Career Consultant Who Bought a 7-Figure Manufacturer

So often it was a second set of eyes. Or it could be times when I was truly just completely flat out with work where I had to hand something off. And it gave me the confidence.

I mean, working with Sam Skerich and Hannah Naben and... uh, Logan Theodoro and they were really good about just jumping in. They checked, we checked in weekly and, you know, it was just very, very good knowing that when I, when things got tough, I could always just call Sam and call Hannah and them and then make sure that we'd get through whatever hoops we had to.

You know Enzo Technologies as one of the leading IT managed service providers serving the search community. Led by Nick Akers, an Acquiring Minds guest who bought the 35-year-old business, the team at Enzo regularly works with searchers and their acquisitions. And one feature of acquired businesses that Enzo is seeing over and over is the need to implement cybersecurity promptly during the…

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One other framework that I am a fan of, and I want to just run it by you and see how you respond about the question of working with a Calder or like an Aquamatch, Athena Simpson's Aquamatch is another big name in buy-side advising in our world.

is the idea that if you keep your salary and pay for this, pay for a buy-side advisor, if you're somebody who's intent on doing a full-time search otherwise, so your two options are quit W-2 and go all in on doing a full-time search yourself or retain the job and hire a buy-side advisor. If you quit your job and let's say you're doing well for yourself, you're earning $200,000 a year north of…

then the real cost of doing your own search is the opportunity cost of walking away from that salary. Not to mention all the, any associated sort of search costs that there are. That's a significant opportunity cost.

Versus you retain the $200,000, $300,000 a year salary, and you pay, call it $60-ish $1,000 a year to a buy-side advisor. Then you're, yeah, that $60,000 out of pocket hurts, but the real effective... But you really need to be comparing it to the full opportunity cost of quitting your job.

And so from that light, it looks a lot more palatable, actually. And so I kind of always say I'm surprised more people don't do this. Now, obviously, my hypothetical here assumes that you make a really full salary.

Not everybody makes $200,000 a year or more. But for that sort of cohort of person or person who's a little bit more mid-career and is likely to have a higher salary, I feel like it's a good analysis. And so I kind of reflect that I'm surprised I don't see it much.