Buy and Build: 60 Acquisitions in 17 Countries | David Schenavsky on Lineage
Buy and build is the most talked-about value creation strategy in small business investing, and the least understood in practice. Every add-on is its own deal, its own integration, and its own set of people problems. Doing it repeatedly without breaking the platform is where most acquirers fail.
David Schenavsky spent nearly eight years inside one of the most active buy-and-build machines in the German Mittelstand. At Tentamus Group, the Berlin-based laboratory group, he joined in 2017 when the first platform, bilacon, had just a handful of add-ons, and left as Head of Corporate Development and Country Manager Benelux with the group at roughly 4,500 employees and over 100 sites across Europe, the US, Asia, and Israel. Along the way he was involved in around 60 acquisitions in 17 countries. Since 2024 he has been part of the founding team of Assessimus Group, a new testing, inspection, and certification platform built from scratch, now operating across Germany, the UK, and the US.
In this episode, David walks through the full buy-and-build playbook: what a platform needs before its first add-on, how to source off-market deals with founder-owners, how to value and structure small acquisitions, what minimum viable diligence looks like, and how to integrate without destroying what you just bought.
What you'll learn in this episode:
→ Why stability beats size when choosing a platform
→ What makes a good add-on and why smaller and healthy beats bigger and broken
→ Sourcing off-market deals through accreditation lists, networks, and personal outreach
→ Winning founder trust through autonomy, brand retention, and a decentralised model
→ Valuing on normalised post-closing EBITDA and aligning the baseline early
→ Why a two-page LOI in plain English closes more deals than a ten-page one
→ Explaining earn-outs and rollover equity to first-time sellers
→ Founder retention: 51 to 90 percent stakes and why a 10 percent stake is not an incentive
→ Red-flag diligence: what to check, what to skip, and the risks that only show up after closing
→ Centralise vs. decentralise: why there is no one-size-fits-all and consistency matters more
Chapters:
00:00 Introduction to David Schenavsky
01:10 Tentamus and Assessimus: setting the stage
03:45 Why lab testing is a buy-and-build industry
05:43 Platform vs. add-on: what Tentamus had and Assessimus lacked
08:56 Stability before scale: what a platform needs
10:16 What makes a good add-on
13:08 Off-market sourcing and the first founder conversation
16:19 Winning trust: autonomy, brand, and the decentralised model
20:34 Deal sizes and no-go criteria
21:51 Valuation and normalised EBITDA
25:13 Transparency, mini commercial DD, and aligning the baseline
27:28 What goes into a two-page LOI
30:40 Explaining earn-outs and rollover to first-time sellers
32:16 Founder retention and transition structures
34:31 The LOI as a tool: keep it short
36:43 Majority stakes and incentive alignment
40:03 Group-level vs. company-level incentives
42:33 Minimum viable diligence: red-flag reports
45:14 What diligence misses: unwritten rules and sector nuance
48:23 SPA negotiation: disclosure schedules and keeping lawyers in their lane
51:24 Centralise vs. decentralise: no one-size-fits-all
55:53 Synergies: subcontracting and cross-selling
57:53 When deals did not work out
60:10 Deal cadence: how many acquisitions per year
62:27 Advice for the first add-on
64:50 Trust and transparency: getting deals over the line
Connect with David Schenavsky: https://www.linkedin.com/in/david-schenavsky-151a4279/
