A letter from the founders
We have spent most of our working lives building companies. Some of them did well. All of them were sold — and then sold again, and in several cases sold a third time, passing through fund after fund in the years that followed.
Each time, the spreadsheet said it was a success. Each time, something we cared about was quietly lost: the people, the standards, the patience that made the business worth buying in the first place.
We started Samhild because we wanted to be on the other side of that table.
What we kept seeing
The pattern was always the same. A founder spent twenty or thirty years building a real business — clients who trusted them, staff who stayed, work done properly. A fund bought it. Five years later it was sold to another fund. Five years after that, sold again. By the time the third owner showed up, the original culture was a paragraph in a pitch deck.
Nobody set out to do harm. The system itself is built around the clock: the holding period, the exit, the IRR. Everything points in one direction, and that direction is out.
What we wanted instead
We wanted to build a company that could continue to live on for generations — just like the businesses we acquire. Not a vehicle. A company. With a name, a balance sheet, a board, and an obligation to be a good owner indefinitely.
That meant three structural choices, and we made all of them deliberately:
- Permanent capital. Anchored by a single European industrial family in its fifth generation, supported by a small group of operator-investors who think in decades. No fund-end date. No redemption clock.
- Operator-led. Decisions made by people who have actually run service businesses, not by a committee evaluating a deal.
- Governance that prevents the forced sale. Written into the constitutional documents, not a verbal promise.
What this means for the businesses we buy
If you sell your business to us, it is not the next stop on the way to another sale. The phone number stays the same. The team keeps their jobs. The work continues. What you built does not get repackaged and resold the moment we have squeezed enough out of it.
We will help where help is wanted — shared back-office, group procurement, modern systems, peers who run businesses like yours. We will stay out of the way where help is not wanted. The business does not become part of something else. Something else gets built around it.
Why we are writing this
Because we know what most letters from buyers sound like, and we know that words are cheap. The only thing that makes any of this real is the structure underneath it and the people executing on it every day. We are happy to talk through both, in detail, with any owner considering what comes next.
If that is you, write to us at contact@samhild.com.
— Eyass, Axel and Niklas