Acquiring smaller companies at a 5-6x EBITDA multiple and integrating them to reach a larger scale allows you to sell the combined entity at a 10-12x multiple. This multiple expansion is a powerful, often overlooked financial driver of M&A strategies, creating value almost overnight.

When scaling a local service business like a chiropractic office, acquiring existing practices is a more efficient growth path than building new ones from scratch. It's often possible to find owners willing to sell for very little, making it easier to retrofit them into your model.

A business's core function is to become a system for repetition. This starts by finding one customer with strong demand, delivering a supply that fits perfectly, and documenting that success. The entire business then becomes a 'factory' optimized to find and replicate that initial case study.

Unlike PE firms that flip companies, Bending Spoons acquires digital businesses to own permanently. Their model focuses on deep operational overhauls—rebuilding software, redesigning UI, and restructuring organizations—rather than making shallow management changes, creating long-term value through operational excellence.

When acquiring a business, don't rely on a single outcome like achieving a growth target. Instead, seek assets that offer multiple ways to win. Even if the primary goal is missed, the acquired data, technology, or talent could create significant value for other business units, providing built-in insurance for the deal.

Single-product companies struggle to align R&D team size with fluctuating opportunities. Bending Spoons uses a centralized pool of flexible R&D talent that can be rapidly deployed to different portfolio companies, maximizing efficiency and capturing short-lived windows of opportunity that others miss.

Viewing acquisitions as "consolidations" rather than "roll-ups" shifts focus from simply aggregating EBITDA to strategically integrating culture and operations. This builds a cohesive company that drives incremental organic growth—the true source of value—rather than just relying on multiple arbitrage from increased scale.

Seeing an existing successful business is validation, not a deterrent. By copying their current model, you start where they are today, bypassing their years of risky experimentation and learning. The market is large enough for multiple winners.

A startup's core function is to find one successful, repeatable customer 'case study' and then build a factory (pipeline, sales, delivery) to replicate it at scale. This manufacturing-based mental model prevents random acts of improvement and helps founders apply concepts like bottleneck theory to know exactly where to focus their efforts for maximum impact.