Search Fund Courses & Entrepreneurship Through Acquisition Courses
Once upon a time only Stanford and Harvard mentioned entrepreneurship through acquisition or search funds in their courses. Today, a growing number of schools globally either weave search funds into a course or dedicate an entire course to the subject.
Below is a list of the university courses currently available to aspiring acquisition entrepreneurs. I expect this list to grow quickly in the coming years, so please send us a note if you discover more!
Small businesses are an important contributor to economies around the world through innovation, job creation, and growth. For entrepreneurs, small firms also present a unique value proposition and a wealth of opportunities.
Buying a Small Business is a hands-on, applied one-day program that delves deeply into the challenges, process, and peculiarities of buying a small business. Participants explore the intricacies of planning, evaluating and negotiating to buy a small business from a family-controlled or privately-owned enterprise. Key aspects of financing and equity structure alternatives are explored, in addition to the industry peculiarities of acquiring a small business. “Small Business” can be defined many ways but our definition encompasses all enterprises with revenue or enterprise value of under $3-5 million. The program is practical in approach and covers a range of critical issues in one day.
Entrepreneurship Through Acquisition
In short, this class is about buying and running small businesses. Entrepreneurship through Acquisition (“ETA”) covers the art and science of developing an industry thesis, sourcing acquisition targets, structuring and closing on a company, and creating value in that business post-acquisition as an operator. This course will give students frameworks and real-world solutions to use if they decide to pursue the acquisition and leadership of a small business. The class will walk through the life cycle of a typical path toward finding and running a business, including information on raising capital, searching for a company, buying a business, leading that business and then ultimately selling it. Although the focus will be on buying and running a business, the class is designed to be applicable to many other career paths including private equity, venture capital, entrepreneurship and leadership.
Entrepreneurship Through Acquisition: Becoming a CEO from an MBA
This course is aimed at those who want to learn more about becoming a CEO by acquiring a company straight from business school. The course is intended to inform participants about the current models and key steps in the process up to the point shortly after the acquisition. At the end of the course the student should have a base level of knowledge of what it means to become a CEO via Entrepreneurship Through Acquisition, leveraging the key elements of your learning to date to search for and buy a business. In general this course will encourage you to draw from disciplines such as finance, operations and organisational behaviour to understand how to select a business to run.
Acquisition of Closely Held Enterprises
This course focuses on the process of acquisition of a business entity. Students will be shown the tools they need and the process to follow to successfully acquire a business of their own. Among the major topics covered will be the search process, assessing and valuing the business, financing consideration, negotiating, and closing the deal. The course may be of interest to those MBA students who are interested in leveraged buyouts, investment banking, venture capital, and other related careers.
Tactical Topics for Entrepreneurship Through Acquisition
This course provides students with exposure to practical matters faced by operators of smaller enterprises. Whether starting or acquiring a small enterprise, entrepreneurs will be better prepared having been introduced to real-world topics such as relationships with key service vendors (banking, legal, accounting), commercial leasing terms, employee benefit programs, state and local public policy, government procurement, commercial insurance, commercial security interests, credit policies, and financial and operational control systems– from the vantage of the smaller enterprise where choices are often limited as compared to the options available to larger enterprises.
Financial Management of Smaller Firms
The course focuses on how to manage smaller businesses with an emphasis on the financial aspects of buying and growing these businesses. The cases are designed to give students practical knowledge that will be immediately helpful if they plan to own or manage a small business, provide consulting or financial services to these businesses, or invest in smaller businesses. These smaller businesses are privately owned, are typically led by a CEO/entrepreneur supported by a very small management team, produce a service or product for which a current profitable business model exists (as distinct from many VC-backed developmental businesses), and frequently the businesses are of a scale that they can be acquired and owned by individuals instead of institutions or families. The managerial and financial challenges for these firms are different from those of larger, public firms and often require a different approach because of their small scale, lack of liquidity and the difficulty of attracting and deploying capital. The careers of small business entrepreneurs are also very different from the employees of larger firms, and we explore those differences through numerous guests and a few cases that focus on the advantages and disadvantages of the career choice.
Entrepreneurship Through Acquisition
This course teaches specific practical skills that are required to become an effective entrepreneur through acquisition. The course is not a case-based course. It will meet weekly and students will be required to complete assignments on topics relevant to buying a small company such as how to screen potential acquisition targets, the likely types, terms and amounts of debt financing, the typical deal terms and the items open to negotiations, the sources of equity investments, including search funds, private equity partnerships and individual investors. We will also learn about the due diligence process and legal concerns when buying a smaller company. We will have guests in most classes who have practical, hands-on experience.
The course will have practical exercises designed to help entrepreneurs complete their acquisitions. These include pitching to potential equity investors, prospecting for potential targets, seller cold calls and negotiating bank loans.
The seminar is designed for students with a serious interest in buying a small company early in their careers.
Search Funds and EtA (Entrepreneurship through Acquisition)
‘Being an entrepreneur’ for many a person equates to starting a business. This is however only one type of entrepreneur. It requires specific capabilities such as ‘creating from scratch’, a high tolerance for the unknown as well as the ability to convince non-believers or predict and create the future. EtA and search funds are based on another form of entrepreneurship, namely the ability and desire to finesse, energize, scale, improve, and further shape what is already in existence. It indeed needs different skills to go from 0 to 10 than from 100 to 1,000.
Entrepreneurship Through Acquisition
There are many paths to entrepreneurship, and one of those paths is through the acquisition of an existing company. This course will highlight aspects of strategy, finance, organizational behavior, marketing and other business disciplines through the context of acquiring and owning a small business. The course will outline pathways to entrepreneurship through acquisition, including search fund, independent sponsor, or through a CEO-in-Training program at a PE firm or a family business. The end goal is ownership of a company in the near future. The course is organized into sections that summarize the experience of entrepreneurs through distinct phases, including raising capital, the search process and deal structure. These classes augment existing FINC courses. Core focus points of the course include due diligence of a particular business, the post-closing transition process and how to create stakeholder value. The course uses several case studies as well as guest speakers who have completed search funds and acquired companies, investors and search fund experts.
Entrepreneurship via Acquisitions
This course is a pragmatic, "real-world" orientation to entrepreneurship through acquisition of a company. Many entrepreneurial oriented managers find that their skills are best utilized in the context of an acquisition and running of an existing firm, rather than via the start up of a new venture. This course addresses the range of relevant topics; acquisition restructuring, and the LBO search fund.
Entrepreneurial Acquisition
For aspiring entrepreneurs who don't have a burning idea or desire to start a company from scratch, acquiring a small business can provide a direct route to running and growing a business. This class will explore entrepreneurial acquisition (EA). As the course covers topics such as what makes a good industry, raising capital, how to source deals, dealing with investors, due diligence, and negotiation, the course is also applicable to those interested in private equity, venture capital, start-ups, and general management. The class relies heavily on the case method, and each class includes guests (often the case protagonists) who bring practical and current experience to the classroom. The two group projects are intended to be highly practical, simulating real-world situations.
Search Fund Garage
Search Fund Garage is an intensive hands-on, project-based course for students planning to pursue a search fund directly after or within a few years of graduation. Students will learn from the instructors, course peers, and class visitors, particularly top current search entrepreneurs, CEOs, attorneys and investors. This course is designed to assist students who are seriously pursuing a search fund, although some enrolled students will likely end up deciding not to pursue one. Those who have taken Entrepreneurial Acquisition (S543) or engaged in meaningful conversation with the teaching team will benefit the most from this more advanced, experiential course. By the end of the course, students will be prepared to or will already have raised search capital and launched their search, if they choose to do so. Pursuing custom self-developed work plans that target the aspect of the search fund path most relevant to them at the time of the course, students will evaluate and attract investors, structure their search entity, set up their process and outreach materials, identify attractive industries and companies, begin to reach out to business owners, and develop wisdom about what makes a deal attractive or unattractive, among other things. Students will work with business owners, mentors and industry experts to deeply understand the search fund model. Each student, or team, will contact real business owners and receive feedback on how they can be a more effective search fund entrepreneur. This course is offered by the Graduate School of Business. The class will combine the processes taught in Entrepreneurial Acquisition (S543) and detailed in the Primer on Search Funds (2016) with elements from the discovery process taught in Startup Garage (in particular, running preliminary experiments to test proposed methodologies). The course provides a supportive yet challenging environment that will help students step outside of their comfort zone and accelerate learning. By the end of the course each will be better prepared to launch a search than many of the searchers who have come before.
Entrepreneurial Alternatives
Entrepreneurial Alternatives will examine paths of entrepreneurship outside of high-growth, new venture creation. In particular, the course will focus on tactical elements of business acquisition and franchise purchase including target evaluation, financial analysis of targets, business valuation, deal structuring, financing of purchases, and post-purchase operations and integration. In addition to its focus on business acquisition and franchise purchase, this course will explore other alternative entrepreneurial paths including social entrepreneurship and corporate entrepreneurship.
Designing and Leading a Business
Entrepreneurship Through Acquisition
Entrepreneurship Through Acquisition Workshop
Other Courses
I hear there are also courses at the following schools, but I have yet to find publicly available information on them. If you have links, please share!
