30.3% CAGR* over 20 years

Buyers and Builders,

We’re growing!

What to expect?

PrivateEquityGuy 1.0 -> 2.0
Buyers & Builders 1.0 -> 2.0
This newsletter 1.0 -> 2.0

Read below and/or forward this to someone who might be looking for exactly this kind of opportunity:

I’ve been thinking for a while that the lower middle market needs a short daily briefing.

So I decided to build one.

It’s called 5 Minutes in the Lower Middle Market - a daily podcast where I take a few short important stories, ideas, or market signals and break it down in 5 minutes or less.

Creating this for folks buying, building, financing, and operating lower middle market businesses.

Posting it every work day at around 8am ET (Apple podcasts; Spotify).

At the end of the day, building a strong and profitable organisation in the lower middle market comes down to collecting a few great ideas along the way.

The goal of this daily episode is simple:

To collect these and bring you one to three of those ideas every day.

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That said… (A quick announcement.)

Great companies are built by exceptional talent and their work-ethic - people who are not only highly capable, but also deeply curious about the specific world they are operating in.

If you live and breathe the lower middle market — especially the $1-10M EBITDA space — I’d love to hear from you.

You might be a Senior Associate, PE VP, Principal, Operating Partner, Managing Director, Partner, Founder, Portfolio Operations Executive, Capital Allocator, Independent Sponsor with a deal under your belt, Search Fund Entrepreneur, Self-Funded Searcher, HoldCo Founder, ETA Operator, Acquisition Entrepreneur, SMB Acquirer, Roll-Up Operator, or simply someone who has bought companies, made mistakes, and kept going.

Different titles. Same type of person.

What matters most is that you genuinely live in this world.

You are ALWAYS thinking about deals, operators, capital, sourcing, financing, structures, post-close execution, and what it really takes to build companies.

You enjoy talking about the lower middle market. You are responsive, curious, and “on it.” Outside of the 6-7 hours a day when you’re sleeping, you’re reachable and engaged.

You also wouldn’t be starting from scratch.

I’ve spent the last three years building this platform. PrivateEquityGuy on X now does roughly 3-5 million impressions per month.

What can you expect from our small team?

A level of seriousness… I haven’t missed a day of posting on X since 2023 and have been bootstrapping this the entire time while building a separate business on the side.

Enough about me…

You get access to a platform with nearly unlimited reach on X.

One great tweet, one great episode, one viral idea can meaningfully change your trajectory. It can put your name in front of exceptional people and open doors you didn’t even know existed.

I’ve built this from Eastern Europe with almost no travel and very limited resources.

But as my kids get older, I can and want to travel again. We’re entering the 2.0 version of providing more industry-specific value to more people.

To do that properly, we need great people.

If you’ve followed the journey, like what you’ve seen, and believe it could be done better - at a much higher level - reply to this email.

To borrow from the story of a young Tony James:

He had the opportunity to choose Morgan Stanley or Goldman Sachs. Instead, he joined DLJ because he wanted to build, take ownership, and do his own thing.

I’m not suggesting we are Morgan Stanley or Goldman Sachs. We are not. The point is different: here, you can join early, take real ownership from day one, and have your work seen by hundreds of thousands — potentially millions — of people.

There are very few places where that kind of distribution exists from the start.

1. Do yourself a favour and listen the full interview with Tony James (From Signal to Scale)
2. Take the time to think about my offer - “I kind of liked doing my own thing…” I hope you feel exactly the same.
(Your work and passion shared with an audience and 3-5 million impressions per month. What that could lead to?)

Sounds interesting?!

3. Reply to this same email and let’s talk.

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Changing gears, I want to share this message about the importance of focus and “niching down”.

There is a fintech/payment company called Slash, who first built a broad banking/payment product for MANY types of online business.

What happened?

Growth was weak. “Why are you known for?” - part was missing.

They almost ran out of money...

Then they narrowed the focus dramatically and built a payment service specifically for sneaker resellers…

How many sneaker resellers do you know? Me, personally, maybe a few.

Turns out this is huge as that niche positioning helped them scale to $5M ARR in about 11 months.

Why did it worked:

• sneaker resellers had unique payment/banking problems

• many were young and couldn’t access good financial products

• existing banks/payment providers didn’t understand their workflows

• and the market had intense transaction volume

After dominating that niche, Slash expanded into serving broader internet businesses and eventually became a much larger fintech company.

Every time I get confused or try to focus on too many things at the same time… I think about the guys at Slash who built a great service by focusing on providing payment service to sneaker resellers.

When I occasionally reflect on why certain Buyers & Builders episodes generate 1,250 downloads instead of 19,000, the answer is fairly straightforward: this remains an exceptionally specialized corner of the market.

There are relatively few people genuinely focused on the mechanics of acquiring businesses:

1.  sourcing proprietary opportunities,
2.  structuring transactions
3.  navigating conventional financing and SBA
4.  raising capital
5.  operating portfolio companies post-close
6.  allocating capital effectively
7.  and ultimately positioning businesses for a successful exit.

Most audiences gravitate toward entertainment…

A much smaller cohort is committed to understanding how businesses are actually bought, scaled, and compounded over time.

And candidly, 1,250 highly relevant listeners in this domain represents a remarkably valuable audience.

With all that being said, what if I tell you there is a gentleman who did just that: he focused and “niched down” on a $2-10m revenue business in this one tiny vertical, did over 90 acquisitions and scale to $50M IN EBITDA.

I met him in Stockholm at the Swedish Serial Acquirers conference and then invited him on the podcast. We eventually got it recorded, and it’s in the hands of my editor. If you haven’t already subscribed to the podcast, here you go (Apple podcasts; Spotify).

That’s all for today.

Last but not least, if you live and breathe the lower middle market — especially the $1-10M EBITDA space — and you have this young Tony James energy of doing your own thing. I’d love to hear from you.

Best,
Mikk Markus / PrivateEquityGuy