How I think about buying businesses.
Seventeen years of doing this work has changed how I see acquisitions. This page is the worldview that's behind everything Acquisitiv does. If you read it and agree with most of it, we'll probably get on.
Done properly, buying another business is one of the few ways left to build generational wealth.
That sounds like a marketing line. It isn't. It's the single belief that's behind everything we do.
For an ambitious owner-operator, organic growth has a ceiling. Sector multiples have a ceiling. The route to building something that genuinely changes your family's position for the next generation, not just yours, isn't found in better margins or faster growth alone. It's found in scale. And the fastest credible route to scale is acquisition.
That doesn't mean every acquisition does this. Most don't. The point isn't that acquiring a business automatically creates generational wealth. The point is that when you treat acquisition as legacy work rather than a growth tactic, the bar for what counts as a good deal moves. You stop chasing what's available. You start asking what would actually compound.
Most advice in this category treats acquisition as a transaction. We treat it as the thing your kids will inherit.
Acquisition is a deliberate strategy. Almost no one in this market treats it that way.
The worst piece of advice I've seen given to a founder about acquisitions is some version of "it's easy, just send a letter." I've heard it from coaches. I've seen it implied by brokers. I've watched founders waste eighteen months on it.
Growth by acquisition is one of the highest-leverage things a founder can do. It's also one of the easiest things to mess up. Done well, it transforms a business. Done badly, it kills one. The market between those two outcomes is shaped by who's advising you and how that advice is structured.
Four structural failures run through most advice founders get on acquisitions:
None of these are bad people. Most of them are competent at what they actually do. The problem is that none of them are structured around the thing the founder actually needs, which is someone treating their acquisition as a deliberate, long-term strategy that has to work after the deal closes.
That structural gap is what Acquisitiv exists to fill.
Nothing in an acquisition is cut and dry. Almost everything is negotiable.
I spent years on the adviser's side, running deals for clients. Then I spent years on the operator's side, inside businesses, watching how the deals advisers had landed actually played out.
The single most important thing the operator-side experience taught me is this. A deal has many different components. Almost all of them can be negotiated. Almost any pair of parties can get to a place where both are comfortable, if someone is willing to find the position rather than fight for the headline number.
Most advisers don't work that way. The framing they bring is competitive. The buyer wants to pay less. The seller wants to be paid more. The job of the adviser is to win.
I think that framing is wrong. Not because it's morally wrong, but because it produces deals that fail twelve months later. The deals that work are the ones where both parties walk away thinking they got what they wanted. The deals that fail are usually the ones where one side won.
I'm here for the buyer. The deals I work on are the ones where the seller wins too.
This is the line that does more work than any other in how Acquisitiv operates. It's also the position that genuinely separates us from most of the buy-side advisory market.
I work for the buyer. That's the engagement. That's who's paying me. My job is to make sure my client gets the right business at the right price with the right protections. None of that is in doubt.
But the deals I'm willing to work on are the ones where the seller is genuinely well-served too. Not because I'm being charitable. Because buyer-only thinking is what produces acquisitions that fall apart after completion. The seller who feels squeezed walks away resentful, takes the key people with them, doesn't support the transition, lets the customer relationships drift. The buyer ends up with a business that's worth less than they paid for, twelve months in.
The best deals I've ever been involved in are the ones where the seller called the buyer two years later to congratulate them on how the business was doing. The worst ones are the deals where one side won the negotiation and the other side spent the next five years making them pay for it.
So in practice, I don't do deals where I think one party isn't getting an adequate value exchange. That's the line.
The deal isn't the work. The work is what happens after.
Most founders, when they're considering an acquisition for the first time, think the hard part is finding the business and getting the deal done. The negotiation. The due diligence. The signing.
It isn't. The hard part is the year after completion.
The majority of the value in an acquisition is extracted after the deal closes, in the boring operational work of actually combining the businesses. Customer relationships that need protecting. People who need keeping. Systems that need integrating. Cultures that need bridging. None of that gets done by the deal itself. All of it gets done in the first 12 to 18 months of ownership, and most of the value gets won or lost in the first 90 days.
This is why Acquisitiv stays involved for the first 90 days after completion. It's not a bolt-on service. It's where most of the value actually lives.
A founder who thinks the deal is the work will spend everything they've got on getting the deal done, then have nothing left for the actual job. A founder who understands that the deal is just permission to start the real work approaches the whole thing differently. They commission better integration planning. They protect their own bandwidth for what comes after. They acquire businesses they can actually run.
A few principles I won't break.
Some of these are structural. Some of them are personal. None of them are negotiable.
If most of this sounds right, let's talk.
45 minutes. No pitch. No deck. We'll go through what you're trying to do, where the risk sits today, and whether we're the right fit. If we're not, I'll tell you.
Talk to Mike