We Bought Three Belgian Companies in 90 Days. Here Is What We Learned.

Three acquisitions. Three different sectors. Three founders who had spent decades building companies they cared about, and needed to trust a team they had known for months. Groupe Jordan closed in October 2025. Mignone and Alsec followed in November. What that sequence actually looked like from the inside is not what the headline suggests.

This is not a victory lap. Deals close on paper long before they close in reality. What I want to set down here is the operational truth of running three simultaneous acquisition processes on Belgian SMEs, because the version that circulates in ETA forums and investor decks tends to omit the parts that are useful to know.

The Three Companies

Groupe Jordan is a Hainaut-based HVAC specialist with 110 employees across residential and B2G work. The founder, Jean-Luc Stavaux, built it over a long career and, when we closed, chose to reinvest and stay on as Sales and Marketing Director. That is not a standard outcome in SME succession. Most sellers want to leave. Stavaux wanted to see what the next chapter looked like. Frédéric Schilling took over as CEO, with Patrick Neyrinck joining as CFO and CBC providing acquisition financing alongside Wallonie Entreprendre as co-investor. Four months later, Kaeron (the holding company) completed its second acquisition, Chauffage Eric Demory in Lobbes, with Karl Verardo from the original Groupe Jordan team leading it. The consolidation thesis, fragmented HVAC in Wallonia, was already in motion before most people knew we existed.

More about Kaeron: wadcap.com/Portfolio

Alsec is a fire safety and security specialist based in Nivelles, Walloon Brabant. Steven Bourgeois, the incoming CEO, has spent his career in critical safety services and understands that the regulatory pressure driving this sector is structural, not cyclical. Stricter compliance requirements for building owners create compulsory demand. Alsec is the technical foundation of what becomes Omnisecur Group. The logic of acquiring the highest-quality operational player first, before adding volume, is the only sensible sequence if you want the platform to be worth anything.

More about Omnisecur Group: wadcap.com/Portfolio

Mignone, based in Manage, is a construction and electrical installation company with 75 percent of its revenue from public sector clients. Guy-Louis de le Vigne is leading NexVolta, the platform built from it. The thesis is positioning for AI infrastructure buildout, EV charging, and renewable energy integration. Belgium's push toward electrification needs electricians, a lot of them, and Mignone's public sector relationships are a more durable asset than most investors give them credit for.

More about Mignone SA: wadcap.com/Portfolio

Three different businesses. Three different financing structures. Three different seller personalities. Closed within a 90-day window.

What the Sellers Actually Cared About

The thing that surprises people who have not been through an SME succession process is how secondary price is. Not irrelevant. But secondary.

Jean-Luc Stavaux had employees he had worked with for twenty years. He wanted to know what happened to them. He wanted to know who was going to walk the floors. Whether the new person understood that the B2G relationships in Hainaut are built on personal trust and not on a CRM entry. The answer to those questions mattered more to him than the final multiple on the deal.

This comes up in every founder conversation we have, and the operators who miss it tend to find out about it expensively, six months post-close, when a key account manager leaves or a long-standing customer relationship quietly lapses. A 35-year-old business is not a collection of assets. It is a web of relationships and informal knowledge that walks out the door the moment the culture shifts and people stop feeling like they belong there.

Stavaux reinvesting and staying on was not a condition we imposed. It was something he wanted. He still knows where the bodies are buried (figuratively), and that knowledge is worth more than any onboarding document we could produce.

The sellers at Alsec and Mignone had their own versions of the same question, asked differently depending on their personality and the specifics of their business. All three wanted confidence that the incoming CEO was genuinely capable and genuinely committed. Not a caretaker. Not a fund's placeholder. Someone with skin in the game who would still be there in five years.

What Nearly Broke Us

Running three parallel closing processes in 90 days is not something we would recommend as a standard operating procedure. The legal and financial diligence workstreams are manageable when sequential. When they overlap, you find the bottlenecks in your own organisation very quickly.

The honest version is that our deal support infrastructure, legal coordination, financial modelling, and regulatory compliance review, was stretched. Not broken. But stretched. The Wallonie Entreprendre co-investment on Kaeron added a layer of institutional process that solo search funds rarely encounter and that requires precise sequencing to avoid delays. CBC as acquisition lender has its own documentation requirements. Multiply that across three simultaneous transactions and the margin for error on timing gets very thin.

The other thing that becomes apparent under that kind of pace is which relationships inside the deal really matter. The notary's calendar. The seller's accountant, who often knows things about the business that the seller has forgotten to mention, or has actively chosen not to. The regional economic development bodies who can either smooth a process or add three weeks to it depending on how early you bring them in. These are not things that appear in the textbook version of acquisition process.

What the Model Actually Proved

The argument for the WAD model, as opposed to solo search or traditional search funds, is that institutional infrastructure accelerates and de-risks the acquisition process without removing the operator from the centre of it. The 90-day sequence was the first real test of whether that argument holds under pressure.

The evidence is specific. Frédéric Schilling closed Groupe Jordan and within weeks was deploying talent from the acquired business into the second acquisition. That is not something a solo searcher running a single-company process produces. The capital was committed before the search began, which meant that when the right company appeared, the conversation with the seller was about fit and timing, not about whether the money existed. According to the 2024 Stanford GSB Search Fund Study, traditional search funds average 2.5 to 3 years from launch to acquisition close. The infrastructure difference is not marginal.

Three acquisitions in 90 days also tested something that is harder to measure: whether founders in Wallonia would trust the model. They would, under specific conditions. The incoming CEO has to be credible, present, and willing to learn the business from the people who built it. The institutional backing has to be visible enough to be reassuring without being so dominant that it feels like a takeover by a faceless fund. The economics have to make sense for the seller. Get those three things right and the conversation moves faster than most people expect.

According to KfW Research and European Commission SME data, Belgium faces tens of thousands of SME succession events over the next decade, with concentration in Wallonia where industrial heritage is deepest and the alternative buyers are fewest. The market is not going to solve itself. Family successors are rarer than they used to be, strategic acquirers are not interested in businesses below a certain size, and the default outcome for a €2M EBITDA company with no succession plan is usually a slow decline rather than a clean sale.

The 90-day window was possible because the infrastructure existed before the deals did. Proprietary deal flow, committed capital, a diligence team, a network of regional co-investors and lenders, and operators who had already been selected and trained before the acquisition targets were identified. Reverse that sequence and none of it works at this pace.

What Comes Next

In January 2026, Kaeron completed its second acquisition. HBI closed shortly after. We are now building the 2026 cohort: ten new CEOs-in-Residence who will run the same process Frédéric, Steven, and Guy-Louis ran, with the benefit of a model that has now been tested against real companies, real sellers, and real Belgian acquisition financing conditions.

What we know now that we did not know twelve months ago is mostly about sellers. The decision to hand over a company you have spent your working life building is not primarily a financial calculation. It is a question of trust in a specific person taking over a specific set of relationships. The institutional infrastructure matters to get the deal done. The operator in the room is what makes the seller say yes.

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