Founder and owner Matthias Smith and COO Valerie Stash bring over two decades of SBA lending experience. Matthias and Valerie have a full bench of analysts and associates who work your deals with them. A true deal team. Not just a single point of contact.
Acquiring Minds
Building Trust as New Owner of a $3m Business
Short excerpts only — hear the full conversation on the publisher's site.
Visit pioneercap.com or click the link in the notes. You find the HBR guide, you find acquiring minds. You go down the rabbit hole.
How do things go from there? Yeah, so you know, to start with and a lot of searchers are contemplating these type of stuff, right? Should I do a full time search, quit my job, do a full time.
Search or continue part time? I initially committed to part time search.
I started off looking for businesses part time, starting to reach out to people in the evenings, early in the mornings. Found it very challenging to get a time response for them that then responding to them back on a timely basis. So that the interest is not lost.
Especially I bought the business when the. Market was very hot in every industry, not just the one that I bought into. So I had to be very timely in responsiveness which I was not able.
To, you know, meeting sellers. I was not able to easily find. The time to go and travel and meet because of the very demanding role that I had as a QE provider.
QE market was pretty hot as well at the time. So after a few months of doing. That and kind of failing almost in every single opportunity that I came across and then kicking myself on, oh my God, this was great.
Had I gotten in, I decided that, you know what, I need to put my foot down. Our family is not going to have income, but we have enough savings to be able to survive. And we laid out a plan of six to 12 months on how we're going to survive, what our expenses are going to be like.
And once we had that, you know, we basically said, okay, you know what, I'm gonna, I'm gonna quit and commit myself full time to search and search only. That's the only way I'm gonna get this done. You know, I'm hitting 40 at this point and if I don't do it now, I'm not gonna have another opportunity to do it.
So this is the time I have to do it. So I, that's what I did. I quit my job. It was in June of 2024, quit my job, committed full time to search for, kept searching, came across a few businesses.
Initially my search was focused on landscaping and H Vac. As I had exposure to those industries. Quickly found out that the sweet spot.
Want what comes before or after? Hear the full episode on the publisher's site ↗