Who we are
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 reach a point where what comes next has to be decided, 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, 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. 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.
Who you deal with
The person you speak to is Pedro. He answers the first phone call, he comes out to the company, he meets your team, and he remains the person you deal with right through to the day of completion. Manuel comes in where the numbers are, and handles the analysis of the accounts and the technical side of the process, but this is not a new team at every stage: there are two of us, and we do not pass your case to anyone. There is no account manager who receives you and then disappears, and no transaction team that turns up halfway through and never sees you again. This does not change during the process, and it does not change after it.