Luis Reyes·August 11, 2025

2 Years to $40m: The Anatomy of a High-Velocity Roll-up | Luis Reyes Interview

Luis Reyes, a Mexican-born former McKinsey and Bain consultant with an earlier SaaS startup exit, co-founded a high-velocity fire safety rollup in Spain with two partners, completing over 24 acquisitions and reaching approximately 40 million euros in revenue in just two years. Starting with less than 1 million euros in friends-and-family capital structured similarly to a search fund, the team identified fire safety as an ideal consolidation target: hyper-fragmented (300+ companies in greater Barcelona alone), recurring and regulated revenue, and almost zero private equity presence. Their first fire safety acquisition — a 1.7M revenue, 600K EBITDA business near Barcelona — proved to be a best-practice operational model that they then used as a benchmark to identify and improve subsequent targets. The team built a proprietary AI-powered routing and customer service platform in-house, enabling the operational leverage needed to absorb rapid acquisition volume. Capital was eventually secured from a German family office experienced in European rollups. The primary challenges have been the sheer complexity of integration at scale, the difficulty of raising capital in a culturally risk-averse Spanish market, and the relationship-intensive nature of acquiring from small, owner-operated businesses where deals often turn on personal trust rather than price.

Deal facts

sde ebitda: First fire safety platform: ~600K EBITDA (referred to as IBITA/IVITA); largest single acquisition: ~2M EBITDA; portfolio total: ~8M EBITDA across 24+ businesses
revenue: ~$40M total platform revenue (near time of recording); first fire safety acquisition: 1.7M revenue
financing structure: Initial raise: <1M friends and family (search-fund-like structure); second raise: 20M from German family office focused on rollups; additional capital raise underway at time of recording targeting ~16M EBITDA
notes: First acquisition was a poultry distribution business (separate from fire safety rollup). Fire safety rollup started with a ~600K EBITDA company near Barcelona. 24+ acquisitions completed in approximately 2 years. Platform operates in Spain. Co-founded with two partners, all former McKinsey/Bain consultants. Structure resembled a search fund but with multiple acquisitions permitted and operators not required to run day-to-day from day one.

Why this business

Luis and his partners identified fire safety in Spain as a highly fragmented, recession-resistant, recurring-revenue industry with no active private equity consolidators, thousands of small family-owned companies willing to sell, and clear operational improvement potential. Coming from McKinsey and Bain with M&A and post-merger integration backgrounds, they believed their skill set — combined with a tech/startup mindset — could apply US and Nordic rollup strategies to an underserved Spanish market.

What's working

Extremely high fragmentation in Spanish fire safety: over 300 companies in greater Barcelona alone, with less than 5% of industry revenue concentrated in top five players — creating a massive acquisition pipeline
Inbound deal flow from brokers and owners accelerated after the first acquisition, and now deals come primarily through relationships built by the in-house M&A team
AI-first operations: custom AI overlay for route optimization, AI-powered call center handling simple customer requests, built in-house by a dedicated AI team — reducing labor costs and improving customer experience
Revenue-per-technician and back-office-to-front-office ratio as simple but powerful operating metrics that guide integration and value creation across acquired companies
High-caliber, young M&A team (former PE and M&A backgrounds) who travel Spain knocking on doors, build deep owner relationships, and conduct their own LBO analysis
First platform acquisition happened to be exceptionally well-run operationally, providing a best-practice model to apply to subsequent acquisitions
Public financial data on Spanish private companies (balance sheet, P&L, cash flow) enables pre-conversation screening of 2,500+ companies in their database
German family office investor with prior European rollup experience provided aligned, experienced capital

What's hard

Integration has been the primary bottleneck — far more work than anticipated, especially consolidating customer bases, phone systems, and route management across multiple acquired companies in dense metro areas like Barcelona
Consolidating call centers after acquiring multiple businesses in a region caused customer confusion and phone chaos, requiring an outsourced Colombian call center and then an AI-powered solution
Raising capital in Spain is difficult: investors are culturally risk-averse, prefer traditional assets (real estate), offer below-market management fees, and rollups are still a nascent asset class with few experienced operators to point to
Finding and retaining top-caliber operational talent willing to travel constantly across Spain is demanding
Valuation timing risk during fundraising: continuing to acquire while raising led to the round being priced on stale (lower) EBITDA figures, nearly creating investor misalignment
Assessing operational quality of targets from the outside is very difficult — two companies with identical financials can have radically different operational realities
Owners in Spain are often mercurial, non-professional, and relationship-driven — price is rarely the only or primary deal variable

Notable quotes

We don't have access to deep capitals, deep pools of capital. So we better have something that we provide and bring to the tables.

Every business owner even you know former business owner integrated into organization say like that's not going to work — this is not the way small businesses work. You cannot do this for safety businesses. Say look, let me try it out in the south part of Madrid and let's see how this 100 customers react, and everyone react great.

It's not a one — definitely when I see people wanting to do roll-ups and it's a guy, I say it's not about being smart or about wanting to work a lot of hours. You need a team. You need a team specialized on every area of the thing that you want to do.

We have a deal that we call grandma — abuela — because the only reason why we closed it is because the grandma of one of my co-founders was friend of the wife of the owner, and he found out that they're from the same town. Otherwise this guy wouldn't have sold.