Three years ago, I bought a contract manufacturer in Northern Illinois with about 50 people and 40,000 square feet. After 20-plus years of operating experience, I became President and co-owner of my first entrepreneurial venture. It was a welcome change after 15 years in logistics and transportation and 5 in manufacturing, where I was running P&Ls and leading teams of 500-plus across multiple locations. Searchers ask me all the time whether buying a small business is worth it. Here's the real answer: it depends almost entirely on whether you are the right fit, and on whether you buy the right business. That second half matters more than people think. The worst-case scenario in ETA isn't failing to buy a business. It's buying the wrong one, and the gap in damage between those two outcomes is not close. Three years into co-owning my firm, I still believe ETA can be one of the most rewarding paths available. But my view of who's actually suited for it has narrowed a lot since I first learned about it during my MBA at Northwestern Kellogg. Back then, I thought anyone who was motivated, smart, and entrepreneurial could make this work. I don't think that anymore. The Operator-Versus-Dealmaker Catch-22 This tension gets discussed, but it deserves more emphasis than it usually gets. To create value after closing a deal, you have to be a good operator. But to close in the first place, you need deal experience, credibility, financing, and the ability to navigate sellers, brokers, and lenders. Those are two entirely different muscles, and most people are not strong in both. A strong operator often needs help getting a deal across the line. Strong dealmakers can wire the money and then discover how hard it is to actually run the thing, which is arguably the more dangerous failure because now they own it. Long term, operating ability matters more, but that's irrelevant if you can't buy a business to begin with. Be Honest About Your Candidacy I see posts on SearchFunder from people frustrated that brokers won't take them seriously. I get it, but often the broker is just making a practical call about whether you'll close. If you haven't run a P&L, operated in a similar environment, or built credible investor relationships, be realistic about how sellers, brokers, and lenders will read your candidacy. SBA financing exists, and there are creative ways to get deals done, but ambition alone doesn't close anything. If the operating background, deal credibility, and capital aren't there yet, the market tells you fast. That's not cruelty; it's information. The community here is supportive, which is one of its best qualities. But encouragement without realism can hurt people in the long term. Sometimes a broker isn't dismissing you because the system is “broken”; he's looking at your background and concluding you're unlikely to close. That doesn't mean never. It likely means that you need to build more experience, find the right business partner, lock down committed capital, or narrow your search to a space in which you truly have an edge. Make Sure You Want the Actual Job Some people are drawn to ETA because they want to be President or CEO: the title, the autonomy, the LinkedIn update, and the ability to say they bought a company. I understand it; ownership is a real milestone. But the novelty wears off fast. Pretty soon you're not "the CEO" in the abstract. You're the person handling a quality escape, a late shipment, a difficult employee, a supplier who let you down, a bank covenant, an angry customer, or a facility problem that nobody else can solve. If what you actually want is the title and prestige, this path will disappoint you quickly. You have to want the job that comes with running the business: the responsibility, the ambiguity, the unglamorous work, and the pressure of being the last stop. If you're doing it for the announcement, the business will expose that in a hurry. The Reality Check I run a 40,000-square-foot assembly operation. It's a solid, presentable plant, but it's no gleaming corporate headquarters. It’s full of real people, real equipment, real problems, and real crises. When consultants, executives, or MBA grads visit, especially ones used to polished offices, I can sometimes watch the question form in their heads: Is this what I'd be doing every day for the next five to ten years? For a lot of them, the honest answer is no. That's not a knock on them; it's just a matter of fit. ETA in manufacturing, as well as a lot of service businesses, isn't for people who need convincing that they will enjoy walking the floor, working with blue-collar teams, and living inside the business. If you have to be sold on that life, it's probably not your path. I graduated in a Kellogg cohort of 77 students. When I first learned about ETA, I figured each cohort might have two to five people genuinely suited for it. I'm more sober now: I'd say one or two. Not because the others aren't smart or ambitious (they are), but because this work takes a specific kind of person. You need a strong sense of ownership, comfort with unglamorous work, the patience to build trust with employees who've watched owners and consultants come and go, the ability to absorb stress instead of pushing it down into the organization, and the confidence to make decisions with imperfect information. Realistically, you need to be 110% committed to the business. If you're only 55% in, flirting with the idea, this will test you and it will break you. The Business-Selection Trap Once you've honestly concluded that you're a fit, the next question is what to buy, and this is where discipline earns its keep. The ETA thesis hasn't changed: boring, profitable businesses can be wonderful to own. I bought one. But "boring and profitable" doesn't mean that any business with positive EBITDA is a good target. Some boring businesses are attractive because they're durable, defensible, and cash-generative. Others are just commodities with weak pricing power and a buyer hoping the spreadsheet holds. I see searchers drift toward commodity businesses — logistics companies, run-of-the-mill machine shops, generic service businesses with no moat — out of fatigue or desperation. Often their only thesis is "it's available, the seller will talk to me, and maybe I can finance it." That's dangerous. Search long enough and not buying starts to feel like failure. It isn't. Passing on a bad deal is discipline. Buying a business that eats five years of your life, traps your capital, and gives you no path to value creation — that's the real failure. The cost of patience is small compared to the cost of the wrong acquisition. The Industry-Agnostic Trap Over the past three years, I've had more than 150 Kellogg and Booth students and alumni through our facility. Almost every time someone is interested in ETA, I ask what industry they want to buy in. The answer is nearly always the same: "I'm industry agnostic." I get why people say it; they don't want to close off any options. But I strongly disagree with being truly industry agnostic as a buyer, especially at the smaller end of the market. Unless you're buying something big enough to keep the full leadership team in place, which allows you to spend most of your time on strategy, stick to an industry you know or an adjacent one. An unfamiliar industry compresses your timeline dramatically. You'll spend months learning what an insider knows instinctively, misread risks, and underestimate the institutional knowledge buried in the business. If you're already buying a job, don't also buy a PhD program. Study the Failures As you start looking at deals, spend real time on what goes wrong, not just what goes right. Success stories are useful but seductive; read enough clean transitions and strong exits and you’ll start believing the path is more straightforward than it is. The failed deals teach more. Was the industry too unfamiliar to the buyer? Was the seller too central to the business? Was customer concentration misread, or the second layer of management weaker than it looked? Did the buyer underestimate working capital, confuse adjusted EBITDA with durable cash flow, or simply hate the day-to-day reality of the thing they bought? Those questions belong in every searcher's ammo box. The Seller Relationship Is Your Edge Your relationship with the seller may be the single biggest advantage you have over strategics and private equity. PE often keeps the owner locked into a transition period. A strategic can bring integration risk and the sense that the company will be swallowed into something bigger. What a searcher can offer is different: a credible, respectful, clean exit for a burnt-out owner. For a lot of owners, their business isn't just an asset: it's their identity, their legacy, their employees and customers, and their life's work. Handing that over to someone they trust is worth real money, and it can win you a deal you otherwise shouldn't win. In our case, one of the original owners wanted to stay involved. Three years in, he still comes by a couple of times a week. We have real conversations, and every time I look at a bolt-on, he's there championing for us. I'm grateful for it, but it takes work, and it takes respecting what was built before you showed up. Be skeptical, too, when you hear that an owner "only works twenty or thirty hours a week." Thirty hours after forty years won't be your thirty; they might equal ninety of yours. The owner knows which customer to call before a problem escalates or which machine to nudge before it kills a shift. It's easy to think, "I have an MBA, how hard can it be to replace a founder with 40 years in?" I can confirm it's hard. Do not underestimate the size of those shoes. Working In the Business vs. On It Once you own a business, one of the hardest parts is balancing working in the business against working on it. In a small operation, something is always on fire: a customer issue, a late shipment, a key employee, a quality problem, a machine down, a cash constraint. It's easy to spend six months firefighting and realize you've made no progress on strategy, systems, or talent. You have to protect time to work on the business. That doesn't mean floating above it; in a small company you'll get pulled into the details no matter what. But if you never build space to improve the system, the system will just keep consuming you. Why I'm Still Here Three years in, I don't regret it. Is it easy? No. The grass-is-greener effect is real and works almost every time. But this is the happiest I've been in my career. After 15 years in logistics and transportation, I realized how transactional and commoditized that world felt to me. You'd bend over backwards for a customer for six months, rates would move, and the relationship often moved with them. Manufacturing feels different — there are real barriers to entry, real switching costs, and relationships that matter. At the end of the day, you’re building something tangible. It's messy, but it's concrete, and it fits how I'm wired. I'm also running a smaller organization than I did earlier in my career. Fifty to a hundred people is my sweet spot; I've run much larger, and I learned the hard way that bigger isn't automatically better for me. If I'm honest, the contract manufacturer I bought isn't the perfect ETA business. The deal worked because of the structure and the foundation we had to build upon, but the business has some commodity characteristics. If I could change one thing in hindsight, I would have pushed toward specialization sooner — a specialized product, a specialized capability, or becoming world-class in a niche. That's the direction I'm building toward over the next five to seven years. Final Word ETA is worth it. But the most important diligence may not be on the business. It's on yourself. Be honest about your operating background, your ability to raise capital, your tolerance for ambiguity, whether you actually want to spend years inside a business carrying the weight of ownership, and why you want it in the first place. Read the HBR Guide to Buying a Small Business. Talk to people who've done it. Study the failed deals. Understand the financing. But above all, stay disciplined, because not buying a business isn't the worst outcome. Buying the wrong one is. If your answers to “why do you want to pursue ETA?” are still mostly aspirational, the business will expose that fast. If they're real — the operating foundation, the relationship orientation, a credible capital path, the discipline to walk away from bad deals, and the commitment to build for the long term — ETA can be one of the best professional decisions you'll make. It has been for me.