# Bolt-on acquisition

A smaller company bought to fold into a [platform business](https://searchspheresource.com/glossary/platform-company) already operating.

Roll-up strategies live or die on these add-on deals, because a bolt-on bought at a low main-street multiple and merged into a larger platform is instantly worth the platform's higher multiple. For a [searcher](https://searchspheresource.com/glossary/searcher) running a platform, each bolt-on also spreads fixed overhead across more revenue, which is where the margin expansion in a roll-up actually comes from.

In numbers: A $600,000 [EBITDA](https://searchspheresource.com/glossary/ebitda) add-on bought at 4x costs $2.4M, and inside a platform the market values at 6x the same earnings are worth $3.6M. That gap is the arithmetic of a roll-up.

Source: https://searchspheresource.com/glossary/bolt-on-acquisition
Not dated: A definition is editorial: what a term means, why it matters, and an example. None of it reads a source that can go stale, so there is no date to take and a stamped one would be the build time wearing a costume.

Site index for machines: https://searchspheresource.com/llms.txt