These moms ditched corporate life to buy their own businesses
How to fund an acquisitionTypically, aspiring entrepreneurs fund their acquisitions through one of four ways. In the traditional search model conceived in 1983 by then-Harvard professor Irv Grousbeck, entrepreneurs raise capital from a group of investors who support them while they search for a business. The entrepreneur gets a salary during their search but can end up giving up 75% of the equity in their company.Next is self-funding: Someone uses personal funds and may get a loan from the SBA, as Anica John did. However, anyone who owns 20% or more of the company is required to make a personal guarantee. Morli Desai, a single mother with two kids, ended up using her house as collateral when she received an SBA loan to buy Amaira Natural Skincare in 2022.Third, they can join an incubator or accelerator program that will provide resources such as a salary, education, and mentorship—but may ask for equity in return. ETA incubator programs are relatively recent creations and began cropping up in 2015. Kelly Conway, a mother of four, left her job as a chief human resources officer in 2024 because, she says, “I was sitting in a boardroom and realized these are people I don’t want to build a business with. While I love capitalism, I don’t love capitalism on the backs of employees. My values just didn’t align with where I was sitting.”She joined the CEO-in-residence program run by Sleeping Giant Capital. The firm, which trains people in ETA, offered Conway a stipend in exchange for equity as she searched for HR businesses. Instead she chose to use her own savings.In April 2025, Conway bought her first business, Rep-Lite. A few months later she acquired a second business, Pondera Advisors, and is in the process of closing on a third. She plans to combine the three into a larger platform.The fourth option for someone interested in going the ETA route is to embark on a sponsored search, which means partnering with one investor.Because it’s difficult to track self-funded searchers, exact data is hard to come by. Will Smith, host of the Acquiring Minds podcast, has interviewed more than 450 ETA owners since 2021. He says searchers are increasingly turning to self-funding. “There’s been a democratization of how to do this over the past five years so that it’s not just MBAs from the best schools,” Smith says. “That’s been facilitated by the growth of self-funded search with SBA loans.”The Search: This Could Take a WhileSearching for the right business to buy is a full-time job in and of itself, and can be one of the most difficult parts of the process. According to Stanford’s 2024 Search Fund study, which examines data from all the search funds started since 1984, only 63% of searchers ended up closing on a deal.Harvard Business School professors Richard S. Ruback and Royce Yudkoff, authors of the HBR Guide to Buying a Small Business, teach a course on ETA. They recommend treating a search like a full-time job, setting aside at least six months to two years to find a viable business to buy and adding at least three more months for due diligence. They typically recommend looking for “dull” businesses with a track record of profitability, and they advise thinking ahead to the day to when you might want to sell so that you’re confident you’ll have a market of potential buyers.In 2010, Robin Kovitz quit her job in private equity to search for a business to buy because she wanted to have kids. “I was working long hours in (an) office, and I knew I wanted to breastfeed longer than the few weeks I had off work,” she says. “A light bulb went off. I realized I knew how to raise capital and get the deal done, and that I really enjoy operations. So I decided to try to buy a small business on my own . . . so that I could set my own hours with a new baby and work from home.”Her search took four years, and during that time she had two children. “I met with hundreds of businesses and took my baby with me everywhere,” she says. “I was really trying to figure out what to do with the rest of my life. Did I want to be in a warehouse or an office? Did I want to be a people manager or a sole contributor?”Searchers today have more resources such as incubators and databases like rejigg.com, the platform that connects small-business owners with buyers or investors, which is how Anica John found her self-publishing business. Still, they have to answer the same questions Kovitz did, because buying and running a company is more than a new job: It’s a lifestyle.Erin Erickson, a former Googler with two kids, looked at 80 businesses before purchasing Southern Sign Co., a custom sign manufacturing business. Morli Desai says she joined an accelerator after a fruitless year of searching on her own to add more “discipline” to the process. She found her skincare business a few months later.Ania Aliev may be a more rare example. She began her search at the end of her second year of business school at Dartmouth, when she was pregnant with her first child. She launched her search in July, met her seller in August, signed a letter of intent in October, and ended up closing in February. Even so, she says, “It felt like a hamster wheel. Everything was urgent and important, and it felt like there was no end in sight as more items kept coming up. I didn’t really believe it was over until I’d signed (on) the dotted line.”While different funding mechanisms have opened up ETA to more people, there’s still a wide gender gap. According to Stanford’s 2024 Search Fund study, only 18% of searchers in 2023 were women, and according to a 2023 study by the Women’s Search Network, only 116 women have launched a search for a business since 2012.Forrest, the SBA loan specialist, estimates that for every 100 people who show up to an ETA conference, about 10 to 15 are women. While she says roughly about 30 of the men will go on to buy a business, only a couple of the women will.She hypothesizes that making the time for a search is a big barrier for women. “Observationally, women are still in charge of so much at the household. . . . Then they’ve got their corporate job, and now they’re contemplating making a change to entrepreneurship,” she says. “Perhaps the process to find a company is just so daunting that even if they love the idea of a search, they don’t know how they’re going to be able to juggle it.” She adds: “We need more women in the room. Their approach and perspective are valuable.”Now, the fun part: Operating the businessOnce a business is acquired, the real work begins. Some buyers get lucky and find that their new acquisition is exactly what was described to them. Aliev purchased Life Support Systems, a 50-year-old business that services and maintains automated external defibrillators. “Many of the people had been there for over a decade and were phenomenal,” she says. Not only that, the business has a playroom so people can bring their children to work if they’re sick or have a day off from school and keep an eye on them as they work, a tradition Aliev is carrying forward.Others find surprises. Kovitz ended up buying Baskits, a gift-basket business. “I loved the idea of sharing in people’s most special moments,” she says. But when she walked into her business on day one, she discovered that there was no infrastructure.“Every day, I would ask the warehouse how many baskets were produced and nobody could answer,” she recalls. “By week three, I realized that the business needed a ton of support in terms of processes, planning, analysis, and rigor. So, I bought steel-toed boots and decided to run the warehouse myself, which is not what I expected and is the opposite of the ETA model. The ETA model is to buy an established, well-run business and watch and learn for the first year before making changes.”In extreme instances, external factors may no longer make the company viable. Desai discovered her skincare business was propped up by “pay-per-click” advertising. When she acquired Amaira Natural Skincare in 2022, clicks were 60 cents each, but the price began to rise shortly after her acquisition, until it reached $3 a year later, decimating her profits. “I had one month after taking over the business before the storm, and then things started unraveling,” she says.Even if the business is on solid ground, managing an ownership transition is a significant challenge.“For the first six months, I was drinking out of a fire hose, making sure that I was keeping the lights on, continuing to deliver high-quality services and products, keeping the team really happy, keeping our relationships strong, getting out and meeting customers,” says Erickson of Southern Sign Co.Thriving as an ETA owner takes a certain type of personality, points out Matt Littell, who teaches classes on ETA at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management. The father of two, Littell runs an ETA and Legacy 41—a holding company to invest in other ETAs—with his wife, Cat. He warns aspiring owners to try to sample the ETA lifestyle, either by volunteering or consulting at a similar company because often owners end up running their businesses for 4 to 10 years. “It’s well worth getting some exposure to what the day-to-day life looks like before you sign up for such a big economic and time commitment,” he says.Littell warns that running an ETA requires a tolerance for ambiguity. “You’re almost always making decisions in the gray with imperfect information,” he says. “You may not figure out ’til three or six months later whether the call you made today was the right call or the wrong call. Many of the problems you’re dealing with are communication issues.”Adds Cat Littell, who teaches at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business: “It’s a lot like parenting.”The Risks and Rewards of ETAA year later, Anica John is still going strong. In May, she bought Long Overdue Books, a publisher, and combined it with her printing business to offer authors services such as ghostwriting and marketing. She’s an ETA enthusiast who has made it her mission to spread the word about it. “More women should know that the ETA path is a strong option for highly educated and capable women, especially those with family obligations.”For Robin Kovitz, the long hours have paid off. Today her company, Baskits, is earning $30 million in revenue and is one of the largest gift basket companies in North America.However, the success came with a price. “I thought I’d be working less, and what all of a sudden happened was the opposite. I was now required to be at the business 100 hours a week with two little kids, and my husband was a partner at a big law firm,” she says. “We literally had like two shifts of help at home, but we looked at each other one day and said, This is not the kind of parents we want to be, and my husband ultimately made the decision to step back and support me. So he left his job, and he now works for us.”On the other end of the spectrum, Morli Desai decided to shut down her company two years after acquiring it. “It became a nightmare. I had bought my company using an SBA loan, so I eventually had to file for bankruptcy to protect myself. I liquidated the company last year because it was worth more,” she says. “I’m still paying the SBA loan back. The bank wanted to foreclose on my house and take the equity. Fortunately, my judge ruled against the bank and allowed me to repay the loan over 10 years.”Neither regrets her choice. “The fund that I worked for prior to acquiring Baskits ended up being enormously successful. . . . I wish I could have remained involved in some way, but no, ultimately I don’t regret leaving,” Kovitz says. “I think you’re either an entrepreneur or you’re not. And if you’re an entrepreneur with vision, you need the freedom to build on your own terms, and ETA is a wonderful vehicle for this.”As for Desai, she admits that shutting down her business “was the most painful thing ever, even worse than going through my divorce. But I got to (live) my dream of being an entrepreneur. I don’t have anyone saying, ‘No, you’ve got to be at this meeting at this time.’ I can put the kids first, and then I know I’ll get the work done. I love that flexibility.”Today, Desai is working in her family’s business and negotiating to acquire it in the future.Jeanne Wang spent 15 years in private equity before she learned about ETA. She thought it was such a powerful mechanism for women to build long-term wealth that four years ago she pivoted to investing in women searchers. “I thought there was a real opportunity here, but I was worried there weren’t enough women participating,” she says. “When I attended my first conference, there weren’t many.” In 2023, Wang started a WhatsApp group called the Women Searchers Community, which is now 600 strong, to create a community for women to support each on their ETA journey.“This is a pretty compelling career alternative,” she says. “For many women, traditional corporate careers can place limits on both autonomy and long-term wealth creation. When they buy a company, they gain the opportunity to build equity, make decisions, and create the kind of business and life they want. It’s still incredibly hard work, but they are in control. Most of the wealth that’s been created in the U.S. has come through small-business ownership.”
تم النشر: 2026-07-09 11:00:00
مصدر: www.fastcompany.com
