Hello Reader, and welcome back to Buyout Diary.

For the last two months, this inbox has been quiet. No Monday issue. No LinkedIn posts. No new conference reports. If you have been reading Buyout Diary since the beginning, that silence is longer than any gap I have taken before, and it probably needs an explanation. This email is that explanation.

I want to be honest about why I went quiet, because I think the honest version is actually more useful to you than any model piece I was planning to write in that time. The two months were not accidental. They were a decision. The reasoning behind the decision, and what has happened since, is what I want to share with you here.

Why I went quiet

Easy twenty hours a week on Buyout Diary alongside my full-time job as a startup coach. Research, writing, interviewing, building the community, keeping the LinkedIn presence active, running the conference reports, replying to the DMs. I enjoyed every part of it. I still do. The responses you sent back, the people I met because of this project, the things I learned from your situations and your findings — all of it has been real, and none of it was wasted.

But something was happening I did not want to admit.

My goal was never to build a research platform. My goal was never to become an ETA media voice or a community organiser. My goal, from the first issue, was to buy a business and build a HoldCo in the Netherlands. The writing was supposed to be the companion to the search, not the other way around.

By mid-summer, if I was honest with myself, it had become the other way around. Twenty hours a week was going into writing about the thing. The thing itself was moving slower than it should have been. I was building an identity as "the person who writes about European ETA" instead of becoming "the person who actually did it." Those are not the same identity, and only one of them was my original goal.

That is what I had to face in July. It was not easy. The writing had become something I was good at, something people responded to, something that was growing. The search was something I was still figuring out. The temptation, when you are good at one thing and uncertain about another, is to spend more time on the thing you are good at. I had been doing that for months without naming it.

The moment I noticed

The specific moment, if I am honest, was a Sunday evening in late July. I was finishing the Monday issue. It was going to be a good piece. The research was solid. The framework was clean. I knew it would get a strong response.

And at the same time, I had a list of 40 owners in a specific industry that I had been meaning to contact for three weeks. The list had not moved. The outreach had not started. I was going to publish a thoughtful essay about how to buy a business the next morning while sitting on a database of businesses I was not actually reaching out to buy.

That contradiction had been true for a while. That Sunday evening was the first time I let myself see it clearly.

I ran the comparison properly over the following week. What was I actually getting from twenty hours of weekly writing? A growing audience. Research depth across European ETA models. A real network of searchers, operators, and investors who wrote back. Credibility inside the community. All real, all valuable.

What was I not getting? Enough deals in the pipeline. Enough owner conversations past the second meeting. Enough time in sectors to actually know them. Enough visits to actual businesses to form a view based on something more than a landing page.

I ran the thought experiment. What if those twenty hours went into the search instead? Into real owner outreach. Into deeper sector work. Into the field visits I kept postponing because Monday's issue was due.

The honest answer was that I would move closer to my goal in two months than in the ten months before.

End of July, I made the decision. Early August, I started executing it.

What two months of real focus looks like

I want to give you specifics, because specifics are what you deserve for having stayed subscribed through two months of silence.

Three thesis industries, now with proper depth. I have narrowed my search to three specific sectors in the western Netherlands. All three are what you might loosely call fragmented service businesses — unglamorous, high recurring revenue, resistant to tech disruption, usually with an ageing owner-operator. I am not going to name them in this email, and I want to be upfront about why: they are specific enough that naming them publicly would invite competition I would rather not have. The honest version is that I know these three sectors better than I knew any one sector two months ago, and I would rather preserve that advantage than demonstrate it in a newsletter. If you reach out personally and you are in Europe and clearly not searching the same thesis, I am happy to share more.

A database built from the ground up. I am not relying much on the traditional marketplaces. I check them once a week to see if anything matches my thesis, and the answer is usually no. The real sourcing is happening elsewhere. Mostly I am building my own database from public sources — Google Maps, local chamber directories, trade association listings, regional registers. For each of the three thesis industries I have mapped every relevant business in the geographies I would consider. Addresses, estimated size, owner where discoverable, approximate age of the business. The database is not fancy. It is a spreadsheet. But it is mine, and it contains more targets per industry than any marketplace listing I have seen.

A four-touch outreach system. This is the part I actually want to share in detail, because I think it is the single most useful thing I have figured out in these two months.

• Touch one is an email. Short, personal, specific to the owner's business. No templates. No "I came across your company and was impressed." Just a direct explanation of who I am, what I am looking to do, and why their specific business caught my attention.
• Touch two, if no reply after two weeks, is a handwritten letter. Good paper. Hand-addressed envelope. The envelope matters as much as the letter. The letter itself is also handwritten, not printed. I write it myself. It takes time. The reason is simple: this is a transaction between humans, not between businesses. A handwritten letter on good paper lands differently on an owner's desk than another email in a flooded inbox. Most of them have never received one from a potential buyer.
• Touch three, if still no reply after another two to three weeks, is a follow-up email or a phone call. By this point I have usually learned enough about the business from public sources to have a reason to call. Not "did you get my letter," but "I noticed [specific thing] about your business and I wanted to understand it better."
• Touch four, when the conversation has started, is a personal visit. On-site. Even for a first proper meeting. I would rather drive two hours for a thirty-minute conversation at the owner's workshop than take a Zoom call. The signal that sends is worth the time.

This is where I spend most of my hours now. The system is not fast. It is deliberate. Owners are busy, often technical rather than administrative by background, and often take weeks to answer anything that is not a customer invoice. Three emails is where most searchers give up. That is where the deals quietly accumulate for the searchers who do not.

Seventeen on-site visits in two months. Not fifty. Not a hundred. Seventeen. Each one has taught me more about the industry, the owner psychology, the realities of these businesses than any amount of desk research would. I now have real contact with specific owners. Conversations ongoing. Trust being built slowly.

Zero deals closed. Zero LOIs signed. Honest about this. Two months, seventeen visits, zero closed deals. No LOI. No handshake. No deal. If I am going to ask you to trust the honesty of what I write going forward, I need to be honest about this too. The pause has not produced a deal. It has produced the conditions for one — the right industries, the right database, the right outreach system, the right relationships starting — but the actual close is still ahead. I do not know when it comes. It might be three more months. It might be twelve. The honest answer is that I do not know, and I would rather tell you that than pretend otherwise.

What the pause has definitely produced is clarity. Two months ago I was writing about ETA while searching broadly. Today I am searching narrowly in three industries I understand, with a system that is working at the input level even if the output has not landed yet. That is progress even without a close to point to.

What this means for Buyout Diary

I am pausing. Not cancelling. Pausing.

No weekly rhythm. No monthly rhythm. No committed return date. If something important comes up that I think you should hear, I will send a note. Otherwise, quiet for a while.

I quit my job as a startup coach. I moved to Amsterdam. I cut several other projects back. The energy has to go in one direction now. The writing is one of the things that got cut back, not because it was not valuable, but because it was the most time-consuming of my optional commitments and the one most adjacent to work I needed to be doing anyway.

I was writing about ETA because writing about ETA had become easier and more rewarding in the short term than actually doing ETA. That is a comfortable trap to fall into. It is also a trap. The way out is to stop writing for a while, do the thing, and then write about the actual experience afterwards. That is the shape of the pause.

What comes back

When Buyout Diary comes back properly, the material will come from a different place. Not research summaries. Not academic frameworks. Not Monday compilations of what I read that week.

What I actually want to write about, and what I think will be more useful to you than anything I have written so far:

• Real deal terms, not theoretical structures. What was offered, what was countered, what closed.
• Post-close operational field notes. The first ninety days of actually running something you just bought.
• Sector-specific pattern recognition from inside a working business, not from reading reports about the sector.
• The parts of HoldCo building that nobody writes about honestly. The capital structure trade-offs. The management transitions. The quiet months when nothing visible is happening.
• Weekly reality of owner-operator life rather than weekly research summaries.
• Eventually, once the competitive sensitivity passes, the specific sectors I pursued and why.

That material takes closing the first deal. It takes being inside the operator seat rather than next to it. That is the pause.

Staying in touch

I have not disappeared. The best way to reach me now is LinkedIn.

→ Connect with me on LinkedIn​

If you have written to me in the last two months and I have not answered yet, I will. The backlog is real, and I owe several of you a reply. I will work through it in the coming weeks.

And if you want to share something, want an introduction, or just want to say hello, hit reply. I read everything.

If you know a searcher, operator, or investor in Europe who you think I should meet, especially in the western Netherlands or in any kind of fragmented service business, please introduce us. The network side of this project is one of the things I keep active even during the writing pause. It is also one of the things most likely to help me close the first deal faster.

See you on the other side of the first deal.

Alexander

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