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Acquiring Minds

(replay)Art of the Roll-Up: 40 Businesses in 4 Years

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buying a small business sounds simple. Find a company, do diligence, get a loan, close. In reality, you wear every hat just to get the deal done.

And then the moment you close, you have to throw those deal-making skills out the window and learn how to operate.

You shouldn't have to rebuild this infrastructure from scratch, and you definitely shouldn't do it alone.

That's why Walker-Deibel created Acquisition Lab. What started as an accelerator has expanded into a complete ecosystem for acquisition entrepreneurs. Over six years, the lab's 1,200 members have acquired over a billion dollars in businesses.

The lab puts everything under one roof, an active community, deal reviews, post-close services, and a dedicated fund helping experienced operators buy larger businesses. If you're serious about buying a business, come see why lab members have a 40% success rate. Learn more in the show notes or at acquisitionlab.com slash acquiring minds.

And side project, how long is it a side project? You're putting in place these changes. You're loving being at the place.

Like this kind of opportunity continues to expand and excite you. But you are working your day job. So when does it become... Your sole focus?

I did both until we had five schools. So we bought the first business January of 2019. I quit my day job February of 2020, which turned out to be auspicious timing, if you remember.

We remember. But yeah, and also, I mean, the part that sounds kind of dizzying in retrospect is it was only about four months from closing on the first deal to closing on the second one. Yeah.

um and that still sounds incorrect to me i don't know how we managed to do that but we did the second one was more of a it was more of a test balloon for the roll-up so it was based in las vegas it was a smaller school even than the first one which was small you know to begin with and it was really intended to be a test of whether we could run one of these businesses remotely and whether it would

you know, burned to the ground, either figuratively or literally, if we didn't go check on it, you know, every day, which is kind of what I was doing at D&B Music. I was there pretty often because it was in my backyard.

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