Who we are
Two Portuguese founders. Why we created Grupo Cerne, why we chose these trades, and why we buy to keep.
Pedro Teixeira Duarte
President
Pedro is the fourth generation of the family behind Teixeira Duarte, the engineering group founded in 1921, and learned early what it means to be handed something and asked to look after it. He worked in private equity at Alpac Capital and taught Finance at Católica Lisbon. During his MBA at Stanford he worked with search funds, and that is where the idea for Grupo Cerne took shape. At Grupo Cerne he leads the relationships with owners and with the industry. 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 founded and ran his own company, Prospio, before turning to the work of finding and acquiring others. He began his career at BCG in Lisbon, holds a master’s in finance from NOVA SBE and an MBA from Harvard. At Grupo Cerne he leads finance and operations. He believes the hardest and most useful thing in this work is to make a good company better without breaking what already works.
Many of Portugal’s best small and mid-sized companies were built quietly, by people who never thought about selling them. They were built to support a family and, often, to pass to the next generation. Today many of those founders, or the children who succeeded them, reach the moment of deciding what comes next with nobody to hand the company to. When they look at the market, the buyer who appears is often a fund, which buys to transform the company and sell it again a few years later.
We created Grupo Cerne to buy good Portuguese HVAC, electrical and plumbing companies and help them keep growing. We have no date set to sell them, which lets us decide with the long term in mind and keep what we promise.
We know what it is to receive something that somebody built over a lifetime and to become responsible for it. We do not know these trades better than the people who have given them decades. What we bring is capital and support so that these companies keep growing for many years.
Why these trades
We chose HVAC, electrical and plumbing because a building cannot do without them. When something breaks, the repair does not wait for the next quarter. They are also trades in which experience, certifications and reputation take many years to build.
Why buy to keep
A buyer with an exit date has to think from the first day about when he will sell again, and that weighs on the price he pays, the investments he makes and the decisions he takes.
Our company was set up for an indefinite term, and we do not buy companies in order to sell them. As in a listed company, who holds the shares can change over the years, and the group and its companies stay. For the person selling us a company, this means we want to still be here to answer for what we promise.
We buy your company to carry on building it.
If you have built a good company and are thinking about what comes next, we would be glad to talk.
Pedro Teixeira Duarte, President · Manuel Oliveira, CEO