Buyout Diary
I’m on a mission to acquire a small business in the UK or Europe. Through Buyout Diary, I share practical insights, tools, and lessons from the front line of small business acquisitions — helping aspiring buyers and operators learn as I go.
What I Have Learned from a Year of Conversations with European Searchers
Hello Reader, 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...
Ten months in, my thesis has changed. Here is what moved.
Hello Reader, and welcome back to Buyout Diary. A reflective issue this week. Last October I wrote a Buyout Diary piece on how to build your investment thesis at the start of a search. It is still a piece I stand behind. But the thesis I wrote for myself in August 2025 is not the thesis I hold today. Most searchers feel guilty about this. They wrote a thesis, they spent time refining it, they put it in a PPM, and now reality is pushing back on parts of it. Their instinct is to defend the...
Nine months in. Two deals broke. Here is everything I learned.
Hello Reader, and welcome back to Buyout Diary. This week is a little different. Not a deep dive into one concept, not a case study. A pause to look back. I launched this newsletter in August 2025. In January 2026 I ran a reader survey and started publishing a new issue every Monday. When I lined those issues up next to each other recently, I noticed something I had not fully planned. The newsletter started with me writing about my own mistakes. The first issue of the year was literally...
Why financial engineering alone will not generate the returns you need
Hello Reader, and welcome back to Buyout Diary. This issue exists because several of you specifically asked for it. When I ran the recent reader survey, the question that came back most often was some version of this: How do you actually create value after you have closed an acquisition, beyond the financial engineering everyone talks about? How do you make the business worth more than the sum of its parts, in a way that does not depend on cheap debt, market multiples, or selling at the right...
The American ETA playbook does not work in Europe. Here is why.
Hello Reader, and welcome back to Buyout Diary. This broadcast is different from the last two. The first of this month was about what you told me you needed as a European searcher in 2026. The last one was about the decision I made on the independent sponsor model and why I made it. Both were personal. This one is not personal. It is an argument. One I have been building since I started searching in Europe, one that comes up every time I speak with a searcher who is frustrated that their...
I’m on a mission to acquire a small business in the UK or Europe. Through Buyout Diary, I share practical insights, tools, and lessons from the front line of small business acquisitions — helping aspiring buyers and operators learn as I go.