About
For most of the last century, Portugal’s best small companies were built by people who never meant to sell. They built to last, and to pass on. Today many of those owners are reaching the end of their working lives with no one to take over — and too often the only buyer at the door is a fund that buys in order to sell again.
We started Grupo Cerne to be the other kind of buyer. We acquire good Portuguese businesses in mechanical, electrical and plumbing, and we keep them — the team, the name, the place. We have no fund to wind up and no date by which we must sell. Our capital is committed and long-term, which means we can say what we mean and keep our word.
We are two Portuguese founders. One of us looks after the people and the relationships; the other after how the businesses are run. Between us we have built, advised, taught, and invested — but the part that matters most here is simpler: we know what it is to be handed something and asked to look after it. And we don’t pretend to know these trades better than the people who have spent their lives in them.
If you have built something good and are thinking about what comes next, we would be glad to talk — quietly, and at your pace.
— Pedro Teixeira Duarte, Presidente · Manuel Oliveira, CEO
Pedro Teixeira Duarte — Presidente
Pedro grew up inside a Portuguese family business, and learned early what it means to be handed something and asked to look after it. He has taught finance and invested in private companies, and helped create the institution that stewards his own family’s legacy. The idea for Grupo Cerne took shape during his MBA at Stanford, where he spent much of a year studying how the best operators abroad acquire and hold small businesses — and interviewing many of them. At Grupo Cerne he leads the relationships with owners. He began all of this because he has seen, up close, how much is lost when a good business has nowhere to go.
Manuel Oliveira — CEO
Manuel built and ran his own company before turning to the work of finding and acquiring others. He began his career at BCG, advising companies on strategy and operations, and is — by training and by temperament — a sourcing specialist: patient about finding the right business, and rigorous about understanding it. He holds an MBA from Harvard. At Grupo Cerne he leads operations and the search for the businesses we acquire. He believes the hardest and most useful thing in this work is to leave a good company better while changing as little as possible.
We are Portuguese, we live here, and this is where we intend to build.