This article is based on my conversation with Andrea Allegrini, Head of Waste Management and Investor Relations at Lindbergh S.p.A., on the RolyPoly podcast. Listen to the full episode above.
Most HVAC roll-ups I've studied follow the same playbook: buy identical businesses, expand geographically, centralize everything. Andrea Allegrini's team at Lindbergh is doing the opposite — and it's working.
Andrea joined Lindbergh in 2008 as employee number two. No degree, no MBA, no corporate pedigree. He started answering phones in customer service, making 200 calls a day to schedule waste pickup routes across Italy. Eighteen years later, he's the company's investor relations face and a key voice in their acquisition strategy. He built and ran the France subsidiary from scratch, saw it through a turnaround from a €2M annual loss to breakeven, then made the counterintuitive call to sell it anyway.
Now he's helping lead what might be the most interesting HVAC consolidation play in Europe: 14 acquisitions in two years across Italy's €12 billion HVAC maintenance market — a market with 12,000 fragmented companies and, as far as Andrea knows, zero competitors doing what they're doing.
What struck me most in our conversation wasn't the deal volume. It was the philosophy. Lindbergh doesn't try to turn acquired companies into mini versions of itself. Their motto — "more plumbers, less managers" — captures something most acquirers get backwards.
Buy a Little of Everything
Here's where Lindbergh's approach gets genuinely different.
Most roll-ups in HVAC (or any fragmented industry) target the same type of business and expand geographically. Buy plumbing companies in one city, then the next, then the next. It's clean, it's easy to explain to investors, and it makes integration simpler because every company does roughly the same thing.
Lindbergh buys heating companies, AC companies, maintenance specialists, and even water treatment businesses — deliberately mixing different types of HVAC services within the same region.
Andrea explained why: seasonality.
A heating company covers costs from January to September and makes its margins in Q4. An AC company peaks in summer. If you own both in the same territory, your technicians stay busy year-round. "It's really powerful," Andrea told me, "because the technician is already paid. It's just incremental turnover with little incremental operational costs."
That's not a theoretical efficiency. It's a practical one — the technician's salary is fixed, and cross-training through their internal SMIT Academy means the same person can work on heating systems in winter and AC units in summer. The marginal cost of that extra work is essentially a hotel room and a performance bonus.
This also reduces risk. If a government pulls fiscal bonuses for new AC installations (which happened in Italy), a pure AC roll-up gets hammered. Lindbergh barely flinches because heating, maintenance, and water treatment revenue absorbs the shock. Diversification isn't just a portfolio theory concept — it's an operational buffer.
The France Lesson: Don't Be Jealous About What You've Built
Before the HVAC strategy existed, Andrea spent three years building Lindbergh France from the ground up. A major customer's French logistics provider went bankrupt, so Lindbergh stepped in with a local partner. Day one of operations was the first day of COVID lockdown.
They entered as minority shareholders, found the company losing €2M a year on €9M turnover, took over the board, moved strategic functions to Italy, and ground their way to breakeven within a year. They renegotiated supplier contracts, fixed customer pricing, and cut operational fat.
Then they sold it.
This is the part that surprised me. They'd done the hard work. The business was finally healthy. Why walk away?
Andrea's answer was the most honest thing I heard in our conversation: "If you have a better opportunity, don't be — I don't know if it's the proper term — jealous about what you've built. If selling is a better opportunity because you have a better way to spend your energy and money, jump into the new opportunity. The past is past."
The HVAC opportunity in Italy was simply bigger. Italy has 12,000 fragmented HVAC businesses, no national player, and a generational transfer wave as aging owners look for successors. Every euro and every hour spent defending a competitive position in France was a euro and an hour not spent exploiting a wide-open Italian market.
Capital allocation isn't just about money — it's about energy. That's a lesson a lot of serial acquirers talk about in theory but rarely act on. Their CEO, Michele Coradi, wrote a shareholder letter framing it exactly that way: capital and energy allocation. Then they actually followed through.
Paying 2x EBITDA (on Paper, 4.5x)
The financial structure behind Lindbergh's acquisition pace deserves attention because it explains how a mid-cap company can do 14 deals in two years without drowning in debt.
The headline multiple is around 4.5x EBITDA. But the actual cash out of pocket at closing is about 2x. How? 30% cash at closing, 70% vendor loan repaid over three to four years. The acquired company's own cash generation funds most of the purchase price over time.
Andrea described it as a flywheel: "If those companies are able to generate cash, also thanks to the deal structure, we can have those companies paying the deal itself." Buy a healthy, cash-generating business for 30% down, let the business fund the rest, and use the freed-up capital to acquire the next one.
This only works because they're buying healthy companies. And that's a deliberate choice born from the France experience — fixing broken businesses drains cash and energy. Their target profile is specific: companies doing €500K to €1M in revenue, stable margins over the last decade, loyal technicians, and a clear succession need.
They'd rather buy three companies at €500K EBITDA each than one at €1.5M. More diversification, less concentration risk, and if one underperforms, it doesn't tank the whole strategy.
The 4 Disqualifiers
What impressed me about Lindbergh's deal discipline is that their criteria are defined by what they won't buy, not what they will. Andrea outlined four deal-breakers:
1. Low employee loyalty. Before closing, they check the average tenure of technicians. In one deal near Monza, the average seniority was 13 years. "If you buy this company, you are safe because a technician is not leaving." If loyalty metrics look weak, they walk.
2. No cash production. The vendor loan structure requires the business to generate cash. If it doesn't, the math breaks.
3. Too many family members. This one surprised me. Andrea was blunt: "We had some experience there and we needed to completely change all the people inside the company." When a €500K business has three family members on the payroll, buying it often means replacing the entire staff — which defeats the purpose of buying a healthy company in the first place.
4. No succession person. Before signing, they need the seller to identify someone already inside the company who can take over management. No internal successor means no deal. This also preserves the local identity and customer relationships that make the company valuable.
Their M&A team? Two and a half people. Due diligence is straightforward because these are service businesses — the balance sheet is mostly labor costs and spare parts. No factory, no complex IP, no hidden liabilities. They don't need external consultants to analyze a company doing €800K in maintenance revenue.
"More Plumbers, Less Managers": The Mild Approach to Integration
This is where Lindbergh's philosophy really diverges from the PE playbook.
They don't rebrand acquired companies. They don't restructure operations. They don't send in a transformation team to "optimize" everything. Andrea calls it a "mild approach," and it means exactly what it sounds like: stay in the back, help these companies do what they already do, but better.
What they do centralize:
- ERP. This is the one non-negotiable. Every acquired company migrates to Lindbergh's ERP on day one. No data visibility, no group-level decision-making. "This is not under discussion," Andrea said plainly.
- Inventory visibility. They just started giving companies visibility into each other's spare parts inventory — and companies immediately began buying from each other instead of external suppliers.
- Purchasing power. They're centralizing €8M in spare parts and consumables spend in 2026 to negotiate better pricing with brands.
- Training. The SMIT Academy standardizes technician training across the portfolio, organized by seniority level and designed to cross-train across brands and systems.
- Cash management. Monthly 10-minute cash reviews with every local manager — teaching operators who grew up as technicians to think like business owners.
What they keep local: brand names, customer relationships, day-to-day operations, local management, the identity that made each business successful in the first place.
Two central people rotate across the portfolio, spending about a month at each location when issues arise. That's it. No consulting army. No integration PMO. More plumbers, less managers.
Each Technician Is Worth €100K
Retention isn't an HR issue for Lindbergh — it's the acquisition strategy.
In HVAC maintenance, a technician who leaves doesn't just create a vacancy. They create a competitor. My aunt actually works as an HVAC foreman in Portugal and confirmed this: the moment you train someone up, they can walk out and start their own shop.
Lindbergh's answer is economic: make it financially irrational to leave. Technicians who travel to help other group companies get a monthly bonus. Those who upsell services during maintenance visits get a variable fee. The result: some technicians earn 30-40% above market rates.
Andrea put the math plainly: "If you hire an engineer, you automatically have an incremental turnover of around €100K at the end of the year. It's mathematics." Each technician is a profit center. Paying them well isn't generosity — it's protecting a €100K revenue stream and preventing the creation of a local competitor.
The Word-of-Mouth Pipeline
Perhaps the most enviable part of Lindbergh's model is their deal sourcing. Of 14 acquisitions, nearly all came inbound.
The HVAC market in Italy runs through brand dealer networks. OEMs like Daikin or Mitsubishi organize periodic meetings with their licensed dealers. At these meetings, sellers talk to each other. "One seller is saying to the other, I sold to Lindbergh. They want to build the first national brand in HVAC. If you are willing to sell, give them a call."
The underlying driver is generational succession. Italy's economy is built on small, family-owned businesses, and a generation of HVAC business owners is reaching retirement age with no one to pass the company to. Lindbergh offers them a clean exit: keep the company name, keep the team, get 30% cash upfront and the rest over four years, and know that what you built continues.
Their conversion rate is remarkable. In two years, only one deal fell through before signing — and that was because the seller changed his mind and decided to leave the company to his son.
Andrea acknowledged they're shifting toward more proactive sourcing now, particularly to build out their hub-and-spoke coverage in new regions. But the passive inbound pipeline from word of mouth and generational transfer has been the foundation.
What Operators Can Take from Lindbergh's Playbook
After talking with Andrea, a few principles stand out that apply well beyond HVAC:
Buy healthy, or don't buy at all. The France turnaround taught Lindbergh that fixing broken companies consumes all your energy and capital. If you buy good companies, "you've already done 90% of what you have to do." If you buy bad ones, you're spending energy fixing instead of growing.
Diversify within your vertical. Buying complementary rather than identical businesses creates natural operational efficiencies (shared workforce across seasons) and reduces exposure to external shocks (regulatory changes, fiscal policy shifts).
Structure deals for cash generation. The 30/70 vendor loan model means acquired companies fund their own acquisition over time. This only works with healthy, cash-generating targets — which reinforces the discipline of the buying criteria.
Integrate data, not culture. ERP on day one for visibility. Everything else stays local. This is a pragmatic middle ground between the "change everything" approach that destroys value and the "change nothing" approach that prevents scale.
Invest in people, not management layers. Pay technicians above market. Build an academy. Make it irrational to leave. Every retained technician is €100K in revenue and one fewer competitor.
