Why I Decided to Try Buying a Business After My MBA

Yesterday I had a veteran who was a year younger than me at business school give me a call to catch up. We chatted a bit about life and what we have been up to, and he asked me:

“Why didn’t you go into consulting like everyone else?”

He and I spoke about it and I thought it would be worth sharing my thinking with you all.

What am I currently doing?

I started The Veteran Professional in late 2019 when I felt frustrated by the lack of coherent information available about leaving the military.

It simply wasn’t good enough.

Since the blog, I started the podcast and tried my hand and a number of entrepreneurial ventures, including a tech startup related to veterans (Vet Journey).

Six months ago I started to look for a business to acquire full-time.

Read this if that sounds like Greek to you: What is Entrepreneurship Through Acquisition?

For someone who graduated from a top MBA program last year, this is simply not the norm.

I took this snapshot from my school’s employment report (which you can find here). You can quickly see that pretty much everyone goes into a corporate role. 71% of my class went into just consulting and finance, the most typical career paths for MBAs. “Going to buy a business” isn’t even an option here.

And you can see why they went. The median base salary for both consulting and finance is $175,000.

That’s crazy. With bonuses, they are making about as much as a flag officer, and at an average age of 29.

Why, then, did I pass on that money?

Ability to Build Wealth

A few years back I read a book that changed my view on how people get rich.

You can find it HERE on Amazon.

The basic idea in the book is this: most people who have a few million in the bank are not lawyers and executives of big corporations (although they often do have that wealth). No, the average rich person is a small business owner. It’s the guy in your town who owns a towing company or the woman who runs an accounting firm.

The fact of the matter is that if you really want to build wealth, you have to OWN assets. And a business that generates money is a great asset to own.

Here is a business that I found quickly on Biz Buy Sell. I don’t know this business and cannot verify any information, but let’s assume that everything we see is true.

Look at the cash flow number of $1,274,039.

A business this size likely has a single owner. That means that the owner made $1,274,039 last year (again, assuming all this is true.) Going back to our post-MBA consultant who went to a fancy firm, this plumbing business owner made 7.5x what that consultant did. Oh, and because of tax advantages for business owners, they also paid fewer taxes on it.

Damn.

Risk Assessment

OK, so I think I showed you that there can be some serious money to be made in owning a small business. But let’s be clear. VERY clear.

It is absolutely NOT guaranteed.

For all we know, that same plumbing company could have made less than half of that number last year. And searching for a business like this to buy and getting the deal done is a GIANT effort. It’s freaking hard (let me tell you) and by no means guaranteed.

But for my family, it was worth the chance.

My wife and I talked and knew this was by no means a certainty. We knew there was no guarantee of me closing a deal and that while I was looking for a business, there would not be a whole lot of extra money coming in.

But we also saw the opportunity. And we saw that right now in our lives, without kids, is a good time to take the risk.

And those jobs my MBA classmates took will still be there if this doesn’t work out.

Money lets you do things

For most of my life, I haven’t been money-motivated. But the more I see what money can bring people, the more I see the value in having more of it.

• I can go visit friends more and not worry about flights and hotels.

• I can take my wife out to nice dinners more often.

• I can hire people to do things I don’t want to do (back to the first point, I hate booking travel).

My goal isn’t to have the biggest pool of gold coins.

I want to be able to generate enough cash flow to do the things my wife and I want to do, make donations to causes that we care about, and make some meaningful memories. All of this can happen without more money, but with more money, we can do more of it.

Buying a business gives me the potential to build that kind of wealth.

Wanted to Break the Norm

Look, I didn’t come from a rich family. Our family vacations growing up were piling into the minivan and spending a week visiting relatives in Kentucky. Nothing fancy.

My family is full of engineers, teachers, and accountants. They have all made a great life, but no one in my family is what anyone would call wealthy.

I wanted to break that norm. I wanted to show my future (knock on wood) kids that if you want to dream big, you can do it.

Freedom

A few months ago, we had my 1-year MBA class reunion. It was a ton of fun catching up with friends and seeing what everyone had been up to in the first year after graduation.

Two things stood out to me:

1. Consultants hated their job. Aside from one friend who went to a small, boutique firm and one friend (former Air Force) who just really likes the work, none of my consultant friends liked what they did. To be fair, most of them knew they wouldn’t like it. They mostly just did it because of the money.

2. Finance people weren’t even there. Maybe they just didn’t want to come, but I think a lot couldn’t make it because of work obligations.

Look, the reality is that many of my classmates are saddled with student debt from undergrad and graduate school and are focused on making as much money as they can right now to pay that off. I’m very thankful I didn’t have to be in that situation because of my military education benefits.

Owning a business doesn’t mean you won’t have to work hard. It doesn’t mean there won’t be weekends or late nights. But it does mean that you can choose when and how you work.

That’s the freedom I wanted.

-Mark

The Veteran Professional

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