Stronger Business Partners

Stronger Business Partners Preferred partner of IT and SaaS companies owner/operators who wish exit. Safeguarding what you have built. Our business your legacy.

09/04/2026

Founders are leaving 2 to 3 turns of EBITDA on the table to avoid selling to PE.

That is a revealed preference, not a miscalculation.

Research on exit behaviour shows founders consistently prioritise team retention, brand preservation, and cultural continuity. PE structures cannot protect those things. The 3 to 5 year exit mandate means every operational decision gets calibrated to the return target, not to the business.

Permanent capital wins those deals at lower multiples because it offers what PE structurally cannot. No mandated exit. No clock. No operating partners parachuting in to squeeze the team.

The buyer you choose is the last major leadership decision you make for your people.

Worth comparing notes with others who have been through a sale process.

08/04/2026

Most PE acquisition offers look generous until you model what happens next.

They acquire at 6 to 8x. They need to exit in 3 to 5 years. Every decision in that window is calibrated to hit the return target.

That means headcount reductions in year one. New operating partners parachuting in. Key people quietly updating their resumes. Then the whole thing gets flipped to the next buyer.

Founders who built something real, where people stayed because they believed in what they were building, hand that team a countdown timer the moment they sign.

Permanent ownership platforms carry no exit mandate. No clock. No strip-and-flip pressure. Founders are accepting 2 to 3 turns less on EBITDA to access that guarantee.

The multiple matters. But it tells you something when founders routinely leave money on the table to protect their people.

Curious how others have thought about this tradeoff.

23/03/2026

Most people look at vertical SaaS acquisitions and see a fragmented market.

What they miss is why it's fragmented.

Vertical software businesses, payroll for care homes, scheduling for plumbers, CRM for surveyors, share a structural characteristic almost no other asset class has: near-zero churn, no meaningful competition, and customers who cannot easily leave.

When your software is embedded in the daily operations of a business that has used it for 11 years, the switching cost isn't the price of a competitor. It's retraining every employee, migrating years of data, and rewriting every operational process.

That's why retention in vertical SaaS regularly sits above 90%. Not only because the product is exceptional. Because switching is genuinely painful.

Private equity doesn't buy these businesses well. Deal sizes are too small, industries too niche, management teams too thin for a fund model. Institutional capital has a minimum cheque size problem.

That creates a structural pricing inefficiency. Businesses with happy customers, motivated employees, and strong margins. Available in a market with limited buyers and no auction process.

That's the opportunity. It's still there in European SMEs today.

What sectors are you watching for this kind of dynamic?

21/03/2026

70% of founders who sell to private equity say they'd have made a different decision with more information.

That number doesn't make it into the deal announcements.

The "clean exit" is a story told by advisers who get paid on completion. In reality, most lower mid-market deals look like this: a banker sends a teaser to 40 buyers, 6 submit indicative offers, 2 make it to final bids, and the founder picks the highest number because that's what they were optimised for.

Then the 100-day plan arrives. Then the redundancies. Then the rebrand. Then the founder - who was promised an "earn-out with operational autonomy" - finds themselves presenting KPIs to a junior partner every Monday morning.

The problem isn't private equity. The problem is that founders are optimising for price when they should be optimising for fit.

At STRONGER, we've walked away from deals because the fit wasn't right.

When founders talk about their ideal outcome - does the buyer they choose actually reflect that?

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