When Lisa Stuhler asked her lawyer to draft the initial contracts for her management buy-in, he paused. He had never drafted such a contract with a single woman before. Not once. That moment told Stuhler everything she needed to know about the landscape she was entering—and everything that needed to change.
Stuhler is the founder and managing partner of Tilia Nachfolgekapital, a Munich-based vehicle focused on acquiring and growing a mid-sized company in Germany. Backed by a family office, she is doing what is essentially a management buy-in (MBI): finding, acquiring, and personally leading a company through its next chapter. She has spoken to more than 150 business owners, navigated multiple instances of due diligence, and built a growing reputation as one of the most visible women in Germany’s nascent MBI ecosystem. She was recently the cover story in a German business publication and sits on the expert board of the Technical University of Munich’s entrepreneurship through acquisition program.
Her journey is remarkable in its own right. It is also a window into a larger question: why are so few women pursuing entrepreneurship through acquisition (ETA) pathways, and what would it take to change that?
Stuhler’s path to launching an MBI was anything but linear. She worked in fashion for brands including Escada and Peek & Cloppenburg, completed an Executive MBA at the Technical University of Munich, and moved into strategy consulting across Europe and Asia. Then she spent four years at a private equity-backed company, leading the transformation of a global agency from an owner-founded business to a PE-owned operation. After that, she tried starting her own company through Antler, an early-stage VC program. When the venture did not take off, she began approaching family offices for investment.
That is when everything changed. One family office said we like your profile. Have you ever heard of ETA? They sent her two studies—including the Stanford search fund research—and told her to read them.
She called back. Within months, she had raised capital, established Tilia Nachfolgekapital, and begun searching for a company to acquire. The name Tilia tells a story: Stuhler grew up on Lindenstrasse—Linden Street—in rural Germany, and Tilia is the Latin name for the linden tree. She chose it because she wanted a name rooted in her origins, not a typical finance-sounding brand. It reflects values that matter more to Mittelstand entrepreneurs than any MBA credential.
The barriers facing women in MBI are not reducible to a single cause. Stuhler sees them as layered and reinforcing. The first is straightforward: there are virtually no role models. When she began her search, she could not find a single woman in Germany who had done what she was attempting. The lawyer’s reaction confirmed it. In a market dominated by machinery-heavy, engineering-focused Mittelstand companies, the default profile of both business owners and their successors has long been male.
The second barrier is structural. Women in their mid-thirties often face different life circumstances than men of the same age. They may not yet have reached senior management positions. The requirement of most MBI programs—deep operational experience, willingness to relocate—creates a high hurdle. Stuhler notes that among the women she has spoken to who considered MBI, the single biggest obstacle was the uncertainty of where they would end up living. Committing to a company means committing to a geography, and that decision ripples through families in ways that disproportionately affect women.
Stefania D’Andrea, who joined All Interests Aligned (AIA) as the platform’s first female operating partner in March 2026, offers a complementary perspective on the internal dimension of these barriers. She has spoken about the tendency among women to wait until they feel 100% ready before making a leap—a form of self-doubt that can delay decisions indefinitely. Stuhler sees the challenge slightly differently. Having managed P&L responsibilities of a similar scale in her previous roles, she is not so much concerned about whether she can do the job. Her internal barrier, she says, is more about commitment: the key challenge is disciplined selection - making a long-term commitment to the right company and fully aligning with its future. One of the more nuanced findings from Stuhler’s experience concerns how business owners actually react to a female acquirer. She conducts extensive cold outreach to potential sellers, proactively emailing owners to express interest in buying their companies. Her response rate is approximately 30%. Among those who respond and engage, she says, gender is never mentioned. The owners who take her calls care about other factors like where does the capital come from and what did she do before.
The more interesting question, she acknowledges, is what happens in the 70% of cases who do not respond at all. There is no way to know why others do not respond. In the conversations that do happen, Stuhler finds that her background—particularly her roots in rural Germany, where neither of her parents had university degrees—resonates more powerfully than any professional credential. Owners hear that she grew up modestly, that she is close to her family, that she comes from the same world they do. That creates a connection that no MBA can manufacture.
“For them, knowing that none of my parents studied is so much more valuable,” Stuhler explains. “She’s one of us—she has the right roots, the right values. That is much more important than where I did an MBA.”
Stuhler’s approach to acquisitions puts human relationships at the centre of the process. In an interview with the Rotterdam School of Management, she captured this philosophy succinctly: ETA is about empathy, trust, and being the answer to a problem. You will spend more time in conversations than in spreadsheets. At the same time, operational rigour remains central. Having led complex P&L structures in prior roles, she views execution discipline as the foundation that makes trust sustainable.
She tells a story that illustrates the point. Last summer, she was deep into due diligence on a sizable target sourced through a broker. The relationship with the owner had developed over months and trust had been established on both sides. Then, during due diligence, the company lost a major client. It was bad news at the worst possible time. Some financial buyers may have reassessed the situation differently. Stuhler did not. She revisited the offer structure to reflect the updated business situation — slightly lower, but structured in a way she believed could still make the deal work for everyone.
The owner’s response stayed with her. He made clear that price was not the decisive factor, leadership continuity was. What mattered was having the right person to lead the company through the next chapter. What he could not afford was someone who would eliminate the jobs or move the company. That human equation—the knowledge that Stuhler would actually relocate, actually commit, actually care—was worth more than any premium on the purchase price.
This resonates with the experience of AIA’s first acquisition, when Philip Cefai acquired H. Mears (Furnishers) Ltd., a 220-year-old family business in Preston. The owner had rejected previous approaches because they did not feel right. It was only when he met someone willing to commit to the community that a deal became possible. For family business owners, trust is usually the deciding factor.
Stuhler has developed a clear way of positioning herself when she enters conversations with business owners. She tells them upfront: I represent a long-term, operational ownership model focused on continuity and responsible growth. I am not your strategic competitor, the one you have been fighting with for the last 10 years. I am another option—a person who will move here and run your business. There are pros and cons to every route, and you get to decide. But you should know this option exists.
This positioning is critical in Germany. Private equity is sometimes viewed with caution in the German Mittelstand context. Stuhler notes that some Mittelstand owners perceive traditional private equity as more financially driven and less locally anchored. By contrast, MBI offers a personal succession path—but one that is still hardly known in the German market. When Stuhler completed her MBA a few years ago, ETA was never mentioned. Now, at least, the university has introduced it into the curriculum, and Stuhler herself sits on the expert board working to raise its profile further.
When asked what is missing from Germany’s evolving MBI ecosystem, Stuhler points to the supply side. Most of the activity and energy in the market is focused on the searcher or operator side—people like her who are looking for companies to acquire. What she would love to see is more initiative from banks and from the owner's side. Banks hold the data: they know the age of business owners, the financial health of companies, and whether there is a son or daughter in line to take over. If banks were incentivised to proactively connect owners approaching retirement with potential MBI operators, it could accelerate the market.
She also makes a point about scale. Her own search targets companies with two to seven million euros in EBITDA, a range that overlaps with PE. But what about the company with only €300,000 in EBITDA? These businesses often fall below the radar of institutional investors. Brokers often will not bother. Yet that company has employees, customers, and knowledge worth preserving. The ecosystem needs to serve those smaller businesses too—and doing so does not require complicated deal structures. It requires making the process simpler and more accessible.
Do it if you love people as much as numbers, because most of ETA is not about deals. It is about empathy, trust, and being the answer to a problem.
Women are starting 49% of new businesses globally, yet receive roughly 2% of venture capital funding. MBI and ETA offer a different path—one where the capital barrier can be removed because funding is tied to the operator’s profile and the quality of the acquisition target, not to a speculative pitch about an untested idea. Stuhler experienced this firsthand. With essentially the same CV, she found fundraising for her MBI vehicle easier than raising money for a consumer startup. The pitch was about her track record and operational experience—things she could demonstrate, not things which would maybe happen in the future in a saturated market.
As for risk appetite, Stuhler pushes back against the idea that women are inherently more risk-averse. Anyone who pursues MBI must have a tolerance for uncertainty. The real differentiator is not gender but temperament: are you the kind of person who can take the leap into an adventure where the outcome is unclear?
This view is echoed at the platform level. Natalia Zeranska, Chief Talent Officer at AIA, frames it in terms of what actually drives success in acquisition-led entrepreneurship: "At AIA, we are completely committed to creating a platform where both women and men are supported and empowered to launch a successful MBI. We need to tell more stories about women in ETA because we know that our operating partners will succeed because they can build strong, trust-based relationships with sellers, customers, suppliers, and employees. The capacity to cultivate those relationships is not about gender. It's about the skills and the qualities of the individual."
What does Stuhler recommend to encourage more women into this space? Talk about it. Create visibility. Show examples of companies that are not just machinery and engineering—because the Mittelstand includes far more than that. Get universities to teach it. Get banks to support it. And get women who are doing it to share their stories, so that others can look at the path and think: I could do that too.
Even when a search does not result in an acquisition, the experience is not wasted. You see dozens of businesses and business models. You develop negotiation skills, financial acumen, and an understanding of what makes companies tick. Everyone Stuhler knows who went through the process—whether or not they ultimately acquired—found that it opened doors to opportunities they would not have encountered otherwise.
“Do it if you love people as much as numbers,” Stuhler has said. “Because most of ETA is not about deals. It is about empathy, trust, and being the answer to a problem.” For the thousands of family businesses across Europe approaching a succession decision, the question is not whether women can be the answer. It is whether enough women will see MBI as the path—and whether the ecosystem will do its part to make that path visible.
