Christian Malek and the business of letting go

A company can have customers, employees, a product people want, and a future that nobody has arranged. Christian Malek’s grandfather built a business in Switzerland. The family’s succession difficulties became the problem Malek would spend his career trying to solve. Years later, he put the consequence plainly: “My family lost everything.” It is a remarkably short explanation for an enterprise devoted to the complicated business of buying other enterprises.

Succession has a modest name for something that can determine the fate of years of work. It asks who takes responsibility when an owner steps away. Within a family, the answer may seem obvious until the next generation has different plans. Outside the family, finding a buyer introduces another question: who will actually run the company? A transfer of shares still leaves somebody needing to answer the telephone.

Malek is now the founder and CEO of Novastone Capital Advisors, and Group CEO of Novastone. His work connects experienced operators with established small and medium-sized businesses across Europe and North America. The operators want ownership. The owners need successors. Investors help finance the transition. Malek’s original concern survives inside that arrangement: a business should have a chance to continue beyond the person who built it.

A family question, carried abroad

His upbringing was international before his investment work was. Malek spent most of his teenage years in Costa Rica, where his father worked as a diplomat, before returning to Switzerland. He later earned an Executive MBA at IMD Business School. Banking and private equity gave him professional experience with companies; the family business gave succession a personal importance that a financial qualification could scarcely supply.

That combination matters to the way he describes his work. There is the financial problem of purchasing a company, and there is the owner’s problem of handing it over. The same transaction has to answer both. A retirement can require money, certainly, but also confidence in the person arriving next. The balance sheet has a column for liabilities. The owner’s attachment to the business is rather harder to tabulate.

Malek’s route into search funds began in 2011, when he backed one. A search fund finances an entrepreneur’s effort to find and acquire an existing business. It offers a route into ownership through a company already operating. For Malek, the appeal eventually became more specific: could that route help an experienced manager become the successor a business owner needed?

The operator who was ready before the owner was

In 2016, he encountered an entrepreneur in his mid-forties whose father was reluctant to retire and hand over the family company. The younger entrepreneur considered searching for another business with his own funding. Malek supported him. He describes the encounter as part of the groundwork for Novastone Capital Advisors, which he founded in 2019.

It is an instructive origin. Here was someone ready for responsibility, with the family route to ownership obstructed. Elsewhere, an owner might be ready to leave, with nobody prepared to take responsibility. Malek’s business would bring those situations together. Entrepreneurship, in this version, could begin halfway through a career and many years into the life of a company.

The order of the search is central. Novastone starts with the operator, then works toward a suitable acquisition. Industry experience helps define what that person should buy and how they could improve it. This is a demanding form of matchmaking. A promising company and a capable executive still need to suit one another; neither is much helped by an elegant introduction followed by an unsuitable marriage.

Buying the company is one of six steps

Malek describes a program that begins with selection and onboarding, moves through search and acquisition, and continues into growth and an eventual liquidity event. During onboarding, the operator develops an investment thesis: the kind of business to pursue, the experience they bring, and their plan for creating value. The search has a purpose before it has a target.

Novastone provides training and support around the transaction, including evaluation, negotiation, due diligence, and legal work. After the acquisition, the operator becomes the company’s CEO. The program continues through the ownership period and helps with a later exit. Its structure acknowledges something a closing announcement tends to compress: finding a business, buying it, and running it are separate jobs.

The model also puts ownership alongside management. The incoming leader has a stake in the acquired business. That arrangement gives the executive a financial interest in what happens over time. It does not remove the risks of running a company. It does make the invitation more consequential than a new job title: the operator is joining the business as an owner.

Thirteen months to a water business

Nate Taylor gives the arrangement a practical setting. He joined NCA’s program in 2022, aiming to buy an infrastructure or utilities business in the United States. After thirteen months in the program, he acquired Water Runner, a Texas company that purifies and delivers bulk potable water to residential and commercial customers across the Southwest. The acquisition was announced in June 2023.

Taylor brought experience from military leadership and the private sector. He wanted international perspectives among his investors and credited NCA with helping secure funding. He also singled out Malek’s involvement at critical moments in getting the transaction completed. This is a useful detail about the founder’s role: the system had a person inside it who could help when the deal needed attention.

“Christian stepped up at the most critical periods in the deal process to get us to a close.”

Nate Taylor, on the Water Runner acquisition, 2023

The company’s work makes the ownership idea tangible. Water has to reach customers. Mechanics, drivers, and operators carry out the business behind the acquisition. Taylor described enjoying working alongside them. Malek’s program brought him to that responsibility; the daily work belonged to Taylor and the people already doing it. The entrepreneurial opportunity arrived with employees, equipment, customers, and a working day.

A frame around the next chapter

Novastone expanded into the United States in 2021. By 2026, another American succession transaction involved a business devoted to picture frames. Omega Moulding, headquartered in Bellport, New York, manufactures and distributes mouldings and accessories. Its nearly sixty-year history includes relationships with independent frame shops, wholesalers, and commercial customers in the United States and Canada.

The founding Portnoy family wanted a succession solution that would preserve the company’s legacy and culture while allowing growth. Robert Vero became its owner-operator and CEO through Novastone’s program. He had previously owned and led Rubber Labels USA, giving the transaction an incoming leader with experience of manufacturing and distribution. Malek’s central proposition was visible in a named person taking the chair.

Vero credited support from investor relations, M&A, legal specialists, and Novastone’s leadership, including Malek. Financing involved Cyprium Partners and Farragut Capital Partners, with an operating credit line from EntreBank. The release, dated January 5, 2026, described a shared effort. A family’s handover depended on several institutions and an operator willing to make the company his responsibility.

An award, and an ownership journey

Malek received a Dealmaker of the Year award at the Central Florida Smart Business Dealmakers Conference in May 2025. The recognition was individual; his response to Novastone’s announcement was collective. “This is a recognition to the entire Novastone team,” he wrote. It was a small public comment, but an apt one for a business whose transactions bring together operators, investors, and specialist colleagues.

He has also taken the succession conversation to Davos. In 2023, he appeared with NCA co-founder Elena Trukhina. In 2025, he and Managing Partner Daniel Gärtner discussed the operator-led program in an interview with Andrew Wilson. These appearances put the same working question before a wider audience: how does an established company find its next entrepreneurial owner?

A 2026 transaction supplied a later chapter. Daniel Coutinho acquired Foo Seng through Novastone’s program in 2023. He developed the frozen-food business and expanded it through the acquisition of Varachaux. Their combination formed Almma. Novastone announced an exit following the acquisition of the new group by European private equity firm Apheon.

The sequence is revealing: an operator became an owner, built the business, completed an additional acquisition, and reached another ownership transition. Malek praised Coutinho’s execution and the support provided through the journey. The story extends the succession idea beyond the first purchase. Ownership changes again; the business needs preparation for that handover too.

The question that began inside Malek’s family now appears in companies with different products, histories, and geographies. Water delivery in Texas. Picture-frame supplies in New York. Frozen foods in France. His work helps arrange the next person’s arrival. For the retiring owner, that arrival makes departure possible. For the incoming operator, it turns years of experience into the responsibility of ownership. The keys change hands. The company opens again.