When I added it all up and it just became obvious that searching for a business was the answer to what I was looking for.
Acquiring Minds
How to Buy a $20m Business as a First-Timer
Excerpts · 316 segments · ~1:30:52 long
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Interesting to hear you say mentioned security. The W2 if you were to get one that you wanted, actually didn't feel like the secure option. Buying a business felt more secure. Say more about that.
Well, I just feel like, you know, there's no guarantees in corporate America you know, you can get a job and, and you know, things are always changing. People are getting laid off, you can get restructured. You know, businesses go up and down.
I felt like I would have more security buying a business that I was in control of than working in a big corporate environment where you just never.
Know the exposure to search. Back in your MBA days, had you been tracking it kind of since it.
Was really the seed planted long ago. Like I said, when I would come up in transitions in my career, I would poke back into it, but I wasn't like deeply embedded in following it. When I hit that transition in my mid, you know, as I was getting ready to go back to work after being a full time dad and having this consulting job, I, I picked up Walker Walker Deibel's book Buy Them Build and also the…
And really it just was so clear that this is what I wanted to do. You know, reading those books and getting back into it, it just immediately just resonated so strongly for me that this was the answer to what I was looking for.
And Alan, say more about your P and L experience. You had that run at Amazon, your own team and. And then you mentioned that your consulting work led to a gig, which I recall being running a local business of some kind.
Yes. So the real story is I had really had a hard time going back to work, figuring out what to do. I had been out of the workforce for a long time. I had been basically just at home and I was really struggling to figure out what to do next.
I took a job as a cashier at our local food co op, grocery store, to just get out of the house and start interacting with people again. And that was great. I loved it. It was just, I'm very much a people person and that was just a really good thing for me to just kind of jumpstart my life and career again. I decided to run for the board of the co op.
It's a kind of member owned institution. I ran for the board and I ended up not getting elected. But in the course of events, the CFO of that company reached out to me.
They owned a large organic food warehouse in St. Paul and they had done an ERP upgrade that they had totally botched and frankly, it almost sank the whole company. They were losing millions of dollars.
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