Why here, why now
The succession wave is demographic fact: thousands of profitable Dutch companies with founders past sixty and heirs elsewhere. Deal sizes of €2–15M enterprise value, banks fluent in acquisition finance, and sellers who prefer a committed operator over a strategic’s integration plan — the search fund’s natural habitat.
The two-stage structure
Search stage: a search BV funded by investors’ search capital, the searcher’s personal holding above their own stake from day one. Acquisition stage: the deal BV acquires the target; investors and searcher roll into its cap table — searcher equity through the personal holding, vesting and step-ups written into the shareholders’ agreement. Exit proceeds return through the exemption from a 5% stake: the PE architecture in miniature.
The searcher’s own economics
Post-acquisition, the searcher-CEO is a director-shareholder (DGA): the €58,000 salary benchmark, the growth-phase arrangement in the lean integration years, and distributions timed to the debt schedule — the personal layer designed with the deal rather than after it: the levers. Succession sellers, meanwhile, read their own chapter: the BOR, which often shapes the deal’s family side.