What We Do
Alderway is here for owners looking to move on but care about what happens next.
We acquire UK critical power businesses, bring them into a single permanent group and run them with the people, brand and customer relationships intact.
Why Critical Power, Why Now?
The UK economy is being asked to do two contradictory things at once:
Demand more from the grid and trust the grid less. The customers running the country's hospitals, data centres, defence sites, financial institutions and major venues already operate on the assumption that the grid will, eventually, let them down. That assumption is becoming more expensive, and more public, every year.
Three things are converging:
Busier
Grid
Larger
Backup
Higher
Standards
A grid that is getting busier, sites that depend on backup that are getting bigger, and standards that are getting harder to meet.
The Sites That Depend On Backup Are Getting Bigger.
Five things shape every acquisition.
Full buyout, every time.
We acquire 100% or close to it, rather than minority positions.
Permanent capital.
The money behind the platform isn't on a five-year clock. We're not buying to flip in three years. We are building the group to outlast the people running it today.
Time-based deferred consideration, not performance-based
In some scenarios, a portion of the consideration is paid after completion, but on a fixed schedule. The seller doesn't carry the risk of how the business trades after they've left.
Operating partners, not investment managers.
Each acquired business gets hands-on support from the Alderway team. People who have run businesses like this before, working alongside existing management on the things that benefit from scale.
Integration without disruption.
The business keeps its name, team and customer relationships. What it gains is access to the group's shared standards, procurement and back-office support. Day-to-day, it runs the way it ran before.
Why This Works If You're Selling Your Business
Full buyout, like a trade sale.
Brand and team preserved, like a private-equity deal but with no clock, no earnout, no resale plan. The business joins a permanent group of similar companies and stays as it was, with more resources, higher standards and the kind of long-term ownership the customers it serves actually want.
No model suits every owner. But if your first question is "what happens to the business after I leave?", Alderway is built to answer it.
Why This Works As An Investment
Three things make this a credible thesis for the capital backing it.
The Market Sector is Fragmented
The UK critical power and electrical infrastructure market is served by several hundred independent businesses, most doing one part of the job. Almost none have built a meaningful integrated platform. The opportunity to be the first credible consolidator in a sector this size is unusual.
Integrated Groups Trade Better than their Parts
Standalone businesses in this sector typically trade at small-business multiples. An integrated group serving the same customers across multiple capabilities trades materially higher. The arbitrage between buying at small-business multiples and exiting at platform multiples is the core of the financial thesis.
The Demand is Structural,
not Cyclical
The customers we serve aren't choosing whether to invest in critical power. They're being told to, by regulators, insurers and their own boards. The case for why critical power isn't a forecast we depend on; it's a procurement reality our customers already live with.
The platform is structured to capture all three. Permanent capital removes the pressure to exit before the integration is complete. Operating partners from the team ensure the businesses we acquire actually perform as a group, not just as a federation. And our acquisition criteria are tight enough that we're not paying up for businesses that don't fit the thesis.