What Doing 30 Acquisitions a Year Actually Teaches You

By Lasse Mäkelä, Founder, Larzon Capital

I had spent eight years in investment banking, first in London and then in Helsinki, when the opportunity at KONE Corporation came up. The title was Vice President, Alliances and Acquisitions, and the role sat at the centre of one of the most active corporate M&A programmes in Finland.

I was genuinely excited. Corporate M&A at a company of that scale was a completely different world from what I knew, and the chance to be inside the machine rather than advising from outside it felt like a significant step. But I was also nervous. Investment banking has a particular culture, and it was the one I was used to. I was not sure how well the person it had shaped would fit somewhere very different.

What I found at KONE surprised me.

Company with a different kind of culture

KONE is one of the world's leading elevator and escalator manufacturers, operating across more than 60 countries. Currently third globally by revenue behind Otis and Schindler, KONE in April 2026 announced its agreement to acquire TK Elevator from its private equity owners for 29.4 billion euros, a transaction that will create the world's largest elevator maker with combined annual sales exceeding 20 billion euros. It is, in many ways, the logical culmination of a strategy of disciplined international growth stretching back decades. The scale is genuinely extraordinary. And yet the culture inside it carried something you would not expect from a company that size: a family company feel, shaped by Herlin family ownership dating back to the 1920s, that made it feel more grounded and less performative than the environments I had come from.

At KONE I found people who were simply good at their work and genuine. Investment banking attracts a certain type, and that type tends to perform a version of itself constantly. At KONE that was largely absent. It took me a little time to recalibrate, but once I did, I found it a better environment to actually learn in.

A list of 1,500 companies

On my first day in the role, I was handed a list of approximately 1,500 potential acquisition targets.

That list was the starting point for everything. KONE had been doing international M&A since the 1960s, building a methodical acquisition programme that had compounded into one of the most experienced corporate M&A operations in Finnish corporate history. By the time I arrived, the company was completing roughly 25 to 30 acquisitions per year globally.

My personal responsibility covered around seven to nine closings per year on average, with oversight of roughly twice that number as processes matured toward the end of my time there. The rest were led by country managers in KONE's local organisations, with my team providing oversight, methodology, and the process discipline needed to bring each transaction to the Group Acquisition Committee in a consistent format. That committee, which included the CEO, the CFO, and my direct superior, reviewed and approved every material transaction up to certain size before the Board. My superior, who headed Legal, M&A, Risk Management and many other functions for the group and sat on the group management team, gave me genuinely wide latitude to negotiate and structure deals alongside our legal colleagues, which was both a privilege and an education I could not have planned for.

What volume forces you to learn

Doing seven to nine acquisitions a year yourself and managing 20 or so more from a distance, year after year, forces a kind of clarity that slower-paced M&A work does not.

You stop spending time on things that do not matter. Not because you consciously decide to, but because the volume makes it physically impossible to do otherwise. You develop an instinct, quickly, for what drives the outcome of a transaction and what is noise. Due diligence that would consume three months at a lower-volume operation gets done in six weeks or less because you have learned, from experience, which issues actually change the answer and which ones do not.

That instinct turned out to be one of the most durable things I took from KONE. In later stages of my career, I encountered situations where transactions stalled or failed not because the deal was wrong but because people in the organisation did not understand what was important in an M&A process. They spent time and energy on the wrong things. At KONE, that could not happen, because the entire organisation, from the CFO and controlling teams to the operational country management, had done this enough times to know exactly what needed to happen the moment a deal was signed. The institutional knowledge was embedded in the system, not just in a few individuals.

The question that was always the same

Across those years I sat in acquisition conversations in places as different as Brno in the Czech Republic, Tel Aviv, and Ho Chi Minh City. The businesses were different, the industries were different, the legal systems were different, and the languages were different.

But the entrepreneurs' final questions, the ones that came at the end of the substantive negotiation when the financial terms were largely agreed, were almost identical everywhere.

What happens to my people? What does the future look like for the team I have built? Will the company I have spent twenty years on still mean something after you have owned it for a few years?

I found this striking at the time and I still do. It also connected something personal for me. My father sold his own business in the 1990s, and I remember him having exactly the same concern: what would happen to his employees. He was not alone in that. The surface of a transaction looks very different depending on where you are sitting. The human reality underneath it is remarkably consistent. An entrepreneur in central Europe and an entrepreneur in Southeast Asia, both facing the moment of handing over something they built, ask the same questions. They want the same reassurances. They need to be heard in the same way.

That understanding changed how I approached the people side of acquisition conversations. Not as a box to be checked after the financial terms were settled, but as the part of the negotiation that determines whether someone sells to you at all, and whether the business you acquire is still intact when the ink is dry.

What scale leaves behind

I left KONE with something I did not have when I arrived: a working framework for what matters in M&A and what does not, built not from theory but from repetition.

That framework has informed everything I have done since, through buy-and-build at Consti, fundraising transactions at Invesdor, and cross-border advisory work at Larzon Capital. The specific contexts change. The underlying logic of what makes acquisitions work, and what makes them fail, turns out to be more consistent than you would expect.

KONE taught me that. It took 30 deals a year to do it, but there is probably no faster way.

Lasse Mäkelä is the Founder of Larzon Capital, a cross-border M&A advisory firm based in Switzerland, focused on the Nordic-DACH corridor.