How hard is it actually to execute a roll up?

Wanted to gather some insight from people who have pursued or considered executing a roll-up strategy independently.

I do not think that I want to be a career PE investor, my primary interest in the space is to prepare me to take an entrepreneurial leap.

Am I vastly underestimating the difficulty of executing a roll up? My experience is in healthcare and I have always thought that after a few years in LMM PE that I would pick a healthcare niche to roll up and have a fat pay day. Is this even remotely realistic or is it just too competitive these days?

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This is kind of a useless question. If I tell you it's extremely easy would that change how likely you are to pursue it? Or vice versa? Try it and see what happens.

A better question is what kind of difficulty is executing a roll-up. It's the operational kind. 

Sourcing, deal negotiation, financial analysis, building working trust, incentive alignment and post-close remediation and integration aren't conceptually difficult, they just require a blend of EQ, IQ and work ethic. And honestly you can be lacking in 1 of the 3 and still have a decent to successful roll-up. Enough work ethic can pretty much blast through any deficiencies in EQ or IQ imo although if I had to rank importance, EQ, work ethic and IQ in that order. In the LMM it's mostly about getting enough operators through the NDA funnel to even get to the point of closing 1 deal. 99% of business jobs are basically this at the end of the day - sales and some rote execution

 

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