Hot take: operator experience is overrated in the search community. Financial literacy is not.

Everyone in ETA loves the "former operator" origin story. You ran a team, managed P&Ls, maybe turned something around. Respect. But most acquisition failures don't come from people who couldn't manage staff. They come from people who didn't understand what they bought. They paid for $600K SDE and got $380K after the add-backs fell apart. They missed that 60% of revenue came from one customer who played golf with the seller. They closed on a business that was, functionally, one guy in a truck. You can hire an ops manager on Indeed. You cannot hire someone to retroactively un-sign a purchase agreement. The due diligence phase is where acquisitions are won or lost — not the first 90 days of operations. Yet searchers spend months building operating playbooks and about four hours on the financials. Learn to read normalized earnings. Understand what a QoE is actually looking for. Know your numbers before you need a lawyer to explain them to you. The operator story gets you in the room. Financial literacy is what keeps you out of bankruptcy court.