Jacobs: Middle-market PE rollups create unintegrated messes for multiple expansion
Brad Jacobs · The Mindset Behind Building a Great Little Business | Brad Jacobs · Aug 4, 2026 · at 1:06:35
Serial entrepreneur Brad Jacobs critiques private equity rollup strategies that aggregate companies to achieve multiple arbitrage without unifying technology or operational systems.
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“You see a lot of these middle market private equity firms do that. They roll up these small companies. They're doing five, 10, twenty million dollars EBITDA each, and they bat, they just buy a bunch of them, and now they're up to a hundred million or two hundred million EBITDA, and they just get a bigger multiple because they're bigger, but it's a mess. Whoever buy those, Whoever buys those companies, there's a lot of work to be done. You've got to now standardize everything and integrate everything and opportunity to improve them, plus a lot of cost and time to fix all that stuff up.”
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