Linh Van Deibel, Leo Van Deibel·January 26, 2026

The First Steps to a Family Holdco | Linh and Leo Van Deibel Interview

Linh and Leo Van Deibel are a married couple — she from Vietnam via Wharton and fintech startups, he German-born via BCG consulting and PE — who co-founded Acacia Partners as a self-funded search vehicle and long-term family holding company based in the UK. After an 8-9 month solo search by Linh (during which she faced significant skepticism as a non-British Asian woman dealing with UK brokers and sellers), Leo left a PE job offer to join, and together they acquired Infrastructure Design Solutions (IDS), a 25-person specialist telecom/ICT engineering design consultancy operating across EMEA with over $1.5m EBITDA, benefiting from data center and AI-infrastructure buildout tailwinds. The deal was structured with roughly 50% private lender debt, outside equity from 8-9 investors, seller financing via earnout and equity rollover, and their own capital, resulting in 60-70% buyer ownership — a majority-owner structure they had to fight hard to achieve against UK investor norms. Post-close, they survived two black swans: their largest customer pausing all projects without notice, and a UK government national security review that put the deal in legal limbo for months. Running the business together as a couple has proven valuable but boundary-blurring, while Linh simultaneously navigated a multi-year IVF journey that she describes as harder than search itself. Their long-term goal is to grow Acacia into a multi-business holding company, treating each acquisition as a permanent family investment.

Deal facts

sde ebitda: EBITDA north of $1.5m USD at time of acquisition
financing structure: ~50% private lender debt + outside equity (8-9 investors) + seller financing (earnout + equity rollover) + own equity; buyers retained 60-70% ownership
notes: No SBA equivalent in UK; closed approximately March 2025 (9-10 months before interview date of Jan 2026); cash cushion of roughly 10-20% of fresh equity injected post-close; 25 employees at acquisition; target investor IRR 30-35% base case, 15% / 2x MOM downside

Why this business

Opportunistically identified via a broker teaser — not something they were explicitly looking for. They were drawn to IDS because it was a specialist engineering design consultancy operating in a genuinely growing market (double-digit growth driven by data infrastructure buildout across EMEA), with strong macro tailwinds from AI and structural capacity gaps versus the US. They valued the consulting business model (familiar to Leo from BCG), the quality of client relationships, and the sellers' clear commitment to legacy and employee welfare. They saw a platform they could professionalize and grow — building out sales/marketing, back-office, and diversifying the client base.

What's working

Strong rapport and trust with sellers, who remain involved post-acquisition and helped new owners get up to speed on industry terminology and project quoting within six months
Equity rollover and earnout structures kept sellers financially aligned with long-term success
Planned cash cushion (10-20% of fresh equity) provided runway when largest customer paused all projects post-close
Underlying market tailwinds: double-digit growth in data infrastructure across EMEA, with European capacity per capita still well behind the US
Complementary skill sets between Linh (finance, fintech M&A integration) and Leo (BCG consulting, PE) allowed them to professionalize back-office, budgeting, forecasting, and begin building a sales/marketing pipeline
Self-funded structure gave them full operational autonomy and majority ownership, which they prioritized over a traditional search fund board structure

What's hard

Largest customer paused all projects without notice shortly after close, requiring rapid pivot to sales and marketing to build a new pipeline
UK government (Home Office) launched a national security review of the acquisition post-close because the buyers are not British and the business touches critical data infrastructure; the deal was in legal limbo for two to three months
Raising investor capital outside the traditional search fund model was very difficult — most UK/European investors insisted on majority investor ownership rather than majority searcher ownership, requiring many rejections before finding aligned investors
Linh conducted the search as a non-British Asian woman in the UK; brokers told her she was a 'soft figure' and suggested she bring an older white male to seller meetings; she had to build thick skin and treat it as a numbers game
Concurrent IVF journey alongside search and post-acquisition operations — physically and emotionally draining, with daily hormone injections, frequent medical appointments, and multiple unsuccessful transfers over multiple years
Working as a married couple blurs professional and personal boundaries, with shared stress and difficulty switching off from work discussions
Investor fundraise for the deal took far longer and required speaking to far more people than expected, with one investor pulling out a week before signing

Notable quotes

I would say the search process was probably the second hardest thing I've done in my life — after IVF. Receiving so many rejections, I probably reviewed a thousand deals and you know requested probably 200 SIMs and kind of narrow down that funnel, but it's just a numbers game at the end of the day.

Shortly after the acquisition, the UK Home Office informed us that they were going to be inquiring whether us acquiring this business was a national security threat. A bit surprising for us and extremely anxiety-inducing because we're not British.

A lot of brokers sat me down and told me that they consider me as a quote unquote soft figure and so I need to bring in an older white male into meetings with sellers to make it look more representable.

The IVF process is much more brutal because you feel like you have no control of the process and you have no idea why it doesn't work out. For search, if it doesn't work out, you know that maybe because you bid too high or maybe because you didn't engage the right lender. But with IVF, we had no idea.