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Equity buybacks: employees retire a better monday’s stake using company free cash flow (primary driver)Free cash flow distributions: proportional profit share to all investorsConsulting fees charged to the acquired companies to embed the ownership culture and optimise via our OwnerOS value creation platformTransaction fees: charged on each acquisitionShared services: portfolio-wide cost efficiencies
1.5-3% annual growth A small uplift in operating margin, earned as employee ownership takes holdNothing that depends on a bull market or a perfect operator
Acquisitions 73% - equity for 2-3 pilot companies. Proof, not promises.People & Platform 19% - the core team to source, transact and run transitions, plus the first build of the Owner Operating System.G&A 8% - the operating base. Legal, structure, the cost of doing this properly.
Continuing to raise within the LLC structure. The LLC would admit additional investor classes at progressively higher valuations (Series A at Year 2, B at Year 3, C at Year 5), creating mark-to-market uplift for Founding Partners before a single distribution is received establishing an impact-focused M&A fund, a formal GP/LP vehicle to attract institutional capital. launching a public vehicle via an IPO, as a compelling listed holding company: a diversified portfolio of profitable, employee-owned Finnish businesses generating stable, growing cash flows.
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a better monday | Investor Memorandum, May 2026
We buy great businesses from retiring owners and give them to people who built them.
To the future shareholders of a better monday,
We are living through the greatest concentration of wealth since the Gilded Age. It is about to compound. Baby Boomers own 45% of small businesses globally. As they retire, the businesses they built over decades will need to change hands. Most will not find an aligned buyer. Some will close. The wealth locked inside them will disappear.
At the same time, 70% of today's workers are disengaged. They build the value. They don't share in it. The ownership gap and the engagement gap are the same problem viewed from opposite ends.
a better monday acquires profitable Finnish SMEs from retiring owners and transfers them, progressively and structurally, to the people who built them. We generate market-rate returns through the engineered exit to employee ownership, not operational heroics, not a forced exit, not a dependency on a buyer appearing at the right multiple.
Social impact is intrinsically linked to the financial model. When workers own what they build, businesses perform better, communities are stronger. When businesses perform better, investors do too. This memo explains how.
You can learn more about our mission via our
Thank you for your interest and looking forward to building an economy of owners together.
Andy
Executive Summary
a better monday is a programmatic acquirer of profitable Finnish SMEs, building the Nordics' first employee ownership buyout platform.
We acquire enduringly profitable businesses from retiring owners at 3 to 4x EBITDA and transition them to full employee ownership over 8 to 12 years. Investor returns come from engineered buybacks funded by each company's own free cash flow. No buyer. No refinancing. No market event.
The opportunity is structural. In Finland alone, 1,384 profitable SMEs, representing €6.9bn of annual turnover, face the next decade with no natural buyer: too small for PE, unsuited to single-operator search funds, and increasingly without family succession. a better monday is built to fill that gap.
We are raising €1.5m from Founding Partners to fund our first pilot acquisitions, build the team, and develop the platform. This capital alone is structured to return 2.5x at a 10% IRR over 10 years; with sequential raises, Founding Partner IRR rises to 23.6%.
Returns and impact move together: every euro of investor liquidity is tied to employees gaining ownership.
Where We Are Today
This is not a thesis on paper. The engine is running.
Pipeline: A live intermediary network now drives deal flow at scale, 23 new opportunities in a single month. Several Letters of Intent have been sent and active
Institutional support: Sitra, Finland's €900m future fund, commissioned our research and continues to advance a collaboration on pilot-stage capital. All seven major Finnish political parties are engaged, with four meetings confirmed to put employee ownership on their 2027 election platforms.
Profile: The Alternative Exit podcast has passed 65 episodes and earned an invitation to the Oxford Symposium on Employee Ownership.
Proof from peers: in Germany (≈€7m raised, 4 acquisitions) and in France (≈€15m raised) confirm that European capital backs this model. We intend to be the Nordic answer.
What remains is the first close. That is what this raise delivers.
The Problem
47.5% of global assets are owned by the top 1%. 70% of workers are disengaged. These are not separate problems. Narrow ownership produces disengaged workforces, which produces weaker businesses, which accelerates closures. The cycle compounds.
Baby Boomers own nearly half of all small businesses globally. In Finland, 2,549 SMEs will change hands in the next decade, 62,500 jobs depend on what happens next. Of those businesses, 765 will transfer generationally, 400 will be acquired through PE or trade sale, leaving 1,384 companies representing €6.9bn of annual turnover without a natural buyer.
These are not distressed businesses. They are profitable, well-run companies with loyal teams and decades of cash flow history. The problem is not the business. It is the absence of an aligned buyer. PE is too large. Search funds are single-operator models. Trade buyers have no incentive to preserve independent employment. Family succession is declining.
This is the gap a better monday was built to fill.
Why Employee Ownership
Our belief in employee ownership is not ideological, it is built on fifty years of unambiguous empirical evidence. It improves the outcomes for business, workers and communities;
Metric
Finding
vs Peers
Source
Productivity
+8.5%
vs non-EO firms
NCEO
Retention
4x lower turnover
median voluntary
EOA UK
Resilience
3x less likely to lay off
in a recession
Rutgers
Household Wealth
92% higher
for EO workers
NCEO
There are no rows in this table
The global investment community has recognised this.
North American EO fund AUM grew 73% year-on-year to $1.57bn. KKR and Apollo have built 120,000+ employee owners across their portfolios. There are now 50+ dedicated EO funds globally, including in Germany & in France.
The Nordics has none. That is the gap. And the opportunity.
Business Model
Stability is the strategy. We engineer a different kind of growth story
Traditional private equity buys businesses to change them: aggressive growth targets, cost extraction, a race to a forced exit.
a better monday does the opposite.
We buy enduringly profitable businesses and let the structure do the work for investors. No inorganic growth required. No exceptional operational transformation. Portfolio companies maintain their existing trajectory. Only 1.5-3% annual revenue growth is assumed, well below CPI. The business simply needs to hold its existing book.
The growth is structural, not operational. We embed employee ownership as shares are progressively retired through buybacks, each remaining share becomes more valuable. As the portfolio grows, platform economics compound. Free cash flow from one acquisition funds the next. The flywheel builds with every deal.
The exit is engineered from day one, not dependent on a buyer appearing, a refinancing event, or market conditions. Employees buy back our equity using the company's own free cash flow. The buyback IS the exit. This removes the single biggest risk in conventional acquisition finance: the dependency on a future market event to generate liquidity, a dependency that, for most SMEs, can never be satisfied.
How We Generate Returns
The type of companies we buy
Revenue
€1m to €10m
EBITDA Margin
10%+
Track Record
10+ years consistent cash generation
Team
8+ employees · strong second-in-command
Seller
True retirement sale · motivated to exit
Geography
Finnish HQ · industry agnostic
There are no rows in this table
The acquisition structure
Valuation
3-4x EBITDA
Senior Debt
50% of acquisition price, repaid by Year 6
a better monday Equity
35%, progressively retired via employee buyback
Seller Rollover
15%, aligns seller incentives post-transaction
Employee Ownership (entry)
20%, hardcoded into the acquisition structure from day one
Full Transfer
Year 8-12: workforce holds 100% (employees 75%, management 25%)
There are no rows in this table
Post Acquisition Playbook
We are not asking these companies for operational heroics. We buy companies that are already profitable. Already enduring. We ask them to keep being what they are. Our model assumes conservative, continuation-of-trend performance:
What we do invest in is endurance: the leadership, Owner Operating System, and the AI optimisations that let the business thrive under its new structure. The returns are engineered, not extracted. The company simply has to remain itself.
Three pillars. Equal weight. Installed in every acquisition.
1. Leadership in Residence Program
Boomer-built businesses succeed despite their leadership model, not because of it. The Leadership in Residence Program identifies and develops operators, and places experienced leaders alongside incumbent management through the ownership transition. The goal is a self-managing organisation that does not depend on a single founder to perform, and therefore performs better without them.
2. Owner Operating System (OwnerOS)
The OwnerOS embeds the cultural infrastructure of employee ownership into the operating fabric of each company, moving businesses from command-and-control hierarchy toward self-management without imposing frameworks workers reject.
Two foundations, Mission, Vision and Values, and Accountability and Operating Rhythm, supported by three pillars: financial literacy, open book management, and participatory governance.
OwnerOS is how the aligned incentives become operational, turning the proven leverage of employee ownership into day-to-day performance.
3. AI Optimisation
AI capacity-building is a cornerstone for an ownership culture and de-risking the ownership transition through operational improvements.
We co-create tools that reflect how employee owners actually operate: open book management interfaces, OKR tracking, governance automation, participatory decision-making support.
At portfolio level, AI enables a lean central team to support multiple companies simultaneously, compressing due diligence, standardising deal execution, and accelerating the OwnerOS implementation timeline across the portfolio.
Key Risks & Mitigations
We have engineered out the largest risk in conventional acquisition finance, the dependency on a future buyer. The risks that remain, we name plainly.
Execution risk. No acquisition has yet closed. Mitigant: a deep, qualified pipeline, advanced diligence on 4 deals, and a templatised, AI enabled deal process built to convert.
Key-person risk. The platform today rests heavily on the founder. Mitigant: a portion of this raise funds the core team; the Advisory Council and advisor network add depth and continuity.
Leverage risk. Each acquisition carries senior debt. Mitigant: conservative 3-4x entry multiples, base-case underwriting, Finnvera-guaranteed structures, and debt service covered by existing cash flow rather than projected growth. Once we have raised equity we have strong confidence to secure a mandate for committed capital.
Leadership risk. SMEs are reliant on their leaders, the retiring owners. Mitigant: our Leadership in Residence program will promote, recruit, train and incentivize the new generation of leaders.
Adoption risk. Employee ownership depends on employees engaging with it. Mitigant: a phased transition, the Owner Operating System, and education embedded from day one.
Concentration risk. Early portfolios hold few companies, all Finnish. Mitigant: diversification across sectors as the portfolio builds; Finland as proof of concept, not the ceiling.
Liquidity risk. Returns arrive progressively, not at a single exit. Mitigant: annual distributions once buybacks begin, and defined liquidity pathways for Founding Partners.
Team & Institutional Backing
Building the team is a deliberate use of this raise. a better monday is founder-led today; the next hires bring operational and employee-ownership depth alongside Andy.
Founder: Andy Farquharson. A lifelong entrepreneur. 20+ years in high-growth technology. Founding Partner and COO of Winning by Design, scaled to $25m+ revenue. Part of the revenue leadership team that took LogMeIn from $10m ARR to a $1.2bn market cap. Certificate in Private Equity from Wharton. Certified Exit Planning Advisor.
Supported by an advisor network that includes;
Petri Rouvinen
Economist · Sitra & ETLA · Lead researcher on Finnish SME succession
Raphael Osmanov
CFO · Boreo
Lars Hagelmann
CIO Big Issue UK
Kalle Kekkonen
Head of PE · Evli
Eve Castell
Impact Investment Manager
Sitra
Finland's national innovation fund, institutional partner
There are no rows in this table
Investment
The Ask
We are raising €1.5m from Founding Partners. Investors hold a Profit Participation Certificate: an equity like instrument in a better monday entitling holders to 80% of all distributable portfolio profits.
The instrument is designed to return capital many times over as the platform compounds. Critically, even if no further capital is ever raised, this €1.5m alone is structured to return 2.4x at a 9% IRR over 10 years. That is the floor, not the expectation. With sequential raises, Founding Partner returns move into the mid-20s IRR over the life of the platform.
Capital funds our first proof-of-concept acquisitions and builds the team & platform. Founding Partners join the Advisory Council, with influence over acquisition mandate and annual budget. a better monday retains operational control. Investors own the return.
Use of funds
This is foundation capital.
It does two things at once: puts our first pilot companies on the ground, and builds the platform that makes the next fifty repeatable.
Every euro is spent earning the right to raise the fund. We are not asking investors to back a thesis. We are asking them to back a working model.
Funding Pathways
The success of companies such as Teamshares, Purpleshares, EterniTeam and others pursuing a similar model is building our confidence that there are multiple paths for us to maximise the investment and provide liquidity.
WIth this founding raise alone, we will deliver 2.4x return on capital. Our mission is bigger than two companies. We want to create a repeatable engine for ownership transfer. To do that, we need to raise additional funds. There are several other needs for us to do that;
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