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Last year I developed one old belief and one new one. The old one is that it is not necessary to be an employee in exchange for a good life. Good lives are lived in abundance all over the world, especially in the United States. Yet, it remains clear that predictable income through gainful employment is the bedrock of the American dream. A salary funds a savings account and a tax-advantaged retirement account while providing for life’s necessities. Eventually, the savings account evolves into a home that represents a family’s wealth through equity. If the family still wants more they can use that equity to back a business venture that may turn them some profits and increase their wealth. If not, they may remain employed and sustain any luxuries they’ve grown accustomed to. I believe that this plan is still alive and well today and that its careful execution will lead to a good life. It is also my belief that creativity can be invoked to tailor the plan to slightly different results or to completely reimagine it for disproportionate ones. I’ve consistently held, questioned, and reevaluated this belief to keep my mind open to creative enhancements of the plan and divergent paths away from it. To me, the plan is rooted in one idea; To act with a plentiful payment in mind and save the fruits of your labor until they’ve grown enough to sustain your life for its remainder. A salary of the right size and security fits wonderfully into this thesis but is only one strategic pursuit in the forum for action where we exist.
The new belief I’ve developed is that risk and reward average out over a lifetime. Incurring risk is inevitable and living may be considered perpetual risk management. There is risk in leaving the house today, just as there is risk in staying there. Evaluating which risk you prefer produces the resulting action you will take. The first paragraph of this essay illustrates a high-level evaluation of risk throughout an average American’s lifespan. Each move, conscious of risk, incurs just enough to sustain a good life. Taking the job is a risk, saving the money is a risk, buying the house is a risk, and starting the business is a risk just as not doing so is. Risk is incurred in anticipation of reward, which is why we act. Due to the inevitability of risk, human action at scale is commonly justified by a distillation of risk and reward known as opportunity. Holding the belief stated in the first paragraph in my mind led me to understand the necessity of risk and develop these new beliefs. Regardless of how much truth they contain, I’ve used them to guide my curiosity into the exploration of a space crawling with new opportunities that present an impressive matrix of risk and reward. That space is the marketplace for small businesses. At the midpoint of 2023, I rebalanced my portfolio of interests and reallocated a considerable amount of human capital toward buying an existing business. The purpose of this essay is not to argue the bombastic assertions stated in these first two paragraphs. I will continue to question those and welcome your help in doing so, but hereon will be discussing the opportunity to test these beliefs by buying a business.
Six months ago I discovered Codie Sanchez on an episode of Steven Barton’s podcast. Throughout the interview she told the story of her fascinating career from journalism to Wall Street to small/medium-sized business, (SMB), investing, and now onto building a new media and education company, (of which I’m a customer). She told the story of how she gradually transitioned out of corporate life and into the world of owning and operating SMBs. The concept was completely new to me that day. I’d always been interested in transitioning out of my 9 to 5 but hadn’t yet come up with a plan I was willing to pursue. I’ve been a wantrepreneur ever since joining the workforce. I study, talk, and dream about all the ways I might start making my own money so I can stop working for companies. But, I’ve never put a plan into action because everything I come up with is too risky for my comfort level. In that pod, Codie made buying a business sound like the opportunity I’d been looking for. She bought her first laundromat for $100k and made $67k in profit in her first year operating it. That amount pails in comparison to a salary from Goldman Sachs, but it comes along with an invisible reward that most jobs don’t; wealth. People buy businesses because they’re cash-flowing assets. Cash flow is a common metric used for measuring value, and SMBs sell for an average of two to three times annual cash flow. Codie’s laundromat was valued at $100k when she bought it, but after a year she proved it could be worth $134-201k. So, after a year of modest take-home pay, she doubled the potential value of her investment. One thing that never changes about a corporate job is how valuable it is to you once you stop working, (hint: $0). Then again, working for a big company isn’t nearly as risky. After hearing about Codie’s stunning 67% ROI, I knew I had to take a closer look. Let’s talk about how this is possible.
Imagine someone has already done the extremely difficult thing that is starting a business. That thing that I stay employed because I’m too afraid to try; they did it! They built a business that humans go to and pay money for goods or services. Not only that, but it costs them less to run the business than their customers are paying them. This means that after a year it might’ve cost them $500k to run the business, but their customers paid them $600k for their work, so they made a $100k profit. Incredible. That person is an entrepreneur and gets to live off of their profits instead of waiting for a biweekly direct deposit. Now imagine this person doesn’t want to run their business anymore. They’re onto greener pastures and have decided to leave this venture behind. Doing so is quite a pain in the neck. Let’s say it’s a laundromat. The owner has to sell a bunch of used laundry machines on the open market for next to nothing. They have to get out of their lease and lay off all their staff. Also, what about their customers? They all have to find somewhere else to wash their clothes. The place they buy their detergent from is out a customer, and several other microeconomies will be disrupted by the business closing its doors. Not only that but think of all the time and money it will cost this person to shut down their business so that they can move on from it. It just isn’t worth it. Those used washers and detergent suppliers and lease agreements are worth far more carefully packaged into a business and positioned in the market than they are inconveniently scattered throughout the world. For this reason, the logical way for owners to separate from a profitable business has become selling the whole business as a cohesive product that another entrepreneur can pick right up with. This process boils down to finding a buyer who is willing to pay the owner in exchange for their business’s assets and the right to operate it. That person takes over all the responsibilities of the previous owner, including all associated risks and rewards. Codie made a deal like that with the owner of a laundromat when she was twenty-three. They wanted $100k for their business, so Codie offered to give them $100k plus interest over the next several years. This is known as seller financing. If you can’t, (or don’t want to), pay full price for something right now, you can borrow some of the money instead and pay your lender back over time. Seller financing means the seller “lends” you that money. Instead of giving them $100k for their business right now, you might give them a $20k down payment and then another $20k plus interest for the next four years. If this were Codie’s deal and she was making a $67k profit in each of those years, then over $40k of that would be going right into her pocket, and once the loan was paid off, all of it would be.
Codie’s story amazed me because there are so many ways to put it into practice. She found a business that she could operate in her spare time while keeping her day job. She would still go to work for a company while customers were going into her laundromat for a wash. After work, she’d mop the floors at the laundromat, refill the detergent, and collect the change from the machines. It might sound crazy to do all that on top of a full-time job for an extra $40k, but she saw it as much more. Codie was building an empire. $40k was the visible metric she did all that work for, but the invisible one she also got was experience. Once she made that deal she became CEO of Codie’s Laundry. A business owner. An entrepreneur. This is meaningful whether you keep your corporate job or not. Buying a business is a sort of graduation to business ownership where you become responsible for that business’s results. Just because you purchased something that turned a $40k profit last year doesn’t mean you can’t operate it to make more this year. Making a bad decision at work will not impact the amount on your paystub that week. Making a good one might get you a raise at some point. Running a business is different in that the quality of your decisions is directly reflected in its profits. There is an inherent risk in accepting that responsibility that, if managed properly, can yield great rewards. Not to mention Codie was building equity in her new asset. If she kept the business running the same way it already was and pocketed $40k per year while she was paying off her loan, she would’ve made a $160k cash profit in those four years while also purchasing an asset that makes $67k per year. She can keep enjoying that cash flow, or she can turn around and sell it. She could sell it for the same price she bought it for and start getting paid $20k per year as the seller. That’s half the cash flow without doing any of the work. There are endless ways to play this game. She could put more effort into the business and grow it so that it’s worth even more. Maybe it cash flows $100k at that point and she hires someone to operate the business for $50k per year. The other $50k goes into her pocket and she doesn’t have to do any work. Then what? She can keep working her 9 to 5 and stick that extra $50k in the bank. Start a family. Probably retire early. Or she could do it again. Buy another laundromat, rinse, repeat. If she pulls it off again she’d have two businesses producing a total of $100k per year in passive income. Codie did this until she owned over twenty businesses that produced 50 million dollars in yearly cash flow.
I love a good story and that one was plenty for me. I decided to learn how to buy a business. Turns out there are a ton of different ways. People have been doing this for decades and there’s a pretty dense internet paper trail documenting the evolution of their practices. Institutions as prestigious as Harvard have even gone to great lengths to productize the idea and market it to their MBA students as a worthy career path. Harvard Business Review published a little red book that has become one of the bibles of this space, along with Buy Then Build by Walker Deibel. And whether they’re talking about the illustrious study of ETA, (entrepreneurship through acquisition), the highbrow field of M&A, (mergers and acquisitions), or the lowbrow conversation of just “buying businesses”, they’re all discussing the same thing. It’s like making cheese; the plan is always the same, but the process varies slightly. Private equity firms are cooking up nutty and sophisticated Parmigiano-Reggianos, but that doesn’t mean individuals can’t tweak the process a little and end up with a nice block of cheddar to get them out of the rat race. The plan is no different than the simple idea brought forth at the beginning of this essay. Anytime people discuss risky behavior with this level of nuance, it comes down to the same pragmatic motivations: do work, create wealth, and have a good life. I’ve been meditating on such life-spanning ideas down to worries that span days or hours ever since I heard Codie on that pod, and it’s all still moving me with conviction that the opportunity for a very good life lies in buying a business.
I started with a pretty firehose approach to getting smart on how this all works. It’s how I tend to approach anything that interests me. I kept all the time I needed to keep the lights on at my day job blocked out on my calendar, and scraped together the rest of my free time for studying. I read books, consumed other free content, and paid to join conversations with other ambitious folks. The truth about the internet’s “dense paper trail” on this subject is that it only appears that way if you know where to look. It’s a collection of case studies documented throughout humans’ experiences over the last century or so. Listening to lots of conversations and having some of your own makes it easier to compile those experiences and pull out the knowledge people have gained from them. Like I said earlier, the process is up to you, but the plan is simple. I laid down the ABCs of buying a small biz in a hypothetical story a few paragraphs ago. First, you find a business. Next, you buy it. Finally, you run that business. How the heck you go from that to quitting your job and driving a Range Rover is exactly what everyone’s trying to figure out, but if you’ve already bought into trying, those three steps are where you should focus your energy.
There are many ways to find a business to buy. So many that this one step has earned the posh moniker “deal sourcing”. The important thing to understand here is that there are lots of businesses out there and only so much time in the day. If you had unlimited time and resources you could start by walking outside and going into the first business you see to strike up a conversation about selling. Since almost nobody has that luxury, the conversation around deal sourcing involves getting specific on the kind of business you want and how you’re going to find it. It’s sort of like dating. You could take the cold approach and start walking into businesses and shaking owners’ hands. This is called proprietary outreach and many search entrepreneurs have gotten a deal out of it. The savvy ones send out email or direct mail blasts to thousands of businesses at a time asking if they are interested in selling. If you took this approach to getting a date, you would get some, but it’s a numbers game. Since you might not even know if they’re single, you should be prepared to repeat the process ad nauseam before you find someone whose situation is right for you. Searchers have taken this as far as hiring teams of interns to reach out on their behalf and building out sales funnels that lead prospects down their acquisition pipeline. It can be very time-consuming, luckily there are places you can look where you’re more likely to meet single ladies. Crowded bars, nightclubs, and dating apps all have analogs in the world of buying businesses. Since both scenes are leaning remote these days, let’s focus on online listings. Enter Bizbuysell; Tinder for SMBs. This is a website where anyone can list a business for sale and the public can browse at their leisure. I’ve also heard people compare it to a thrift store, meaning there’s a bunch of crap for sale but if you look for long enough you can find something good. They have everything from failing businesses on the road to bankruptcy to profitable operations with scores of employees. A business owner might post their business there to try selling it themself, or it might be represented by a broker who is looking for potential buyers on behalf of the owner. This underworld is so vibrant that quite a lot of business goes on just to service it. Working with a broker comes with the advantage of having someone who’s done this before, but they also get a cut of the purchase price, and you better believe the seller has priced that in. Also, once you’ve met a broker in the context of one business, it’s customary to ask them about any other deals they’re working on. If they take you seriously they might keep you in mind. Getting on a broker’s “shortlist” is the special treatment of being told about new deals before they’re listed to the public. So, networking with brokers, browsing listing sites, and proprietary outreach are all tactics that can produce results when looking for a business, and a healthy mix of them can build out a substantial deal pipeline for anyone who wants to take this field seriously.
Telling everyone you know and meet that you want to buy a business also won’t hurt. I’ve been doing it all whilst loitering around the common business owner water coolers in my city. Chambers of Commerce, Meetups, and Rotary Clubs are just a few examples where you’ll find willing listeners for your wantrepreneurial dreams. I’ve met a lot of folks and had some amazing conversations from this, but again, it’s a slow burn. The connections you make in that arena compound over a lifetime and are invaluable in that sense, but if you’re looking for businesses that are ready to sell yesterday nothing beats brokerages and listing sites. After digging into material and combing through listings for weeks I found a business that I could see fitting nicely into my life. This Anytime Fitness franchise gym location was priced at $350k and boasted a cash flow of $130k. Affordable, profitable, and two blocks down the street from my apartment, I fell in love right away just like they told me not to. That price tag might sound anything but affordable, but small business acquisitions can be financed with up to 90% debt through the United States Government’s legendary SBA 7a loan. With that in mind, I pictured putting up $35k to tac $130k onto my salary. The Range Rover was practically already leased. I called the number on the BizBuySell listing at 4 PM and one of the owners picked up. Five minutes later I was in their office.
First meetings with sellers are the best. I queried delicately for their motivations in selling. A young couple nowhere near retirement age, they were not the archetypal baby boomers selling their life’s work. The search community prides itself on its awareness of the “silver tsunami,” which is the factual trend of baby boomers simultaneously owning the majority of small businesses in America and retiring at the growing rate of over ten thousand per day. This trend has created new popularity around buying businesses, as the necessary transfer of wealth it begs is inviting to curious investors. Someone has to take over those SMBs or else we’re going to be at a loss for necessary labor. Some go as far as to speculate that blue-collar work will surpass white-collar in value as technological advancements cause demand for the latter to wane. That said, the gym owner before me that day was not a tsunami contributor. This was the first letdown, as retirees are advantageous partners in the eyes of a buyer. The foremost reason for which being that they are likely to be open-minded to the idea of seller financing, even if they aren’t familiar with the term. Monthly payments offer tax advantages to the seller, and many would prefer sustained income in their first few years of retirement as opposed to a lump sum. A mid-forties couple selling their franchise location might have different goals for the transaction and these folks were no exception. I was there with the husband of the duo, and he told me about the liquidity event they were looking for. They planned to relocate to another state, and they wanted all the money upfront so they could start a new venture in their new home. Seller financing wasn’t going to do it for these folks. I pressed on.
I pulled at the strand of their relocation. Selling a business is a big life change, and when one such change is accompanied by friends of its likeness, it’s prudent to suspect that passion guided those decisions. Fear spurs frequent revisions just as a manic teenager gets a new girlfriend, grade point average, and hairdo all in one season. It turned out their relocation was imminent, and the man’s wife had already carried out the move. He was splitting time between the gym and their new home several states away, and their last order of business was to get the gym sold. Flags were everywhere. Red flags? Who’s to say? Flags nonetheless. I haven’t even gotten to the fact that it’s a franchise yet, which begs a word of caution from any searcher. We ended that meeting without opening the closet in search of skeletons, but in agreement that he would send me some financial documents where I would inevitably find them. A first glance I found that revenue was down from the previous year and they weren’t banking anywhere near $130k in free cash flow. BizBuySell notoriously misrepresents the cash-flow-based metric of seller’s discretionary earnings, (SDE), as “cashflow”, which is an understandable fib in their line of business. I will go over the differences between the two and their cousin, EBITDA, in a later post. It was naive of me to believe that figure. Further digging revealed plenty more bony bodies hanging amongst their attire, but that’s what I was there for. Digging is learning and searchers are business archeologists hoping to uncover a relic none of their colleagues were careful enough to notice. I found lots of worthless scraps and dusted off the occasional deblume, each time learning something new about this curious process. After a few weeks of meetings I was overwhelmed with information and the sellers were getting skittish. Motivated sellers want to see a commitment from potential buyers so that they can visualize a timeline for their payday. So, I drafted a letter of intent, (LOI), to buy their gym which we both signed. This is a formal agreement that when properly written is not legally binding, and therefore can be executed by a buyer and seller as an intermediate step in their relationship. Traditionally in search, signing such a letter marks the time when the seller stops marketing the sale to potential buyers and provides more sensitive documents, like tax returns, to the buyer. The period that follows is commonly referred to as due diligence, (DD), and it’s said to be the time when the most truth comes out and the actual deal is sorted out before it’s struck. Many searchers urge the prioritization of due diligence to expedite finding out if the business is worth your time or not. The founder of Guardian Due Diligence, a firm specializing in this practice, goes as far as urging searchers to “write the darn LOI,” insisting that any information provided before DD is insufficient for the decisions needing to be made from a buyer’s perspective. For that reason, I put the sellers’ original asking price on the document and away we went. I was officially committed to buying my first business.
Earlier I alluded to a cliche in the space which is not to, “fall in love with the first deal”. Many spread these wise words because it’s a commonly understood trend that the first time you get near a business you see it for all of its appeal and none of its shortcomings. Think of your first boyfriend or girlfriend. The infatuation, the new identity you award yourself for embracing this opportunity, and the desire for its justification to prevail. You live two or three entire lives in your head during those moments following a new commitment. I was dead set on the pious life of a remote programmer and a gym owner. I’d write some code for a paycheck during the day, coach my teammates, and maybe take a few meetings. Outside of those duties, I’d patrol my iron kingdom, talk with my happy customers, and now and then balance the QuickBooks. It was a wonderful life and I was ready to dive right into it.
Similar to step one, there are many ways to buy a business once you’ve found it. Or, due to our human obsession with options, it seems that way. However, there is only one true way to buy a business, which is to pay for it. Folks allow some air to breathe in their definition of money when selling a business, which can lead to fascinating agreements where both parties feel they’ve won. 80% seller financing with 20% cash upfront is a pretty epic deal to pull off, and there are plenty of other ways to skin that cat. Codie also talks about the crown jewel of 100% seller financing where there is no down payment from the buyer and they only pay the seller back with future profits. The art of deal-making is a dance between self-interested parties who must act in both their own and each others’ best interests for optimal results. So, if incentives align, an agreement can be made that looks unbelievable to spectators. It’s an abstract pursuit that can only be understood in practice. Though 100% seller financing is a mouth-watering idea to most buyers, it will always come with drawbacks. Since it is one of the less traditional methods in the space, you won’t have as many businesses to choose from if you’re only interested in seller financing. The more traditional method would be to borrow the money from someone else. If you go this route your deal could still look almost the same as the one I described earlier. You would give a down payment to someone other than the seller, (likely a bank), and they would lend you the amount you need to buy the business. You give that money to the seller and boom, the business now belongs to you, (and your friendly neighborhood lender). In the preceding years hopefully, you make enough money to pay the lender back and own the business outright. It’s the same story except the seller exits stage left halfway through to make way for this new lender character. Once you’ve found a business and engaged the seller, closing the deal is about working with them to determine how that act plays out. The possibilities are endless and the level of creativity employed in your deal is up to you and the seller. I’ve met searchers who’ve ruled out the idea of owning less than 100% of the business after closing, which means they aren’t open to borrowing any money. The obvious drawback there would be that they have to pay for the whole thing themself, with the advantage being that they have nobody to answer to. The process boils down to risk tolerance and time preference. If you’re willing to risk other people’s money and the seller prefers to be paid now, you’re probably going to finance the deal with a bank loan. Working out such a loan is endlessly arousing, which is why I’m going to save that topic for a future post.
To sum step two up, buying the business is where real risk is taken and the interested parties need to determine if the proposed deal can be struck. If written correctly, (with the help of a lawyer), the LOI from step 1 is not legally binding and can be voided by either party without consequence. Step two, however, traditionally culminates with the signing of a legally binding asset purchase agreement (APA). This document ought to be reviewed by each party’s lawyers and gives a clear path to litigation to one side, should the other violate the terms. It’s the equivalent of putting your money where your mouth is. Steven Pressfield would refer to step one as amateur ETA, while step two is turning pro. An APA is drafted with protections for both sides but is meant to consider all possible outcomes so that each party can proceed with confidence. Negotiation is much heavier on an APA due to the difference in legal nature. It’s common for both parties to be uncharacteristically cordial while drafting an LOI in hopes of advancing the deal. For instance, I gladly put the purchase price the seller was asking for on our LOI, though I had little confidence I’d be willing to pay that after reviewing their preliminary documents. This is a common strategy for getting that darn LOI signed because sellers in this market often start with irrational asking prices, and starting the due diligence process is a way to open their minds to the facts of the situation. I attempted to do so by engaging bankers, several of whom told me they weren’t willing to finance the transaction. Relaying this to the sellers is called the “blame it on the bank” strategy, and is meant to neutralize the seller with an expert’s opinion. Telling them why you want to lower the price is akin to calling the sellers’ baby ugly while telling them you can’t get the money unless they do so is a logical argument based on a professional appraisal of value. And, getting comparable opinions from multiple lenders will only strengthen the case, leading the sellers to believe most buyers would run into similar issues. However, this strategy can backfire. The more bankers you present the deal to the more likely you are to find one with an above-average risk tolerance. So, just because you find someone willing to fund your deal, does not mean you should go through with it. After engaging well over three banks, I was able to find a couple who were interested in my deal. Excellent news, though it didn’t change the fact that I wanted a better price, and likely needed one to run the business sustainably. This is why honesty is pivotal to the buyer/seller relationship from day one. I still think it’s ok to do what you have to do to engage the seller, though negotiation still ought to be sprinkled throughout the timeline. Consistently painting the seller’s intentions in a favorable light sends the wrong message, and can make the start of negotiations seem abrupt. This was the pitfall of my deal. I had gotten loan proposals from a couple of lenders and was considering signing one if I could get the sellers to come down in price. At this point, I’d already completed a weeklong training with the franchisor, yet still had not signed an APA. I was an amateur with my fingers crossed, masquerading as a pro, and offering a lower purchase price exposed that. The deal was still on the table, but that bit of shock tainted our relationship from then on. This taught me how important it is for business interactions to appear smooth and for the element of surprise to be reserved for emergencies, and those skilled in its handling. If I had presented myself as slightly less agreeable from the beginning, the contrast wouldn’t have seemed as stark when I made a lower offer, and I might’ve gotten my price. Hindsight did me no good in this case, and we eventually walked away from the deal.
The fascinating contradiction here is that people do all this work instead of starting a business, yet for the same result. Some folks quit their jobs to set out as full-time searchers so that they can find a profitable business to buy instead of creating one from scratch. If you spend a year living off your savings as a searcher, you could’ve just as well spent that time opening a lemonade stand. It still comes down to time preference and risk tolerance, and it seems that there is a lot of promise in buying a business that you can profit off from day one as opposed to starting one and grinding toward the unlikely outcome of profitability.
Once you’ve purchased that business, the only thing left to do is operate it. The only step in this overly simplified process that I’m entirely ignorant of, yet my ignorance will not keep me out of my armchair. From one wantrepreneur to another, I’ll now tell you how to run a business. Lucky for me, it appears that search entrepreneurs can benefit from proclaiming their ignorance in this process. Another key distinction between the zero-to-one startup approach and the one-to-two acquisition approach. Why might an entrepreneur start a landscaping business? Because they’ve mowed a lawn or two and are willing to work. Why might another entrepreneur buy that business? Because they’re willing to learn everything the first guy already has and keep the ball rolling. The laws of physics are of extreme advantage for the latter businessman. An object in motion wants to stay in motion, so if some brilliant person is already making money mowing lawns, paying them for their business and some of their time to teach you how to do the same thing is a pretty good bet. Never having run a business, this is all I can say on the topic. People go into business for many reasons, and though this post began on the topic of wealth creation, there are more rewards to be reaped in business besides money.
Nothing about any of the steps here described is easy. Nothing about risk management at all is easy. Buying a house isn’t easy. Working 9 to 5 isn’t easy. Having a good life isn’t easy. The challenge is implied in the engagement of opportunity, and embracing challenge is the cost of mining an opportunity’s rewards. Entrepreneurship is the sexy label we give to a risky divergence from the most common path to a good life. Entrepreneurs are heroes on a journey fraught with challenges, though the journey of an employee can be described in the same way. The challenge is inherent in any pursuit, less it would not require action. Therefore, along with time preference and risk tolerance, an action also communicates an individual’s preference for a challenge. I decided to buy a business because I wanted to experience the challenge of running one. I want to experience risk and get used to its accompanying discomfort. Taking risks is a skill that is reflected in an individual’s quality of life. Excuse my confidence in saying so, but the quality of life I’m referring to is subjective, meaning that Range Rovers only affect the quality of life to the extent that they satisfy their owners, rather than their pricetag. If a man makes a living selling insurance for Statefarm, retires in a condo, and loves every second of it, he is an excellent risk manager. He took all the right risks to attain the quality of life he wanted. Someone who does the same and dies miserably didn’t do themselves justice and probably lived a life of quiet desperation. I want to practice taking risks while I’m living in an apartment with no dependents so that I’m confident in my skill level by the time I’ve got a house and family on the line. When I venture into the zeitgeist for my afternoon podcast, I find an imploring number of interviews of folks who risked much larger estates than mine on business ventures. Some are less successful than others, mind you. Others are killing it and plenty are just making ends meet. Yet, the overwhelming attitude amongst these folks is that they’re all proud to have risen to the challenge of business. I think there’s something special in the act of doing business and for that, I’ll continue looking at deals and exploring new ways to enter this arena. I’m hoping to flex my risk muscle a little harder this year and continue learning what a good life means to me. I’m glad to have you along for the ride.
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