From Searcher to Sponsor: How to Buy a $22m Business

Yeah. So my search changed halfway through it, but it started with a very, very typical kind of searcher criteria where it was going to be anywhere from 750K in SDE to about 1.5 million in SDE. It was going to be SBA-backed. We were going to go do an SBA loan.

If we needed to, we might have gone into a little bit of para-pursued debt, but really was looking for the core criteria. For me and my wife, we didn't want to move outside of Chicago, so it was going to be a geographic search.

And I was still fully employed at the time at my consulting shop and decided that I was going to go down the path of hiring a buy side broker. So I know you've had a couple of episodes with folks who've used Calder Capital. That's who I worked with and had a really good experience with them.

We're essentially my buy side team throughout. It let me test the waters on seeing what deals were out there looking for proprietary leads and then kind of went down that path. Now, eventually the business that I bought, Florgar was quite a different business, but it took the shape of working with Calder to make that happen.

And how did you decide to stay in your W-2 and hire an outside firm to effectively do the search for you? Plus more. I think they helped you. Beyond just bringing you the deal, they helped you close it.

We'll get into that. You'll correct me if I'm wrong. So how did you decide to do that as opposed to just quitting and going full-time search, which is a little bit more of the typical model?

Yeah, I think it was risk aversion, really. So I had a job that paid well. It continued to provide.

And I didn't want to quit that and not know for sure that there was a business that was lined up for me to go into. And so what I wanted to do was... get somebody to help me search for a business to see if there was one out there that that would close while still having this as a fallback option.

I really saw that as an insurance play. And, you know, the the salary that I was getting was going to go to paying down the retainer for Calder, but it still allowed us to maintain our lifestyle. So it was a little bit like an insurance play for me.

And then I also I think was realistic enough that my skill set isn't doing a ton of cold outbound you know reaching out to owners to try to figure out you know are you interested in selling i didn't think that i would be able to convey my credentials in a way that made me seem serious i thought that if i could have uh if i could have a buy side broker reach out on my behalf it would feel

more serious it would feel more like you know i you could close on the deal i had a team behind me um so it's really those two things to be totally honest i didn't know buy side brokerages existed so when i started planning for my search i joined the acquisition lab so i went through um the acquisition lab was one of the cohorts you know learned about the whole process of doing proprietary search…