The First Steps to a Family Holdco

I first met today's guest at the self funded Search Conference in Dallas in 2023. Linh Van Deibel had flown all the way from London, a demonstration of how seriously she was taking this path of entrepreneurship through acquisition. As you'll hear, her husband Leo later joined her, and Linh and Leo both are today's guests.

So buying a business as a couple is a key theme of the interview, as is buying outside the U.S. Linh and Leo live in London. We hear how they structure their deal in a market where loans for business acquisition aren't as readily available as they.

Are here in the us. On top of that, neither Linh nor Leo are British, adding to the search challenges. Finally, we hear about Linh's parallel journey with ivf. You may not know much about that.

Process, but suffice it to say that that journey can be long, fraught, hugely time consuming and emotionally draining. Going through that while also trying to buy a business would be harrowing. Hopefully, Linh's story can be a resource to other women or couples considering ivf.

Please pass it along if you know someone who should hear it. Okay, here are Linh and Leo Van Deibel. Diebel, owners of Infrastructure Design Solutions.

Welcome to Acquiring Minds, a podcast about buying businesses. My name is Will Smith. Acquiring an existing business is an awesome.

Opportunity for many entrepreneurs and on this podcast I talk to the people who do it. You know Inzo Technologies as one of the leading IT managed service providers serving the search community, led by Nick Akers, an Acquiring Minds guest who bought the 35 year old business.

The team at Inzo regularly works with searchers and their acquisitions and one feature of acquired businesses that Inzo is seeing over and over is the need to implement cybersecurity promptly during the transition. So many acquired small businesses either have glaring vulnerabilities, lack security best practices or both. That step one to de risk the deal you just closed should be addressing…

INSO is your full service IT MSP for post close stability. They assess your target, surface the biggest risks in plain English and and give you a day one through 30 plan to cut exposure, prevent downtime and even find cost takeouts like bloated telecom bills. Check out Inzo Technologies.com in Z O or email Nick directly at nick@enzotechnologies.com Linh. Van Deibel Leo Van Deibel welcome to…

Thank you for having us.

The two of you are married, are self funded searchers, are based in the. UK and bought a business tied to the AI buildout. So there is much to dive into in our conversation today.

Let's begin with some Brief background on you both. Linh, if you'd go first and then Leo will go to you.