If you see dozens or hundreds of acquisition opportunities each year, some will carry significant revenue or customer concentration. Structure around it, or pass altogether? After years of fielding that question from our platforms, we supplemented experience with real-world data – to our knowledge, the first empirical study of its kind. A summary of the findings is now available publicly.
Selling a business is often cited as a top five emotional event in an owner’s life – up there with marriage, having children, or unexpectedly losing a loved one. Yet, the traditional M&A market frequently reduces these emotional milestones to spreadsheets, treating fragile ecosystems of employee livelihoods, customer trust, and generational legacy as mere commodities to be traded for short-term IRRs. With small businesses especially, many buyers miss the bigger picture.
One of the more common beliefs among founders and investors building serial acquisition platforms is that paying a low multiple is, by itself, a form of downside protection.
The logic is intuitive: buy a business at 4x EBITDA in a market where peers trade at 8x, and you’ve created a buffer. If things go wrong, the modest entry price limits the damage. On paper, this feels conservative. In practice, it leads teams into trouble more frequently than most realize.
Low multiple deals are not inherently safe deals. They are cheap deals. And cheap is not necessarily the same thing as protected or high quality.
As you scale through acquisition, how confident are you that each business turns attention into revenue in a predictable way?
In this piece, we explore why many growth challenges are less about tactics and more about visibility, how making the GTM funnel explicit helps teams diagnose friction, align ownership, and compound organic growth before adding spend.
We see founders spend a lot of time debating whether to use leverage, but far less time thinking about when to introduce it and what that timing reinforces over the long run. We shared a practical framework below based on patterns we’ve seen across serial acquisition platforms.
The stakes are high. You set it once, and you may have never fully overhaul it again. Yet it is an invisible force behind most decisions your company makes: incentive systems.
The odds are brutal.
A landmark study by Henrik Bessembinder (W. P. Carey School of Business, ASU) analyzed nearly a century of public company data from 1926 to 2023. The conclusion was staggering: 96% of all stocks collectively matched the return of one-month T-bills.