Buy and Build: Living and Breathing SMEs
David Nefs from the Buy and Build podcast invited our Managing Partner Ibrahim to discuss his experience managing SMEs and why search funds are such an interesting asset class. Buy and Build is a weekly show built around the nuances of buying and building small businesses across the UK and Europe — dissecting the strategies of small business owners, investors and deal professionals actually doing the work of acquisition, rather than talking about it in the abstract.
That focus made it a natural fit for Ibrahim’s story. Long before search funds entered the picture, Ibrahim was already living and breathing the SME world — growing up around his family’s business, then returning to scale it roughly tenfold after a stint in management consulting, before its acquisition by Döhler Group. The conversation used that operating background as the foundation for explaining why search funds appealed to him as an investor: because he’d already spent years inside the exact kind of company search fund entrepreneurs go on to acquire and run.
Key takeaways
- Operating experience is the credibility that matters most. Having actually run an SME through a decade of growth and an eventual acquisition gave Ibrahim’s case for search funds a first-hand weight that pure investment theory can’t match.
- SMEs and search funds are two sides of the same coin. The businesses Buy and Build’s audience is buying and building are exactly the kind of companies search fund entrepreneurs step in to acquire and run — making the two communities natural neighbors.
- Europe’s buy-and-build audience is a growing source of search fund awareness. A show built for UK and European SME buyers and operators is a direct channel to the exact demographic search funds are trying to reach as the model expands beyond the US.
- The asset class benefits from operator credibility, not just investor pitch. Coming to the conversation as someone who once ran the kind of business being discussed, rather than only as an investor evaluating one, changed the register of the whole episode.