We are building the world’s greatest companies.
We invest alongside entrepreneurs in companies that serve permanent individual or business needs, building integrated, cohesive groups made to last for generations.
Bergamo · London
We invest alongside entrepreneurs in companies that serve permanent individual or business needs, building integrated, cohesive groups made to last for generations.
Bergamo · London
01 — About us
An investment platform with a flexible time horizon.
We acquire Italian companies with revenue of between €5m and €50m, in manufacturing, business services and distribution. We are backed by permanent capital from Italian and European family offices: we have no fund life to work to, and we stay for more than ten years with the clear intent of building market leaders.
The founder's track record, before Michil Holdings
Italian roots, ten years abroad.
Michil Holdings grew out of its founder's experience, built in international banks and in private equity funds with more than €90bn of capital under management. We think of ourselves as entrepreneurs rather than financiers: private equity teaches market analysis and rigour with numbers, not how to run a company. We come from that world: growing up on the shop floor rather than in a conference room. That is why we do not follow our companies from a boardroom in Milan, and do not decide by looking only at a spreadsheet: we are on site, with the people who run the business every day, in order to businesses with an admirable reputation for decades to come.
Andrea Mazzoleni, founder LinkedIn
02 — Investment criteria
We invest in markets that serve permanent needs.
We do not invest in passing trends. We look for markets where the customers' need has existed for decades and will go on existing, whatever the economic cycle.
In every market, we build a top-three operator.
In each market we enter, the aim is for the company to become one of the three largest operators within a decade. That is the first milestone, not the destination: consolidating that position and making it defensible is the work of the years that follow. Acquisitions matter, but we intend to grow market share organically, by serving customers better.
Obsessed with what the customer needs.
We always start from the end customers' need. We study the best international operators in the same sector and bring to Italy the service innovations that have already proven themselves elsewhere. The aim is to be the first to offer them in the Italian market, and to win share by serving the customer better than the competition does.
Pervasive use of technology and data.
A larger group can afford investments in technology that a single company could not justify. We put them to work on two fronts: the tools the customer sees, and above all the management and data analysis systems that allow the business to be run on precise information rather than on instinct.
03 — How we work
A direct relationship, and a confidential one.
We deal directly with the owners, under a confidentiality agreement. No competitor and no customer learns that a conversation is under way.
The key information, to reach a written proposal.
We concentrate on a limited number of economic and financial data points, enough to understand 80% of what drives the value of the company. We do not ask you to open up the business before we have put in writing what we are prepared to invest.
Pragmatic due diligence, signing in one or two months.
Data is never perfect, and we do not expect it to be. We verify what actually matters to the value of the company, and we move from first proposal to signing in one or two months.
A flexible structure.
We work with the entrepreneur's own objectives: a full sale of control and an exit, or a partial sale with the entrepreneur staying on. The structure we build rewards those who stay in proportion to the results they achieve.
Continuity.
The people stay, the customers stay, the long-standing suppliers and partners stay. We protect the reputation of the company and of the person who built it.
The people who work there share in the results.
We put incentive schemes in place for key people, so that they are directly affected by the growth of the company.
Present on the decisions that count, not on the day-to-day.
We are in the business regularly, and we are involved in investments, acquisitions and strategic choices. Day-to-day management stays with the people who already do it well. We are not there to teach a trade to those who know it better than we do.
04 — Contact