From €4 Million, to Zero, to €12 Million

Buying a business solved an issue in the future life of today's guest and her husband. They were both MBAs at Kellogg Business School, so career would be important to both of them. But it was going to be difficult to find great jobs for both Ivona Butcher and her husband in the same place at the same time.

Not to mention, Ivona is Czech and the couple expected to spend some years of their lives in the Czech Republic. The chances were low that they would both find work there to match their ambitions. Buying and building a business together in the Czech Republic solved for all of this.

Ivona and I spent time on working with U S based search investors to buy a Czech based business. Challenges and opportunities of buying a business in a small country where they were the first known search fund how to get press so that when people google you you seem legit.

Renegotiating a bank loan, buying out a seller note at a huge discount, surviving Covid when revenue dropped to literally zero, then emerging from that existential crisis to double earnings which are today above 2 million euros. Please enjoy this conversation with Ivona Butcher, Co CEO at Bayre 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. If you ask owners in the ETA and search community which insurance broker provides highest quality work, great outcomes and has a practice dedicated to searchers and acquisition entrepreneurs, one name comes up again and again.

Oberle Oberly Risk Strategies has worked with hundreds of searchers over nearly a decade and is in fact led by a two time successful searcher, August Felker, which makes Oberle a specialty insurance brokerage for searchers by a former searcher. And if you've got a business under loi, Oberle will provide complimentary due diligence on that business's insurance and benefits program. An easy no risk…

To know August and the team at. Oberle to take advantage. Check out oberle-risk.com that's o b e r l e-risk.com link in the notes. Ivona Butcher welcome to Acquiring Minds.

Thank you Will.

Ivona, I saw you on stage at. MIT at MIT's ETA conference. I was impressed by you and your story which has many distinguishing features to it, among them that you bought your business in the Czech Republic, your home country.

So let's get right into it. Ivona, a little background on you please to start.

So I come from the Czech Republic from a small town. I went through my studies there I had my first job as an economist in the Czech Republic, and I started my third year, finished my doctorate degree, and then I. I met my husband and we moved to the US to go to business school together.

That's where I first heard of search funds. But first we needed to have other career, pay off debt and things like that. So after business school, after Kellogg, I started working in New York for an investment firm.