A $10m Acquisition for Freedom and Family

Over the past two years, there have been over 150,000 layoffs in the tech industry. These are people who know how to run businesses, who know how to lead teams.

and a lot of times people who are very qualified buyers because they have stock from big tech companies you know sitting there ready to be deployed and so uh for all these reasons i felt it was important to make the leap myself and then also to have this interview with you and get out there so that more people know that this is one option that they can consider as they're navigating all these…

So couldn't be more relevant even in my own circle. How did you hear about buying a small business? Because you were not somebody who was at business school and took the class or something.

Yes, I have had to learn a lot of things in my career just on the fly by just being a curious person. And that has really steered me, my own innate curiosity. And so what led me to this particular world is that I had been advising some startups.

And through that, I met this search fund partner. And he introduced me to the idea of non-private equity purchasers who are buying companies that perhaps are too low EBITDA for private equity firms to consider. And so they're really filling in that gap.

So at first I... was evaluating whether I wanted to have a search fund. And that is a path that would have been a harder road. I think the ideal search fund candidate is someone probably out of business school that's traditionally who has had the best shot of getting funded in that way.

And... I looked at my own profile and the options available to me, and I would be very qualified for SBA financing. And it's something, it's a risk that I was willing to take. And then I also would have more control if I did it this way.

And so I put all those factors together and I decided that I wanted to be self-funded.

Great. And so give us some more detail then on how the search took shape, what your search looked like.

Yeah. So I actually had partnered with a good friend of mine who is just, you know, incredible and still a great friend. And together we set out to buy a business that would be large enough that we could both work in the business together. And so my friend, he actually grew up in Ann Arbor.

And so he was looking in this area because he felt like it was someplace that he could relocate to often. And so, you know, I continue to look mostly on the West Coast. And so we kind of split our our focus and and, you know, did it that way.