Think Big, Buy Small

Hosted by producer Katie Zandbergen, Rick and Royce return for their end-of-season dive into listeners’ most pressing questions – those that many aspiring acquisition entrepreneurs wrestle with. They explore how age and personal finances may influence ETA risk tolerance; whether an MBA truly matters for success in a traditional search; how to handle the loneliness that often accompanies searching...

Partners in search, Nick Kerr and Shaquille Walker, join Rick and Royce to share their journey from risk-averse upbringings to acquiring HealthBridge, a concierge primary care clinic on Long Island. In this conversation, they discuss how their backgrounds, family considerations, and desire for autonomy led them to entrepreneurship through acquisition, while also reflecting on the emotional highs a...

In this special “Friends and Family Night” episode, Rick and Royce speak with Meghan Orzetti about the experience of entrepreneurship through acquisition from the perspective of a searcher’s spouse. Drawing on her personal experiences, Meghan shares candid reflections on supporting her husband, Season One’s Michael Orzetti – a Marine Corps veteran, turned searcher, turned CEO – through the uncerta...

Ike Ukawuba was a self-funded searcher whose path to entrepreneurship began far from the boardroom. Raised in a single-parent household in Chicago, he began his career in engineering before discovering his true passion for business and problem-solving. After several years at Accenture, followed by experience at some startup ventures, Ike found his stride in entrepreneurship through acquisition – a...

In this episode, Rick and Royce sit down with Rob LeBlanc, Co-Founder at Ambit Partners, to explore the evolution of search fund investing beyond traditional markets. Rob traces his path from building an ETA platform in South Africa to backing searchers across frontier economies, offering an insider’s view on how entrepreneurship through acquisition is adapting globally. The conversation examines...

Michael Aubrey, having walked the path from searcher to successful operator and investor, draws on his wealth of experiences to offer a masterclass in small business growth. In this episode, he talks candidly about navigating early operational setbacks and hiring challenges, the strategies he employed to build a national salesforce, and why he believes a deep understanding of one’s customers is th...

In this bonus episode, hosted by Adam Outland, we're featuring a conversation from our friends at The Action Catalyst, a top-rated leadership and entrepreneurship podcast. While Think Big, Buy Small focuses on the unique entrepreneurial path of acquiring and operating a small business, The Action Catalyst shines light on all types of entrepreneurs and the distinct insights they offer. This episode...

In this episode, Rick and Royce are joined by A.J. Wasserstein, Senior Lecturer at the Yale School of Management, for a deep dive into one of the most critical – and often misunderstood – aspects of buying a small business: revenue quality. Together, they unpack the full spectrum of revenue types, from transactional to contractually recurring, and explore how these distinctions impact everything f...

Rick and Royce sit down with a former student of theirs, Paige Sopcic, an engineer turned entrepreneur, to discuss her inspiring entrepreneurship through acquisition journey. After leaving a promising career at GE and earning her MBA, Paige launched her search in partnership with an accelerator and acquired a specialty canning company called CanSource. In this episode, she shares how she found the...

In this episode, we’re joined by Bruce Marks, a veteran SBA lender with decades of experience and well over 1,000 business acquisition deals under his belt. Bruce draws on his deep expertise in the acquisition lending space to reflect on the role of SBA financing in ETA, how lenders assess deals, the importance of debt service coverage, along with evaluations of risk, and factors that searchers sh...

It's always fascinating to hear the journey of someone who doesn't have a conventional MBA background but still finds their way to ETA, identifies high-quality acquisition opportunities, and then successfully buys and operates a small business. In this episode, we meet Tom Allsworth, who was in the Merchant Marine Academy and the Marines Corps, followed by some work experience at home and abroad,...

Will Smith, Partner at Minds Capital, has been host of the Acquiring Minds podcast for over four years and, during that time, has had the opportunity to speak with hundreds of searchers-turned-entrepreneurs, affording him a true bird’s eye view of the ETA landscape. In this wide-ranging discussion, Will reflects on personal traits that set top-performing searchers apart; company characteristics th...

Jeff Homer is the founder of Ensemble Performing Arts, an organization that provides back-of-house support to music schools, allowing teachers to focus on what’s most important to them, excellence in music education. Though there are now over seventy music schools under Ensemble’s umbrella, it all began with Jeff’s acquisition of a single school in Colorado, initially meant as a side hustle that w...

Last summer when, after a self-funded search, Nick Wheeler was only a few months into his new role as President at Tra-Cal, Rick and Royce had a chance to speak with him about his early experiences at the company’s helm. In that Season One episode, Nick confessed that he was “drinking from the fire hose”, but he also believed that Tra-Cal had been a high-quality acquisition and was optimistically...

At the end of each episode, Rick and Royce ask listeners to reach out with any questions they may have related to entrepreneurship through acquisition. In response, we’ve heard from people at all stages of their entrepreneurship through acquisition journeys, along with other stakeholders in search. Now, in the final episode of Season Two, our hosts address many of the queries that were received. T...

A few years ago, Logan Leslie began his search with the goal of rolling up smaller, same-industry enterprises under the umbrella of one company. Fast forward to today and Logan is CEO of Main Street Auto, which is the parent company to over ninety auto repair shops around the country. In this engaging conversation, Logan shares why he believes the auto industry is ideal for roll-ups, along with hi...

In the last three years, Adriana Garcia Ceja graduated from Harvard Business School, became a mother and, after a funded search, acquired an aging life care management business called ElderTree. Many would-be CEOs set out on their searches primarily wanting to experience the joys of operating a small business, while being more agnostic about what the company does. This was not the case for Adriana...

Kent Weaver was an early participant in the world of search, completing a self-funded search that led to his acquisition of a healthcare company in 2002 and then, four years later, putting on his investor hat to make his first investment in search. Today, he’s one of the most experienced and highly regarded funding partners in the space, having invested in over one hundred searches, both tradition...

Connor McCarthy and Caroline Matthews are not only a married couple and new parents, but they’re also funded searchers turned co-CEOs at Canyonlands Camps. The outdoor recreation industry is little explored in the world of search and their ETA journey is also distinct in that, through the acquisition of summer camps and travel programs, they’ve taken ownership of business-to-consumer businesses, w...

William Young became CEO of Aerowave Technologies in January of 2021. While he has no regrets about his pursuit of the ETA path, his journey to the company’s helm was a difficult one. His story is distinct in that he started out in a partnered, brokered search but ended up as a solo searcher, focusing on proprietary outreach in Dallas-Fort Worth and Boston. Once he closed on Aerowave, Will was met...

Sam Rosati is a former searcher turned active equity investor in self-funded searches and, given his experiences, an important focus of this conversation is on the evolution of the self-funded market. It used to be the case that self-funded searchers had to create their investor base from scratch, out of pure networking. Now, however, a path is emerging where a searcher can reach out to a recurrin...

Betsy Harbison, CEO at Softrip, successfully completed a funded search in 2021. Her story, however, is rather unique in that the business she acquired is a remote, vertical software company that was also a carve out, meaning that a crucial part of Betsy’s journey involved the daunting task of untangling Softrip from its parent company. In this episode, she considers the pros and cons of self-funde...

In May of 2024, after a self-funded search, Brian Seeling became CEO of PGM Service, a Florida-based company that focuses on maintenance, service, and repair of commercial food equipment. His journey to become an acquisition entrepreneur is distinct in that he first worked as a software engineer, was then involved in startup life for a number of years, and only recently embarked on the ETA path. I...

Not only is Zach Duprey a highly experienced commercial lender to those seeking to acquire a small business but, in helping to create a national market for these loans, he has been instrumental in dramatically changing the landscape of small business lending, revolutionizing the market for search. In this episode, Zach describes the “three legs of the stool” that he and his team consider in evalua...

After a brokered search, Jenn Braus became CEO at Systems Design West, a company that provides customized ambulance billing, emergency medical services billing, and accounting services to fire and rescue organizations, and one that Rick and Royce believe is “the perfect recurring revenue business.” In this episode, we learn about the beauty of recurring revenue (and how it differs from repeating r...