PermaTech is a private holding company building a portfolio of high-quality, owner-led businesses across New Zealand and Australia. We use a model that's been quietly compounding wealth — and protecting legacies — across Scandinavia for decades. We're bringing it home.
PermaTech is a permanent home for excellent businesses.
We're not a private equity fund. We don't have an exit mandate or a fund life. We're not a trade buyer looking to integrate your operations into ours. We're a holding company in the true sense — we acquire, we hold, we support, and we compound.
Our focus is niche industrial and commercial businesses in New Zealand and Australia: the kinds of businesses that are hard to find, hard to replicate, and quietly excellent. Businesses with real customers, real margins, and a management team that knows what they're doing.
When we acquire a business, our intention is to own it forever. That's not a figure of speech.
There are really only a few options for a business owner who's thinking about the future.
Buys your business, brings in a new management layer, runs an improvement programme, and sells in three to five years. Some businesses are well-suited to this. Most aren't — especially owner-led businesses with strong culture and long customer relationships.
Usually means your business becomes a division of something bigger. The brand gets retired. The management team gets restructured. Your customers deal with someone new. The thing you built disappears into a larger entity.
Lists your business, runs a process, and finds the highest bidder. Sometimes that works out. Often the "highest bidder" turns out to be neither the best operator nor the most committed long-term owner.
We buy your business at a fair price. Your management team continues to run it. Your brand stays. Your people stay. We provide stable, permanent ownership and the occasional resource — financial, strategic, or operational — when it's useful. That's it.
We don't have an exit plan for your business because we don't intend to sell it.
In Scandinavia, a handful of listed holding companies have spent the last three decades quietly building portfolios of niche industrial and commercial businesses. Lifco. Addtech. Lagercrantz. Indutrade. Judges Scientific in the UK. The pattern is consistent: acquire excellent businesses at fair prices, give them permanent, supportive ownership, let management run the show, and compound.
The results speak for themselves. Companies acquired in the 1990s are still operating under the same name, the same management philosophy, and the same customer relationships today. The businesses compound. The portfolios compound. And the founders who sold live out the rest of their lives knowing their life's work is in safe hands.
We studied more than 500 companies built on this model. We understand what makes it work — and what makes it fail. PermaTech is built on the same principles, applied to the New Zealand and Australian market.
PermaTech was founded by Chuck Slogrove and Joel Surges, two people who became convinced there was a better way to transition excellent NZ and Australian businesses than the options currently on offer.
Chuck brings a background in strategy, technology, and governance. Joel brings deep experience in culture, vision, and building owner-operator relationships. Between them, they spent years studying the Nordic holding company model before building PermaTech on its principles.
We're not a large institution. We're not running someone else's capital to a fund mandate. We're building something we intend to own and operate for decades — exactly like the businesses we acquire.
If you're curious about how we operate, what we look for, or what the acquisition process looks like, we're happy to have an open conversation.