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Case studies

Private equityMid-market, proprietary origination

How a mid-market fund found founder-owned targets nobody had called

Sixty-one owner-operators in the Nordics with no institutional capital on the cap table.

Names, companies, sectors and figures are anonymised. This study describes the workflow and the persona rather than the customer.

Situation

The thesis was founder-owned facilities and building services businesses across the Nordics — fragmented, unglamorous, and almost entirely absent from intermediated processes.

Proprietary origination in that market means reaching the owner before a banker does, and the owner is a person, not a company. The fund had been working from a registry export and calling switchboards, which produces conversations with the wrong people at a rate that discourages associates from doing it at all.

Search

The prompt
Find founders and majority owners of facilities and building services companies in Sweden, Norway and Denmark with 50 to 400 employees, that have never taken institutional capital.

Must have

  • A founder or majority owner still operating the business
  • Headcount between 50 and 400
  • No institutional investor on record

Ruled out

  • Companies already backed by a sponsor
  • Listed companies and their subsidiaries
  • Anyone who has sold a business in the last two years

Intended actionA personal note from a partner offering a conversation — explicitly not a process, and explicitly not an offer.

Evidence

Why they fit

  • The person is the owner-operator rather than a hired managing director, which is the difference between a conversation about a life's work and a conversation about a job.
  • No funding event of any kind appears on record — the negative is the qualifying criterion here.

Verified

  • Role and the ownership signal, from the national company register
  • Headcount band, from the company's own filing
  • Absence of any recorded funding round or sponsor transaction

Still uncertain

  • Actual ownership percentage. The register establishes control, not the split.
  • Whether the founder has any interest in selling, at any price — unknowable before the conversation, and the reason the note offers one.
  • Eight companies had a second shareholder whose role could not be established.

Action

  • Sixty-one owners identified; eighteen carried a warm path through the fund's operating partners and were routed to them.
  • The remaining forty-three received a sequenced personal note, paced so no single region saw a cluster of approaches in one week.
  • Nine were held back where the register showed a recent transaction that the exclusion should have caught.

Outcome

Seven conversations, two of which progressed to an indicative offer. The fund's own read afterwards was that the pacing mattered as much as the list: a fragmented regional market notices a wave of approaches.

Owners identified
61
With a warm path
18
Indicative offers
2

Elapsed4 weeks from prompt to indicative offer

Net newAll sixty-one were outside the fund's pipeline, and none had been approached by the firm before.