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4 owners found their biggest growth move hiding in plain sight. Here’s the lesson each one took, from bank statements to customer lists.

7 hard-earned lessons from building businesses: why boring beats shiny, why WHO mistakes cost more than HOW mistakes, and why a bigger job is still a job. Most people only see the highlight reel: They see I helped build an investment business at First Trust that grew past $1 billion in assets under management, and that I’ve bought and built dozens of businesses doing over $100 million in combined revenue. They know I also grew Contrarian Thinking from a single newsletter into one of the largest business advisory and media companies out there. And that along the way, we built Contrarian Academy into the largest acquisitions platform and BizScout into the second-largest marketplace for buying and selling businesses. But what people don’t see is that I’ve also lost millions on bad deals, hired the wrong people, and made more mistakes than I’d like to admit... So I put together the 7 biggest lessons I learned from building businesses from $0 to 9 figures. Steal my homework, learn from my mistakes, and level up your business. 1. THE BEST OPPORTUNITIES ARE THE ONES NOBODY WANTS Early in my career, First Trust handed me an assignment to build an investment business in Latin America. I know it sounds great on paper, but one of the only reasons I got the job was because no one else would take it. I didn’t live there and I didn’t have a network there, so honestly, I was terrified of failing. But I cowboyed up, went to South America, and was able to 10X the business through joint ventures and acquisitions until we passed $1 billion in assets under management. While it was scary, that experience taught me something I’ve never forgotten: Chaos creates compensation. When everybody wants something, competition eats the opportunity. On the flip side, when nobody wants it, the math starts getting interesting. Which is why years later, while everyone was hunting for the next Uber, I was looking at washing machines. So before you chase

7 hard-earned lessons from building businesses: why boring beats shiny, why WHO mistakes cost more than HOW mistakes, and why a bigger job is still a job.

How a Tech Veteran Who Waited 20 Years for His Shot Bought 2 Laundromats “I definitely don’t want to build something from scratch. I’ve been there, done that.” Meet Vishal Parihar. Vishal landed in the US in 2003 with a master’s program ahead of him and one goal: own a business. But years of paperwork stood between him and that dream. So he built for other people first. In 2008, Y Combinator rejected his startup. He spent close to 2 years building someone else’s tech company instead. The product worked, but the customers didn’t “get” it. So growth stalled out. In 2018, he joined another startup after its Series A and climbed to director of platform. Right around then, the board shut the whole company down. Then came 6 years at SAP, managing data engineering teams. In 2023, his citizenship came through, and he knew it was time to do something with it. “I’ve been waiting for this moment for a while,” he says. “How do I use this?” He found Codie’s shorts, read Main Street Millionaire, and joined Contrarian Academy on June 1, 2025. The book made him hungry for his own piece of Main Street. The numbers scared him, though. After all, in a world without guarantees, how do you know a business is worth the price? So he did the work. Deal reviews, questions in the community, and attending calls. It paid off. On July 23, 2026, he closed on 2 Southern California laundromats with 160 machines between them. Here’s how he got there. 1. Read the broker’s silence Vishal narrowed his search to laundromats and self storage. After years of building teams, he wanted a business that could run without him standing in it all day. By November 2025, he had an LOI accepted on a Southern California laundromat. Then the broker cut him off. Too many questions for a laundromat, he said. “This is my first business,” Vishal says. “I can’t just not ask questions.” We’re

How a Tech Veteran Who Waited 20 Years for His Shot Bought 2 Laundromats

Price objections are story problems. See how Mark Cuban reframed Mavericks tickets, plus a 3-part audit to uncover why your customers really buy. Your customer isn't buying your product. At least, they're not just buying your product. They're buying the story they tell themselves about the money they're about to spend. If you miss that story, you become the cheapest option in a race to zero. But when you find it, price becomes almost irrelevant. Think about the last thing you overpaid for and felt great about. The anniversary dinner, the stroller with better suspension than your truck, the vacation to Italy you'd been planning for a year. Do you remember the price tag or how it made you feel? That's a Money Story . Every customer has one, but most businesses never try to find it. How to Sell a Losing Team I've been reading my friend Vanessa Van Edwards' new book, Conversation: How to Connect with Anyone and Make Every Interaction Count . She’s a behavioral researcher who teaches science backed-people skills in a way that makes it easy to implement in life and business. And one story from her book keeps rattling around my head. In January 2000, Mark Cuban bought a stake in the Dallas Mavericks. Great deal, except for one teeny-tiny detail... The team lost games. All. The. Time. So he'd effectively given himself one of the hardest sales jobs out there: getting fans to buy tickets to watch a team lose. And while he could've hired it out, the Mavericks' new owner walked into the sales bullpen and worked the phones himself. He started with facts, then dug deeper. Tickets to a game cost less than the movies or feeding the family at McDonald's, and they gave you something more than entertainment. Here's what he said, straight from Vanessa's book: He sold them a memory, and suddenly the ticket became a symbol of family bonding. Seemingly overnight, the arena started selling out, and pretty soon tickets were going for

Price objections are story problems. See how Mark Cuban reframed Mavericks tickets, plus a 3-part audit to uncover why your customers really buy.

How a software engineer with a W-2 job and 4 kids bought an IT business he'd never heard of. Here's what 6 LOIs, 1 partner, and a 52-day close taught him. Meet Christian Christian Riboldi builds software for a living. He’s got a W-2 job, a loving wife, and 4 beautiful kids. The 4th arrived mid-search, which we'll get to. About a year and a half ago, he decided he wanted ownership. So he did something about it and signed up for Main Street Millionaire Live even though he'd never heard of Codie. Christian was just hungry for knowledge and saw an event about buying businesses. He joined the Academy at the end of it, tore through the course in a couple of weeks, and fired off his first LOI almost immediately. After becoming an Academy ambassador and getting his reps in, he closed on a managed IT services business back in July. Here's everything that happened in between, and what you can use in your own search. 1. LOIs are like reps Christian's first LOI? A $5M deal with roughly $1M in SDE. "I was like, this would be so sweet, and we'll figure out how to fund it later." The sellers wanted a multiple well above the 3 to 4x range we teach, so while this deal died, Christian kept the education. "Every single time I put in an LOI, I learned a whole lot about myself [and] what I even consider to be a good deal." He submitted 5 LOIs over the course of the next year and change, and finally, the 6th one went all the way. The lesson: Your first LOI teaches you more than your first 10 hours of research. Put in the reps early , because while it feels scary, each one gets you closer to where you want to be. 2. Tell people what you're hunting A fellow Academy member had just closed on their own business when they sent Christian a listing with a note: you should buy one of these. It was managed IT support for small businesses. Funny enough, Christian writes software for a living and had never heard of the industry. Turns out it was a great Frontpoint IT IT Services Closed a $1.2M managed IT business in 52 days while keeping his W-2 job

How a software engineer with a W-2 job and 4 kids bought an IT business he'd never heard of. Here's what 6 LOIs, 1 partner, and a 52-day close taught him.

Learn why consuming endless business content can feel productive without creating real progress, and how turning knowledge into action can actually grow your business. It's 6:40 a.m. You're 2 episodes deep on a podcast about hiring A-players, 1.5x speed, coffee in the cupholder. And you're driving to a business where you still make all the sales calls. Somewhere in your notes app sits a list of 40 ideas from shows like mine, but you've only tried executing 1 and a half... Look, no judgment. You've got plenty of company. 58% of Americans now listen to podcasts monthly and 45% listen weekly, both record highs according to Edison Research's Infinite Dial 2026. That weekly number works out to 130 million people. When you tack on the YouTube breakdowns, the audiobooks at 2x, the threads you saved "for later," and yes, this newsletter: you've never had more access to information. And yet most businesses look exactly the same as they did last year, yours (probably) included. Quick warning before we go further. If you're here for a pep talk, you're reading the wrong newsletter. There's a mirror waiting at the end of this email, and it doesn't do flattering angles. The Age of Mental Masturbation Here's the uncomfortable truth. Consuming business content feels like working on your business. Your brain gets the hit, and you screenshot another inspirational quote for later. Then Monday shows up and you run the same plays you ran last Monday. So let's call it what it is (sorry, Mom): mental masturbation. The feeling of progress, without the actual progress. Feels great. Does nothing. In fact, Stanford professors Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert Sutton wrote a whole book on this in 2000 called The Knowing-Doing Gap. Their finding: companies rarely stall because they don't know what to do. They stall because they never turn what they know into action. 26 years later, most of the knowledge is free. You can have the best operators on earth in your ears on

Learn why consuming endless business content can feel productive without creating real progress, and how turning knowledge into action can actually grow your business.

Laid off from tech, Krista bought a flower shop inside an old airplane factory. Here are 5 lessons from her search you can use to find your own business. “Wait for the glass slipper. It will come.” Meet Krista. Krista Sohmer owns Poppy and Pine, a flower and retail shop outside Denver. The shop sits inside a marketplace built in an old airplane manufacturing warehouse. Big space, lots of foot traffic, and flowers where the fuselages used to be. Krista has spent over 12 years in tech marketing, and for most of that time, it felt stable. Then she watched friends get laid off one after the other over the last 5 years. It eventually hit her too. “And I went through a layoff at my last company and that really shook me. And so being an owner, it feels like I am more stable in a sense of like, well, it's not replacing my salary. It's at least a little bit of something that I can control more I can fall back on.” A few friends started talking about buying businesses, and she got curious. So on her birthday weekend, she gave herself a gift: a ticket to one of Codie's virtual events. Something clicked. She joined the community, took the group calls, built a deal box, and started showing up to meetings. Then she gave herself a year to find the right business. Some months, she made peace with missing that deadline. She evaluated “everything under the sun,” and sent 4 or 5 LOIs. She went down the franchise rabbit hole and climbed back out, finally closing on Poppy and Pine, her flower shop, on July 1st of this year. Here's what she learned along the way. FREE EVENT Krista built her deal box, wrote her LOIs, and worked through diligence with the Contrarian Academy community in her corner. And it all started with a free event... Here's what you'll walk away with when you join in: How to buy the right business for you. Your 1st deal or your 10th, the right business fits your schedule and your goals. We'll show you how to spot the fit Poppy and Pine Retail Floristry Bought an absentee-run flower shop after a corporate layoff, then rebuilt its marketing from scratch

Laid off from tech, Krista bought a flower shop inside an old airplane factory. Here are 5 lessons from her search you can use to find your own business.

Most of the top 1%'s income gains since 1985 came from Main Street businesses, not tech. Take the 5-question test to see if you're your own bottleneck. The Millionaire Next Door You’ve probably shaken hands with a multimillionaire without knowing it. America mints about 1,200 new millionaires every day, and some wild new statistics in Owen Zidar and Eric Zwick’s new book, The Everywhere Millionaire, show they aren’t tech moguls or private equity suits. Far from it. There are about 3 million “stealthy wealthy” whose average net worth lands around $25 million. Meaning, for every 1 name on the Forbes list, there are 4,000+ private owners worth $10 million or more. And they don’t own fancy AI apps. They own law firms, car dealerships, medical practices, commercial contracting companies, and regional restaurant chains. All that ownership adds up to 13X more wealth than the Forbes 400 combined. After spending more than a decade inside anonymized Treasury and IRS records, Zidar and Zwick found that more than half the rise in the top 1% income share since 1985 ran through pass-through businesses. 5.8 of 10.5 percentage points. Zidar says economists spent 40 years studying "a few redwoods in Silicon Valley" and never saw "the vast forest of American entrepreneurs." These aren't giant empires either. Owners in the top 1% run businesses averaging $3.7 million in sales with 28 employees. That’s a 12-truck HVAC company or 3 dental offices and a good office manager. The exact kind of businesses that show up on a site like BizScout every week. You’re standing in the forest right now, and you don’t even see it! If you’re reading this, you know I talk about this all the time. You don’t have to be the next big startup founder to build real wealth, because there’s plenty of money on Main Street. And Zidar and Zwick’s findings prove it. They also found something else I think you should know. But I’ll get to that in a sec. Hot Dog

Most of the top 1%'s income gains since 1985 came from Main Street businesses, not tech. Take the 5-question test to see if you're your own bottleneck.

A former Cirque du Soleil coach spent 2 years fighting zoning to build a micro resort. Then he bought one instead. 5 lessons from his glamping deal. "It wasn't my intention to buy a micro resort. But it just sort of happened." Meet Beau. Beau spent 10 years coaching for Cirque du Soleil. Quidam. Totem. He even helped build Drawn to Life, the Disney collaboration down in Orlando. Then in December 2023 he moved to Austin and did something completely different. He opened a school. NextGen Academy is an Alpha sister school built from the ground up by a guy with zero background in children’s education. "I come from a coaching background," he told us. "(So I...) built the plane as I flew it." He still runs that school full time, so everything you're about to read happens after he clocks out. For his 5-9, Beau and his partners own and manage short term rentals across 3 markets. They started during the pandemic and self-funded every single deal. 10 acres in Tennessee, 22 in New York. The plan was always to build micro resorts on it, but the permitting and zoning process had other ideas. So in June 2025 he joined the Contrarian Academy, looking for a business to support the rental operation. On July 31, he closed on something else entirely. 5 tiny cabins in a national forest in Texas, about 90 minutes from a major city, purchased for just shy of $2M. Here's how he got there. TOGETHER WITH ASK DOLLY You do everything right. You take the raise, you max the 401k, and you skip upgrading your SUV. But you don’t feel like you’re making any real progress... Part of the reason is that no one ever taught you how to pay attention to your money. That’s what Ask Dolly is for. Ask Dolly is the difference between staring at your accounts and actually knowing what to do next. It's not just showing you numbers, it's helping you decide. Our friend Vivian Tu built Your Rich BFF into a 10-million-follower operation by making money make sense Stay in Babia Glamping Bought a $2M glamping resort in 8 months after joining the Contrarian Academy

A former Cirque du Soleil coach spent 2 years fighting zoning to build a micro resort. Then he bought one instead. 5 lessons from his glamping deal.

Michael Jordan won 6 titles by giving up the ball, then ran his team into the ground. Take the free Owner Score and find out what's capping your business. For years I flew to Santiago, Chile, every single week. 11 hours in an aluminum tube, rocking through night and cloud. I made that trip more than 100 times. I liked Chile fine. What kept me going back was a belief that I had to be there, that deals would die without the magic trick of me shaking hands in the room. One of those flights landed on my birthday. Delayed 4 hours. The terminal hummed with that fluorescent fatigue, everyone around me scrolling and sleeping and living, and I drank too much cheap airport wine and started crying. Not the big kind. The quiet kind, where your face is already wet before you notice it's happening. A stewardess asked if I was okay. She was kind about it, which somehow made it worse. How do you explain to a stranger that you're weeping because of the life you built with your own hands? Somewhere over the Andes, between night and landing, it finally hit me. I hadn't built a business. I'd built a pedestal I couldn't jump off of. Here's the part that still stings. That company has run for the last 8 years without me, and my #2 handles it. Every flight I took, every birthday I missed, every time I told myself they need me there, the business was proving me wrong. I just refused to listen. Why I wrote a second book Main Street Millionaire was about getting into the game. Own or Be Owned is about winning it. And I didn't write it from a mountaintop with a cigar, slowly plugging away at a typewriter. No. I wrote this because I needed it. I was running 3 jobs inside a company I'd built to set me free, and it was destroying me. If that sounds uncomfortably familiar, good, because the book is intended to fix exactly that. This particular trap has nothing to do with laziness. Unfortunately though, everything that got you where you are stops

Michael Jordan won 6 titles by giving up the ball, then ran his team into the ground. Take the free Owner Score and find out what's capping your business.

Why your ROAS is lying to you, how the Ad Trap starts by rewarding you, and the 3 numbers that tell you whether you own your demand or only rent it. So I posted this about a week ago: And the internet exploded. (God forbid a woman have a hot take. 🤣) Look, sometimes I like to be a little hyperbolic to get a conversation started. Fair point by the trolls. And sometimes that conversation turns into a shouting match in the comments. Marketing agencies came after me like I'd kidnapped their families. Ad buyers called it naive, along with some other choice words. Someone informed me I'd clearly never scaled anything real. LOL. Here's what's funny about that: marketers make money when you run paid ads. Their business model relies on you spending as much as possible, because most agencies get paid a cut. Most marketers obsess over ROAS instead of profit. Most salespeople care about top line, not profit. I've even heard media buyers brag about budgets the same way other people brag about horsepower. Pretty much everyone arguing with me had a financial reason to. And I get it. Advertising is their job. From their perspective, as long as the ROAS works, everybody's happy. Which is why I devoted a whole chapter to advertising in my new book. In Own or Be Owned, this idea has a name: Promote. It's 1 of the 12 Profit Levers, and done right it builds an asset that accelerates your growth. Get it wrong and you'll be paying Meta more rent every year for less return. Which brings me to the $10 million business we told to turn off every ad. A Method to the Madness Imagine throwing $200,000 a month into Facebook and Google. That's more than most people make in a year. For the company we were looking at, that was just the cost of doing business. Their ads drove phone calls. Calls turned into appointments. Appointments turned into revenue. Nothing wrong with that. At $10 million a year in revenue and 70% margins, there were no red

Why your ROAS is lying to you, how the Ad Trap starts by rewarding you, and the 3 numbers that tell you whether you own your demand or only rent it.

Brian Barnett was a hospital PA with zero business experience. Here's how he found a senior home care company, won over the broker, and closed the deal. Meet Brian Brian Barnett is a physician assistant, who just acquired a senior care business in Florida. His story is one of following the process, being flexible, and working his butt off. Exactly the kind of person we love working with at Contrarian Thinking. And based on our interview, we’ve got no doubt he’s going to scale his business and keep growing. The only question is how big does he want to go? While he recently moved down to sunny Stuart, Florida to keep an eye on his new business, he doesn’t plan on living there forever. His family is up in New York, and he wants to return to his day job there once everything is running smoothly. And that’s something people miss: you don’t have to hate your job to want to become an owner and scale a business. You also don’t have to sacrifice your life to run and scale a business. (In fact, building a business so good it runs without you is kinda our thing...) What pulled him toward business buying was a question about his savings, not his career. “Initially it was really more of a financial goal,” he told us. “What do I do with my other money? How do I invest this? The stock market?” Then he started getting our newsletter. Other people’s stories kept landing in his inbox, and one day he decided this whole “buying a business thing” was 100% possible for him too. Ownership started looking less like a pipe dream, and more like an asset class he could control. So he joined the Academy with no idea what he wanted to buy and no business background at all. Then, on August 10, he closed on a senior home care company in Stuart, Florida. Here’s how he got there. 1. The first 8 months didn’t count Brian finished the course and then did what almost everybody does. Not much. “I realistically didn’t spend enough time searching as I Acorn Elder Care Senior Home Care Closed his first acquisition with zero business experience after joining the Contrarian Academy.

Brian Barnett was a hospital PA with zero business experience. Here's how he found a senior home care company, won over the broker, and closed the deal.

The 5-category Hiring Matrix Contrarian Thinking runs on every candidate, and the scorecard behind our scariest hire. I pulled her into a room because I'd run out of other options. For weeks she'd been touring the company like a lounge act. Different audience, same whiny set. We work too hard, this place is crazy, everyone else is the problem. "You've told me you have a problem with your manager, with ops, with the content team," I said. "Have you actually talked to any of them about it?" She looked at me. "Well, no. They wouldn't listen anyway." There it was. All she'd ever wanted was an audience. So I decided to give her a new one. Firing her took 20 minutes. Undoing what she'd already done to the team took months. Here's what you might not know about a bad hire: underperforming is the least of it. The real damage is how they poison everyone around them. Every person you bring in either compounds your standard or corrodes it. Most owners run the wrong version by accident. They talk to 3 or 4 people, pick the least terrible one, and act shocked 5 months later. Turns out, hiring is hard. It's why we built a process the whole company follows for every single hire. We’ve had to. Contrarian Thinking has outgrown 3 offices since we started in 2019, and over the last 9 months we've added about 50 people to the payroll. We've gotten it down to a science, so go ahead and steal it for your next search. The Hard Part You want better hires? Fix the core problem: too few candidates, and a standard so flexible it could be an Olympic gymnast. Here's the math. For every 50 profiles you scroll, 10 to 20 turn into real conversations, and 1 turns into an offer. Top performers are already winning somewhere else, which means you have to go get them. Block an hour a day for hunting. Open LinkedIn, type "Austin, Texas, Chief Marketing Officer," and start DMing strangers. One of our best content hires came

The 5-category Hiring Matrix Contrarian Thinking runs on every candidate, and the scorecard behind our scariest hire.

Ian, Randol and Karen run wildly different businesses. All 3 hit a wall, and all 3 got moving again by fixing 1 thing. Here's how to find yours. “I always thought luxury was the icing. But it was actually the cake all along.” In our community, we see all sorts of businesses with a million different problems. Take these three: Ian inspects houses, Randol runs a plastic surgery practice with his wife, and Karen rents space to hairstylists. And while their businesses are wildly different, each owner shared a similar problem. All 3 hit a wall they couldn’t seem to climb, and all 3 got moving again by addressing a few simple things. And in case you’ve been living under a rock, Codie's new book, Own or Be Owned , takes everything she’s learned over the last two decades building a portfolio of successful businesses worth over 9 figures, and distills it into 12 Profit Levers owners can pull to create a company that runs without them. Most owners are really good at pulling one, but completely ignore the others. Own or Be Owned helps point you to the biggest 2 problems stopping your growth, and gives you the tools to fix them. Here's what it looks like when a stuck owner finds their bottleneck and pulls the right lever. 1. Ian sold to everyone → Persona Ian Mayer started a home inspection company so nobody could lay him off again, and it worked... right up until it didn’t. He hit the same revenue ceiling 4 years running, but by the only scoreboard he had, he was doing everything right. More inspections, more agents, more work. Then he sorted his customer list by revenue instead of job count. “And I went, oh.” A small group jumped to the top. Luxury agents with bigger homes, where pools, guest houses, and sewer scopes stack on top of an already higher base price. “They may not give us as many inspections, but they give us way more average revenue per customer.” Ian didn't change how he worked. He changed who he worked

Ian, Randol and Karen run wildly different businesses. All 3 hit a wall, and all 3 got moving again by fixing 1 thing. Here's how to find yours.

Time is the only asset you can't make more of. Here's how Codie protects hers, and the meetings she flat-out refuses to take. Don’t waste my time My phone buzzes and it’s my podcast producer: "Hey, when you get a minute, give me a call." So then I get on the call and they just want to move a meeting... While I'm glad no one’s in the hospital, now I’m picking out a headstone . Typing out, "Can we talk about the Henderson invoice today?" costs you negative seconds, and by making me take a call that definitely could’ve been a text, you’ve done something egregious. You’ve wasted my time. Time is, by far, the most valuable asset we have. And all this made me think about a few of my billionaire friends and how one of the biggest levers they all pull is related to their time. Getting the most out of theirs, not wasting anyone else’s, and focusing it where it matters. Here’s a few ways to maximize the time you have. 1. Never uni-task As an owner, you won’t have a ton of free time anyway. So anything you can do to double-dip will pay dividends on your calendar’s whitespace. A few ideas: Get a portable red-light to use while you answer emails. There’s plenty out there, but make sure you’re getting one with the right light spectrum or your mitochondria won’t feel it. It’s got tons of benefits, and it’s an easy add-on for deep-work blocks. Use a standing desk and walking pad during meetings. I know it’s not always possible to take meetings walking outside (this Texas heat is no joke), but this is the next best thing. This helps you get your steps in during long days, and keeps you sane. Outsource your low-level tasks . I’m talking anything under a certain dollar amount/ hour. If it’s not worth your time, it gets pawned off. One of my biggest unlocks was just getting a cleaner a few times a week. That one change will win back hours of time spent tidying up and allows you to actually relax at home. The

Time is the only asset you can't make more of. Here's how Codie protects hers, and the meetings she flat-out refuses to take.

How one buyer built his buy box around his life, sent LOIs before he felt ready, and hired past his own skill level. 6 lessons from an acquisition story. "I would rather learn from my own mistakes fast than wait for the perfect moment." Meet Shaker. Shaker Albrahim started his entrepreneurial journey in a school hallway. Candy, bought cheap, resold at a premium to his classmates. The margins covered pocket change, and the game hooked him for life. But instead of going for an MBA, he studied physics at the University of Arizona. Always an A-student, his goal was to provide for his family. While he could’ve pursued academia, Shaker knew there was a bigger opportunity elsewhere. In his last year of college he found e-commerce, built an Amazon store from zero, and sold it. Rather than take his pocket change and try something else, he doubled down and kept building. Over the next several years he would run 15 different e-commerce businesses. Then he walked away from all of it. "I just told them, hey, I don't want anything from that. I'm done from this path." Back to zero. He'd built enough from scratch, and found the ceiling. This time he wanted to buy. "I had the cash. I wanted a fast track." He'd followed Codie for years, and ultimately joined the Contrarian Academy so he wouldn't get his first acquisition wrong. Just 2 months of searching later, he had a business under LOI. 4 more followed over the next year, and he's grown every one of them since. Here's how he did it. 1. His deal box started with what he knew Shaker knew going in that Codie isn't an e-commerce evangelist. So he spent a while looking at other sectors. Then he saw something familiar listed at a favorable multiple, and stuck with what he knew. E-commerce. And while we specialize in helping people acquire service-based businesses, Shaker had 2 (good) reasons to stick with selling products online. First, he was moving back to Saudi Arabia. His product sells

How one buyer built his buy box around his life, sent LOIs before he felt ready, and hired past his own skill level. 6 lessons from an acquisition story.