How to Build a $5m Media Business Into a $20m Flywheel

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. The lab offers a month long, intensive, almost daily Q and A sessions with. Advisors, live deal reviews with Walker, Deal.

You know Clayton, first of all, what year was all this happening?

I learned about search in 2011. I officially launched my search fund in 2014.

Okay, 2014. And so as you said, you were at Duke's business school. You didn't even learn about search from a business school class, but from a law school class, which is funny. There wasn't an ETA program or club or what have you at Duke that there is at Fuqua there.

Of course there is now. You were basically kind of from a non search school at the time. Y. What we hear around traditional search is that like tr the traditional search investors basically recruit searchers from a handful of schools that they have these relationships with.

They're all the, you know, the, the top MBA programs in the country. If you are not at that phase of life or you are not at one of those schools, it is hard to get the attention of the traditional search investors. Traditional search mafia.

But you did it because they, they weren't at Duke is my understanding. Is there something to be learned from how you did it for other folks who are not coming out of the, you know, the top 10 or 15 business programs right now?

Well, I'll be like really cognizant that, that the ecosystem has changed a lot in the, in the last 12 to 15 years. So when I was launching, I put together a list, went through every single search fund website out there and put together a list of 40 investors who had backed search funds. Like that was the Whole I scoured the earth and that was like the scale of the ecosystem that I could uncover…

That is extremely different today. And at that time like search investors were getting nearly all of the searchers they needed from a small selection of schools and getting really high caliber searchers. And like that was, that was kind of the, the ecosystem.

But as search has gotten more popular and prominent and more exposure to different schools and every search fund that that launches, it's usually one or two, you know, friends, family, colleague, investors that, that come into the deal. And that's like usually the introduction of a person who realizes, oh I really like this asset class and like this is like, can be great returns and it's really…