Mistakes I Made When Buying a Business (Part 1)
When I first started looking to buy a business, I thought I had the perfect background.
After more than 15 years in consulting and an Ivy League MBA, I’d built two core strengths:
Problem-solving
Being a generalist who could learn a little about anything
On paper, that sounds like an ideal profile for a business buyer.
Small business owners wear many hats (generalist ✔️) and are the ultimate decision-makers (problem-solving ✔️).
In many ways, buying a business was a great fit for me.
But that same strength became my biggest mistake.
The Trap of “I Can Run Anything”
When I began my search, I told myself:
“I can figure out any business.”
And because I believed that, I didn’t put any real boundaries on my search.
I had:
No industry focus
No B2B vs. B2C preference
No upper limit on purchase price
No clear financing plan
No licensing constraints factored in
My thinking was:
“If I find the right deal, I’ll figure out the rest. Investors, financing, expertise—I’ll handle it.”
What that actually meant was this:
I had no filters.
What Happens When You Search Without Focus
The result was months of spinning my wheels.
I evaluated everything:
every listing site
every industry
every size of business
every shiny opportunity
I requested information on deals I never could have closed:
businesses that required licenses I didn’t have
deals far outside my realistic budget
industries I didn’t actually understand
Worse, I spent months analyzing businesses I didn’t know how to evaluate properly because I had no real operating context.
The Deal That Made It Click
One deal still stands out.
I seriously considered a baby products company that sold a niche baby bottle holder exclusively on Amazon.
Was it a good business?
Maybe.
But here’s the truth:
I had never worked in a physical products business
I had never worked in consumer-facing companies
I didn’t know how to source or negotiate with suppliers
I had no experience selling on Amazon
I didn’t understand inventory, logistics, or fulfillment
Would I have figured it out eventually?
Probably.
But the cost would have been steep: lost time, wasted capital, unnecessary stress, and a painful learning curve.
I would have been a terrible buyer for that business.
The Lesson: Be Ruthless About What You’re Actually Great At
Being a generalist doesn’t mean you should buy any business.
It means you should buy the right kind of business—one that aligns with:
your real strengths
your operating experience
your financial reality
your risk tolerance
When you’re starting your search, you need to be brutally honest with yourself about what you’re truly good at—not what you could learn with enough pain.
Focus isn’t limiting.
Focus is what saves you time, energy, and money.
Want to Avoid This Mistake?
My intro course helps you:
define your target deal profile
set clear search filters
build realistic budget constraints
identify industries that actually fit your background
stop wasting time requesting information you’ll never get
If you want to shortcut the learning curve and avoid months of frustration, come join me at Team Rise Consulting.
👉 Subscribe to this Substack for the next post in this series, where I’ll share the next major mistake I made—and how you can avoid it.
Learning from your own mistakes is expensive. Learning from someone else’s is much cheaper.