Why Choose Ownership Over Being a CEO

So in the entire process of January to eventually closing in September, we looked at probably 80 Sims and a more cursory glance at over 100 deals. So that was generally the broad strokes of the process. The first deal we got really close on, we got referred by a friend who had previously worked for the company.

One of Katherine's MBA classmates dates someone who came to our wedding and we're still very close to but he had worked there. He said, hey, I know the founders, I love them. They're like family to me.

And so we started going down the process with those people. We really, really liked them. The business was very interesting.

It was effectively tech enabled services for large scale conference planning. So an indicative example, this is not one of their clients for risk of violating the NDA, but if you think about Dreamforce, right, the large Salesforce conferences, that's the sort of scope and scale of conferences that these people were working at.

So we actually flew to Vegas, we pretended to be their interns, we helped out, looked good in front of their clientele, you know, did whatever it took. And that was our general approach to search, right? Do whatever it takes.

There is nothing but the search. We were, we got to the end of that deal right about to sign on the line. And then the sellers had to pull out due to personal life circumstances where their home actually had burned.

And they're like, we actually need the cash flow from this business right now to sustain ourselves and figure out what we're going to do with our lives. Like the expense and the headache and the stress of going through with a sale is not going to work given this personal tragedy that we've suffered. And so, you know, obviously we understood that it is horrifying to have something like that happen…

We have heard from our friend since that they're back on their feet and that they did end up selling to someone else. We're generally very happy for them. But from that process a we learned that we probably spent way too much money on lawyers and outside diligence.

What do the following acquiring minds guests all have in common? Doug Johns, Morley Desai, Tim Erickson, Chirag Shah, Shane Ursam. They all went through the acquisition lab, the accelerator in community for people serious.

About buying a business. But they represent just a sliver of. The lab success stories.

The number of deals across the lab's cohorts now stands at over 120 with over $300 million in aggregate transaction value. The Acquisition Lab was founded by Walker Deibel, author of Buy then Build, the book that introduced so many of you to the very idea of buying a business.