and what the numbers actually support. They bridge that gap by tying part of the purchase price to future performance.
And then there are loans. Bank financing where available, but also worth exploring EU subsidies and local government schemes that many searchers do not even know exist. Depending on your country and sector, there may be meaningful support available.
The point is this: a real European self funded deal will likely involve equity, seller financing, an earn out component, and some form of loan or subsidy. Getting that combination right is one of the most important decisions you will make in the entire process.
That deserves a full dedicated issue. I am writing it.
If you are stuck on structure right now, stay subscribed. That issue is coming.
What I Am Building in Response
So here is what I heard, and here is what I am doing about it.
Conference Pass is the first output. Getting you inside the conference rooms that are shaping European ETA, without the travel budget or the time away from your search.
The content ahead is the second. A series called Big Deal, Small Lesson, starting soon, which looks at what the world’s greatest acquirers can teach someone buying a €2 million business in the Netherlands. A dedicated issue on thinking like the bank. The fund versus solo decision I am navigating in real time, written honestly as it unfolds.
And in late March, ETA Europe launches.
ETA Europe is an online community platform built specifically for acquisition entrepreneurs across Europe. Searchers, investors, and operators, connected through a digital platform and through local chapters in cities like Amsterdam, Rotterdam, and Brussels. Online 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Face to face monthly in your city.
Think of it as the European network that should have existed years ago. A place where you can ask a real question about a Dutch deal structure and get an answer from someone who has actually done it here. Where investors who understand the European market are accessible. Where the collective knowledge of everyone doing this across the continent is in one place rather than scattered across LinkedIn posts and private WhatsApp groups.
The infrastructure that European searchers do not have yet. That is what we are building.
This is not a features list. It is a commitment.
You answered the survey honestly. The least I can do is build honestly in return.
One Last Thing
I started Buyout Diary because I could not find what I needed as a European searcher.
I am still searching. That is not a weakness. It is what keeps the writing honest. If I had already closed my deal and moved on, I would be writing retrospectives. Instead I am writing from inside the process, with the same uncertainty, the same frustration, and the same stubborn belief that this works. That buying a good business in Europe, with your own capital and your own conviction, is one of the most worthwhile things a person can do.
The people who responded to that survey are doing something genuinely hard. Limited playbooks. Limited networks. Limited proof that it works here the way it works elsewhere.
That is exactly why this community needs to exist.
See you next Monday.
Alexander
P.S. Do you know anyone who is thinking of buying or selling a business in Europe or the UK?
Forward this email to them or direct them to alex.buyoutdiary.com/newsletter.