What the aggregators taught the market

Between 2021 and 2022 a generation of buyers raised billions to acquire marketplace-native consumer brands on the promise that scale would deliver margin. By 2024 the largest of them had filed for protection from its creditors and cut its portfolio to a fraction; by 2025 others had been merged, restructured, or wound up, and at least one lender had written its remaining debt to zero. The public record of that episode is a syllabus, and the Group’s buy box is written from it.

The first lesson is about demand. Cash flow that arrives through a marketplace’s algorithm belongs to the algorithm. The Group asks every target who owns its demand: what share of new customers arrives by brand search, direct, and owned channels, and what happens to contribution if the price of paid social rises again. A marketplace-dependent business is admissible only where it is profitable on audited figures and a written multi-channel plan, costed and owned by a named executive, exists before exclusivity.

The second lesson is about price. Growth bought at peak prices with borrowed money is a forecast the lender underwrites. The Group prices verified trailing earnings and pays for growth only as it arrives.

The third lesson is about integration. Deferred integration is deferred discovery. Every business the Group acquires moves onto one operating system within a hundred days: one chart of accounts, one close, one cash forecast, one treasury, one security standard.

The fourth lesson is about candour. The buyers who failed presented the base case first. The Group’s seventh principle is that the downside and the loss case come before the base case, always, to its Board and to its lenders.

One of the Group’s directors co-founded the largest of those buyers. The Group says so deliberately: the lessons were learned by someone who lived them, and he sits on the Board that enforces them.