Bought to keep

I · August 2026

The question we are asked most often, by owners and by people who look at this from the outside, is the same one: if you buy good companies, why would you never sell them? The answer is not sentiment. It is that selling is expensive in ways that rarely appear in the arithmetic.

A company that is being prepared for sale starts behaving like a company that is being prepared for sale. Investment that pays back over five years gets deferred, because the buyer will not pay for it. The people who might have been promoted are kept where they are, because the organisation chart is easier to explain unchanged. Everyone senses it, and the good ones start taking calls. None of this shows up as a cost. All of it is one.

Not selling removes the deadline, and with it most of those distortions. A roof, a truck, an apprentice, a second branch that takes three years to pay for itself — these become ordinary decisions rather than arguments. Compounded across a long enough period, ordinary decisions made without a clock are worth more than clever ones made against it.

Permanence costs us something, and we would rather say what. We cannot win a competitive auction, because the highest price is usually paid by whoever has the shortest holding period and the most debt. We have to be right the first time, since there is no exit to correct a mistake with. And we are slower: we would rather lose six months than buy a company we would not want to own in twenty years.

What it buys the owner is the only part that matters to them. The name above the door stays. The people stay. The person who spent thirty years building something can step back without watching it be taken apart to make a return — and can still walk into the yard afterwards, which is not a small thing.

We will write these letters when there is something worth saying, and not otherwise. If that turns out to be twice a year, it will be twice a year.

— Pedro Teixeira Duarte, Presidente · Manuel Oliveira, CEO

More letters are here. If you are an owner thinking about what comes next, here is how a sale works.