No SBA, No Investors: The Liquidity Access Line

It felt like I was building equity in the business community and locally in Atlanta and the passions that I have for my, for the neighborhood. And then my business said, you know, on paper and even by policies that Adobe said, that's great. Do all that stuff. We want you to be involved in the community, et cetera.

But it was this effort of involvement here was not supporting the effort of my career growth. And I also saw a big opportunity to marry those things up by working locally.

years of your career.

Anything more to say about why buying a business was, was the answer?

Yeah, you know, I think buy, then build and some of these. Learning more about the ETA community really brought shape around this feeling that I had of I think I could do something here as an entrepreneur, but I don't have the big idea. I'm not, you know, sitting here as Mark Zuckerberg in my dorm room.

I don't, I don't know what that is, but how cool would it be to, to, to find something? So, so that's when I, you know, I do what I do whenever I'm trying to make a, a big decision is just start tapping the network and ask as many people as I can, what do you know? Who do you know that I could talk to about this whole concept of eta?

So tell us some of the parameters of the search and what you kind of went out there looking for once you decided on ETA as the path.

Yeah, the search was, the search cadence was interesting. So I kind of get my heart set on this path and I start ingesting the content. Like, let's start listening to acquiring minds.

Let's read all the books. Let me ask everyone in my network pretty early on, a couple months in, so I'm learning about what does a proper search look like, what's your thesis, how are you going to raise funds, et cetera, et cetera. As I'm doing this and I'm asking my network, one of the first conversations in my network was one of my good buddies said, hey, talk to my father in law.

He's been in small business for a long time. He's got a lot of experience. He also left corporate about 20 years ago and so he'd be a good resource.

So of course I took a call with him and during that call he said, hey, listen, I've got this business. I know I haven't been putting what I should be into this. It's, I'm ready to move on into, you know, a retirement type phase.