Calling Australian Searchers - a conversation on the landscape...

I'm an Aussie whose been living in South Africa for about 6 years, and am planning on moving back, and searching there. I've run various businesses over the years, and in the last 6 months, have been looking at building a holdco (in South Africa, but due to the move now, Australia). I have a couple of questions about the landscape there -- let's get a discussion going... 1. Regarding debt funding: I understand the banks are typically quite conservative. Most say they want personal collateral (i.e. real estate) to back any debt, particularly for a first acquisition, and will not typically fund >70% of the transaction with debt. It's the same in South Africa - the banks are EXTREMELY conservative here. We were, however, offered 2.5X debt to EBITDA by a big bank, on a deal we were working on here, which was about $2.5m AUD. I had to sign a personal guarantee, but had very little collateral on my personal balance sheet at the time -- so it was just for 'Skin in the game', not actual coverage. The way I got them to fund this was by putting together a world class board of directors, who all had tiny (1-2%) amounts of equity in the project, and would advise me. If I was a solo/traditional searcher, they would not have funded it. I also had the seller roll 20% equity, so the banks observed reduced risk by virtue of the sellers remaining involved. Would it be reasonable to think I can employ the same structure to achieve a near 100% LBO acquisition in Australia? Or is a cash/equity injection of >40% pretty much mandatory to get our first deal done there? 2. Regarding industry and consolidator competition: I am debating between a roll up (to exit), or building a long-term holdco of unrelated companies (a legacy project). It's clear that PE has sunk its teeth into most of the industries that make sense for a roll up - everything from assisted living, to body piercing shops. Does this make a non-PE backed roll up a waste of time? I would assume pretty much any business in these 'roll-up-able' industries would be snapped up immediately. Looking instead at the idea of building a holding company of unrelated businesses... would the consolidator/PE competition be significantly less, making these deals doable at 2-4x ? The mental debate I am having is whether to cast a very broad net, and just look for amazing, unrelated businesses to buy, or to do a roll up. My fear is - we attempted a veterinary roll up for 2.5 years in South Africa. There were only ~250 acquirable practices, and 2 other consolidators in the market. Too much competition, not enough opportunity meant that things moved incredibly slowly. I had reached out to every one of those 200 clinics multiple times, and found that I was actually spending most of my time twiddling my thumbs, waiting for responses etc. from the sellers, with not enough work to actually fill my time. Then, when an opportunity would arise from an interested (off-market) seller, they would also speak to the other consolidators to understand what they could offer, and would inevitably go with them as they could offer more. Is there still space for non-PE backed roll ups in Australia?