The Anti-Roll-Up: How Minority Stakes Are Disrupting PE’s Agency Playbook

On paper, roll-ups sound simple: consolidate smaller agencies, cut duplicate costs, stack revenue, and flip for a higher multiple. For two decades, financial engineering has been the default play.

But agencies are not widgets. They are cultures, clients, and creative talent. Integration is messy.

Data point: Over 75% of buyouts are now bolt-ons. Yet Bain reports that 70% of roll-ups destroy value due to cultural clashes, not financial performance.

Example: Entire PR networks collapsed in the last cycle because there was no shared data backbone, no integration strategy, just a spreadsheet stack of acquisitions.

And the human cost is real. One founder we spoke to sold into a roll-up at £3m turnover. Within 18 months, their brand was gone, three senior leaders had resigned, and they were locked into earnout targets they couldn’t hit. The cheque cleared, but the legacy was erased.

The roll-up playbook isn’t new. In the early 2000s, it was hailed as the fastest way to scale fragmented industries. From dentistry chains in the US to IT resellers in Europe, financial groups used leverage to buy dozens of small firms and “integrate” them into larger platforms.

Advertising and marketing followed suit. Holding companies acquired boutiques, consolidated them, and promised synergies. For a time, it worked. Share prices rose. Multiples expanded. But the cracks were always cultural.

The founders who sold out often left within two years. Clients followed them. Integration costs ballooned. By the next cycle, investors were left with hollow shells that resembled agencies but functioned like spreadsheets.

History is repeating now. The playbook hasn’t changed, but the market has. Clients demand integration, not silos. Talent wants culture, not bureaucracy. And technology has widened the gap between agencies that can reinvent themselves and those that can’t.

Financial engineering is brilliant at scaling spreadsheets. It’s terrible at scaling agencies.

Why? Because the real levers of value aren’t cost savings or stacked revenue. They’re:

• Retention: clients who stay for five years, not five months.
  
  
• Talent: teams who grow with the firm, not burn out after a quarter.
  
  
• Resilience: infrastructure that survives leadership changes.
  
  

Strip those out, and all the leverage in the world can’t save the platform.

As one ex-roll-up founder told us:

“Every month became about the numbers, not the work. We were measured on cost savings, not client outcomes. Within 12 months, our best account director left. Two clients went with her. The spreadsheet still looked fine, until it didn’t.”

For founders, the roll-up model creates a brutal trade-off:

• Sell the majority to PE or a holding group: you lose control, your culture, and often your team.
  
  
• Join a roll-up: you become a line item in someone else’s spreadsheet, with promised synergies that rarely materialise.
  
  
• Go it alone: you remain under-resourced and outpaced by competitors with deeper pockets.
  
  

That’s why so many agency leaders feel stuck between three bad choices.

Here’s the contrarian question: What if founders could access growth capital, infrastructure, and networks without having to sell control?

• What if you could hire senior leaders ahead of revenue, without mortgaging your culture?
  
  
• What if you could embed AI transformation in just ten weeks, rather than bolt it on when buyers demand it?
  
  
• What if you could prepare for an exit years in advance, with valuation levers already baked in?
  
  

That’s the alternative emerging now: minority capital paired with operational infrastructure.

It doesn’t rely on cost-cutting. It doesn’t require cultural assimilation. It compounds what’s already working instead of ripping it apart.

Minority capital on its own is not enough. Write a cheque without systems, and you just accelerate fragility. The differentiator is capital plus infrastructure.

At The Unusual Group, we see four levers that actually change the game:

1. Infrastructure Before Exit
   Buyers don’t pay for potential. They pay for documented systems, financial discipline, and clean contracts. Agencies that install these years before a deal double valuations.
   
   
2. AI Transformation Built In
   70% of AI rollouts fail because they’re bolted on. Embedding AI into workflows delivers 30% efficiency gains and builds defensibility; buyers reward with premiums.
   
   
3. Leadership Depth
   Agencies collapse when everything depends on the founder. Bringing in a COO or senior bench ahead of revenue reduces risk, stabilises culture, and reassures buyers that the agency can survive succession.
   
   
4. Peer Networks That Multiply
   Coaching gives advice. Cohorts give accountability and shared intelligence. Agencies that scale together accelerate faster than those that scale alone.
   
   

These levers aren’t optional. They’re exactly what buyers test in diligence, and why some agencies trade at 12–15x EBITDA while others languish at 5–6x.

Consider two £4m-turnover agencies.

Agency A joins a roll-up. They sell majority control, integrate into a group, and become one of ten “bolt-ons.” Within two years, three senior leaders exit, culture fragments, and the promised cross-sell never materialises. Buyers pass.

As one founder told us, “It felt like we sold our identity. On paper, the numbers stacked. In practice, we lost the magic that made clients buy from us in the first place.”

Agency B takes minority capital plus infrastructure. They shift 60% of revenue to retainers, hire a COO, embed AI dashboards, and document financial discipline. Within three years, they double their valuation.

One partner put it simply: “For the first time, I felt like the business could thrive without me in the room. That’s when buyers started calling us, not the other way around.”

Same revenue. Same sector. Different trajectory.

The roll-up era is ending. By 2026, investors won’t reward bolt-ons without an operational backbone. They’ll price them at discounts.

Meanwhile, buyer filters are shifting fast:

• AI/data diligence will move from “bonus” to baseline.
  
  
• Founder rollover equity will be expected as standard.
  
  
• ESG and DEI metrics will be priced in, not for PR, but because clients and talent demand it.
  
  

The direction of travel is clear: agencies that look like spreadsheets will be sidelined. Agencies that look like platforms will command premiums.

We’ve built and exited our own agencies. We know what survives diligence and what doesn’t. That’s why we created The Unusual Method™, an eight-phase roadmap from growth to exit, proven across more than £200M in founder exit value.

It hardwires:

• Revenue architecture: shifting from projects to predictable retainers.
  
  
• Leadership design: building succession into the DNA.
  
  
• AI transformation: embedding defensibility early, not as an afterthought.
  
  
• Exit readiness: packaging systems and financials, years before buyers arrive.
  
  

This is not about stacking agencies. It’s about compounding them.

Roll-ups strip control. Financial engineering strips culture. Both destroy value.

Founder-first capital plus infrastructure compounds value. It multiplies what works, protects what matters, and engineers survival instead of fragility.

As The Unusual Group CEO Luke Tobin puts it:
“Roll-ups strip control. Founder-first capital compounds it.”

Download The Unusual Group’s Exit Readiness Checklist or book a confidential conversation about how to scale without selling out.