Articles List

The UK mid-market presents a rare structural arbitrage opportunity for international private equity sponsors, corporate acquirers, and institutional investors.

For over two decades, private equity operated under a seamless implicit contract: Institutional Limited Partners (LPs) committed illiquid capital in exchange for consistent, outsized net alpha over public equity benchmarks.

The narrative surrounding UK business growth has long suffered from a London-centric bias.

The private equity market across the UK and Europe has reached a critical inflection point.

Buy & Hold buyers—often referred to as permanent capital aggregators or long-term compounders—represent a distinct and powerful asset ownership model in private market M&A.

In private equity, assets are typically classified across distinct market tiers based on scale, financial performance, and organizational complexity.

Independent sponsors—frequently referred to as “deal-by-deal” or “fundless” sponsors—are specialized private equity operators and transaction professionals who identify, structure, and execute corporate acquisitions without relying on a pre-funded, committed commingled fund.

Continuation vehicles (CVs)—often referred to as continuation funds—are specialized investment structures established by a private equity sponsor (General Partner or GP) to transfer one or more existing portfolio assets from a maturing primary fund into a newly formed vehicle.

As dealmakers for multiple decades, it’s perhaps surprising to find that whilst the world around M&A has changed markedly over the last twenty years, the process of doing deals and in particular due diligence actually has not.

When I started Independence Capital, we had a singular mission. To be the go-to Private Equity alternative for exit-proven leaders & mgmt teams.

Throughout the two and a half years since we commenced we have faced a lot of questions.

After having joined Independence in September 2021, we ask Ben to share some of his experience and observations as a window into the business for future prospective candidates.

Navigating the M&A market involves a blizzard of acronyms and a whole new language of terms, phrases, documents and processes.

Apologies in advance to those who have landed on this article from an entirely different sort of Google search… because the letters in question here are only MBI otherwise known as “Management-Buy-In”.

It has to be one of, if not the first question, that we often encounter with new teams and leaders considering building for themselves instead of others.