Career Consultant Who Bought a 7-Figure Manufacturer

And, and also just, I think the other dimension of this is the travel with consulting can get to you. It's a lot. I mean, I could have, you know, a few years ago I was doing three city weeks and, and literally hopping on a plane two or three times a week. And those are the things where you just see your kids getting older.

I've got a couple of teenagers now. I've also got one six-year-old. And you want to be a part of their lives in a way that you haven't been able to for many years.

It's just you get to decide which 12.

Exactly. Yeah. Great. I need to go pop out during the day to run an errand for my daughter or son. It's a lot easier than if I'm across country. So that helps.

Yeah. How did you approach your ETA project, your search?

So I started out, yes, it was back in September 23, started really just kind of tiptoeing into it to get a sense of what's the landscape? How does this work? I mean, I mentioned before, had done work in private equity, very familiar with M&A, but nothing in the lower middle market. And so I actually signed on with Acquire.

I joined their cohort. Yeah. Um, good group of folks helped me learn. It was great to learn from other searchers that were going down this path.

And so I started, uh, working with them and kind of learning more because certainly on the lower level markets, it's, it's just a different ball game and a lot to, a lot to understand how, what the process typically looks like. And I really didn't have any exposure to SBA lending. Um, so that was something I really need to get my arms around.

It probably took two or three months of just going it alone, looking at the biz buy sales, looking at Axial and things of that nature. And I came to the conclusion pretty quickly, I feel like Atlanta is a hyper-competitive market. And having said that, I doubt it's any different than any major metropolitan area.

I just, everything I ran across seemed already kind of oversold or overpriced. And, and I thought, you know, I really need to go off market, look, look to see, you know, look, how do you connect with buyers? So, and then I was also working.

So I started looking for options to get some help, ran across Colorado Capital at that point. Um, because I was, uh, you know, really looking for additional help and I knew that I wouldn't be able to spend the cycles, uh, during the day necessarily to do a lot of this myself. So signed on with them in January of 24 to kind of get, get underway more formally and with a support team and structure…