For Anica John, the pandemic was a revelation. At first of the lockdown, she had a 5-year-old little one and labored in product administration at Walmart Labs. John, whose husband is a professor at Stanford College, turned the default mum or dad whereas working remotely.
By the point return-to-office mandates started to roll in, John had two kids and was working at Amazon.
“Issues turned unimaginable,” she says. “We outsourced family duties as a lot as we may, however I didn’t really feel like life was getting higher. With the implementation of AI, the expectations elevated at work and it turned increasingly more unimaginable.”
John started in search of different profession paths. “I had at all times been an entrepreneur at coronary heart, however I didn’t need the inflexibility of constructing a venture-backed enterprise after I had two babies at house.”
Then she discovered about entrepreneurship by way of acquisition: shopping for an present enterprise.
In April 2025, she left Amazon. A couple of months later, she purchased DiggyPOD, a ebook printing enterprise, utilizing a $10 million mortgage from the Small Enterprise Administration (SBA). All of her workers, except for those in manufacturing, work remotely.
“We’re all tending to households and dealing,” John says. “It’s been fantastic as a result of I prolong the identical flexibility to my group that I get pleasure from myself.”
It’s no secret that girls in company America are struggling: Caught between the calls for of their jobs and parenting, many are selecting to go away their employers. In 2025, more than 455,000 women left the workforce, and virtually half (42%) cited caregiving as the highest motive.
However selecting to go away doesn’t imply bold and proficient ladies need to cease working. It typically means they’re not ready to deal with the system, and opting out of a job could also be extra possible than scaling again on caregiving. Many of those ladies are channeling their ambition and expertise into entrepreneurship, the place they will make the foundations.
Particularly interesting is entrepreneurship by way of acquisition (ETA), the method of buying an present small enterprise quite than ranging from scratch.
Lisa Forrest, a senior SBA enterprise growth officer at Northwest Financial institution who has spent virtually 40 years specializing in SBA loans for ETA searchers, says established companies normally have a better chance of long-term success than a brand new enterprise, although she notes that there isn’t credible trade knowledge on the five-year survival fee of ETA companies. (One estimate from Angora, an organization that makes a speciality of launching companies on Amazon, places the five-year survival fee of ETA companies between 70% and 80%.)
That stated, the leap from worker to CEO will be perilous. How perilous? In 2023, the Yale Faculty of Administration printed a paper titled “Ten Reasons to Absolutely Not Pursue Entrepreneurship Through Acquisition,” citing lengthy hours, private monetary threat, and an excruciating search course of to search out the appropriate enterprise.
But as Krystal Duarte and Lisa Kaplowitz wrote in a recent analysis for Fast Company, “What needs to be alarming to corporations is that many ladies nonetheless view entrepreneurship because the extra sustainable choice for his or her lives regardless of these dangers.”
We spoke with greater than 10 moms who’ve chosen to go away the company world and purchase their very own enterprise. Learn on, and also you’ll be taught:
- Why so few ladies have pursued ETA, and the individuals and packages making it extra accessible
- 4 methods to fund an acquisition, and why one particularly is rising in recognition
- What one knowledgeable recommends it’s essential to do earlier than pursuing an ETA
- How buying and selling a company job for working your personal firm is a way of life selection, however you’re not buying a way of life enterprise
Learn how to fund an acquisition
Usually, aspiring entrepreneurs fund their acquisitions by way of one among 4 methods. Within the conventional search mannequin conceived in 1983 by then-Harvard professor Irv Grousbeck, entrepreneurs increase capital from a gaggle of buyers who help them whereas they seek for a enterprise. The entrepreneur will get a wage throughout their search however can find yourself giving up 75% of the equity of their firm.
Subsequent is self-funding: Somebody makes use of private funds and will get a mortgage from the SBA, as Anica John did. Nevertheless, anybody who owns 20% or extra of the corporate is required to make a private assure. Morli Desai, a single mom with two children, ended up utilizing her home as collateral when she acquired an SBA mortgage to purchase Amaira Natural Skincare in 2022.
Third, they will be a part of an incubator or accelerator program that can present assets equivalent to a wage, schooling, and mentorship—however could ask for fairness in return. ETA incubator packages are comparatively current creations and commenced cropping up in 2015.
Kelly Conway, a mom of 4, left her job as a chief human assets officer in 2024 as a result of, she says, “I used to be sitting in a boardroom and realized these are individuals I don’t need to construct a enterprise with. Whereas I really like capitalism, I don’t love capitalism on the backs of workers. My values simply didn’t align with the place I used to be sitting.”
She joined the CEO-in-residence program run by Sleeping Giant Capital. The agency, which trains individuals in ETA, supplied Conway a stipend in change for fairness as she looked for HR companies. As an alternative she selected to make use of her personal financial savings.
In April 2025, Conway purchased her first enterprise, Rep-Lite. A couple of months later she acquired a second enterprise, Pondera Advisors, and is within the means of closing on a 3rd. She plans to mix the three into a bigger platform.
The fourth choice for somebody occupied with going the ETA route is to embark on a sponsored search, which suggests partnering with one investor.
As a result of it’s troublesome to trace self-funded searchers, precise knowledge is tough to come back by. Will Smith, host of the Acquiring Minds podcast, has interviewed greater than 450 ETA house owners since 2021. He says searchers are more and more turning to self-funding.
“There’s been a democratization of how to do that over the previous 5 years in order that it’s not simply MBAs from one of the best faculties,” Smith says. “That’s been facilitated by the expansion of self-funded search with SBA loans.”
The Search: This Might Take a Whereas
Looking for the appropriate enterprise to purchase is a full-time job in and of itself, and will be one of the crucial troublesome components of the method. In keeping with Stanford’s 2024 Search Fund examine, which examines knowledge from all of the search funds began since 1984, solely 63% of searchers ended up closing on a deal.
Harvard Enterprise Faculty professors Richard S. Ruback and Royce Yudkoff, authors of the HBR Information to Shopping for a Small Enterprise, train a course on ETA. They suggest treating a search like a full-time job, setting apart at the very least six months to two years to discover a viable enterprise to purchase and including at the very least three extra months for due diligence. They sometimes suggest in search of “boring” companies with a observe document of profitability, and so they advise pondering forward to the day to if you would possibly need to promote so that you simply’re assured you’ll have a market of potential consumers.
In 2010, Robin Kovitz stop her job in non-public fairness to seek for a enterprise to purchase as a result of she needed to have children. “I used to be working lengthy hours in [an] workplace, and I knew I needed to breastfeed longer than the few weeks I had off work,” she says. “A lightweight bulb went off. I noticed I knew easy methods to increase capital and get the deal performed, and that I actually get pleasure from operations. So I made a decision to attempt to purchase a small enterprise alone . . . in order that I may set my very own hours with a brand new child and earn a living from home.”
Her search took 4 years, and through that point she had two kids. “I met with lots of of companies and took my child with me in all places,” she says. “I used to be actually attempting to determine what to do with the remainder of my life. Did I need to be in a warehouse or an workplace? Did I need to be a individuals supervisor or a sole contributor?”
Searchers immediately have extra assets equivalent to incubators and databases like rejigg.com, the platform that connects small-business house owners with consumers or buyers, which is how Anica John discovered her self-publishing enterprise. Nonetheless, they must reply the identical questions Kovitz did, as a result of shopping for and working an organization is greater than a brand new job: It’s a way of life.
Erin Erickson, a former Googler with two children, checked out 80 companies earlier than buying Southern Sign Co., a customized signal manufacturing enterprise. Morli Desai says she joined an accelerator after a fruitless yr of looking on her personal so as to add extra “self-discipline” to the method. She discovered her skincare enterprise a number of months later.
Ania Aliev could also be a extra uncommon instance. She started her search on the finish of her second yr of enterprise college at Dartmouth, when she was pregnant together with her first little one. She launched her search in July, met her vendor in August, signed a letter of intent in October, and ended up closing in February.
Even so, she says, “It felt like a hamster wheel. All the pieces was pressing and necessary, and it felt like there was no finish in sight as extra gadgets saved arising. I didn’t actually consider it was over till I’d signed [on] the dotted line.”
Whereas completely different funding mechanisms have opened up ETA to extra individuals, there’s nonetheless a large gender hole. In keeping with Stanford’s 2024 Search Fund examine, solely 18% of searchers in 2023 had been ladies, and based on a 2023 study by the Women’s Search Network, solely 116 ladies have launched a seek for a enterprise since 2012.
Forrest, the SBA mortgage specialist, estimates that for each 100 individuals who present as much as an ETA convention, about 10 to fifteen are ladies. Whereas she says roughly about 30 of the boys will go on to purchase a enterprise, solely a few the ladies will.
She hypothesizes that making the time for a search is an enormous barrier for girls. “Observationally, ladies are nonetheless answerable for a lot on the family. . . . Then they’ve obtained their company job, and now they’re considering making a change to entrepreneurship,” she says. “Maybe the method to discover a firm is simply so daunting that even when they love the concept of a search, they don’t know the way they’re going to have the ability to juggle it.”
She provides: “We’d like extra ladies within the room. Their strategy and perspective are invaluable.”
Now, the enjoyable half: Working the enterprise
As soon as a enterprise is acquired, the actual work begins. Some consumers get fortunate and discover that their new acquisition is precisely what was described to them. Aliev bought Life Support Systems, a 50-year-old enterprise that companies and maintains automated exterior defibrillators.
“Most of the individuals had been there for over a decade and had been phenomenal,” she says. Not solely that, the enterprise has a playroom so individuals can convey their kids to work in the event that they’re sick or have a day without work from college and regulate them as they work, a convention Aliev is carrying ahead.
Others discover surprises. Kovitz ended up shopping for Baskits, a gift-basket enterprise. “I beloved the concept of sharing in individuals’s most particular moments,” she says. However when she walked into her enterprise on day one, she found that there was no infrastructure.
“Daily, I might ask the warehouse what number of baskets had been produced and no person may reply,” she recollects. “By week three, I noticed that the enterprise wanted a ton of help when it comes to processes, planning, evaluation, and rigor. So, I purchased steel-toed boots and determined to run the warehouse myself, which isn’t what I anticipated and is the other of the ETA mannequin. The ETA mannequin is to purchase a longtime, well-run enterprise and watch and be taught for the primary yr earlier than making adjustments.”
In excessive cases, exterior elements could not make the corporate viable. Desai found her skincare enterprise was propped up by “pay-per-click” promoting. When she acquired Amaira Pure Skincare in 2022, clicks had been 60 cents every, however the value started to rise shortly after her acquisition, till it reached $3 a yr later, decimating her earnings. “I had one month after taking up the enterprise earlier than the storm, after which issues began unraveling,” she says.
Even when the enterprise is on stable floor, managing an possession transition is a major problem.
“For the primary six months, I used to be consuming out of a fireplace hose, ensuring that I used to be maintaining the lights on, persevering with to ship high-quality companies and merchandise, maintaining the group actually blissful, maintaining {our relationships} sturdy, getting out and assembly clients,” says Erickson of Southern Signal Co.
Thriving as an ETA proprietor takes a sure kind of character, factors out Matt Littell, who teaches lessons on ETA at Northwestern’s Kellogg Faculty of Administration. The daddy of two, Littell runs an ETA and Legacy 41—a holding firm to put money into different ETAs—along with his spouse, Cat. He warns aspiring house owners to attempt to pattern the ETA way of life, both by volunteering or consulting at the same firm as a result of typically house owners find yourself working their companies for 4 to 10 years. “It’s nicely price getting some publicity to what the day-to-day life appears to be like like earlier than you join such an enormous financial and time dedication,” he says.
Littell warns that working an ETA requires a tolerance for ambiguity. “You’re virtually at all times making choices within the grey with imperfect data,” he says. “You might not determine ’til three or six months later whether or not the decision you made immediately was the appropriate name or the improper name. Most of the issues you’re coping with are communication points.”
Provides Cat Littell, who teaches on the College of Chicago Sales space Faculty of Enterprise: “It’s quite a bit like parenting.”
The Dangers and Rewards of ETA
A yr later, Anica John remains to be going sturdy. In Could, she purchased Long Overdue Books, a writer, and mixed it together with her printing enterprise to supply authors companies equivalent to ghostwriting and marketing. She’s an ETA fanatic who has made it her mission to unfold the phrase about it. “Extra ladies ought to know that the ETA path is a robust choice for extremely educated and succesful ladies, particularly these with household obligations.”
For Robin Kovitz, the lengthy hours have paid off. At the moment her firm, Baskits, is incomes $30 million in income and is without doubt one of the largest present basket corporations in North America.
Nevertheless, the success got here with a value. “I believed I’d be working much less, and what unexpectedly occurred was the other. I used to be now required to be on the enterprise 100 hours every week with two little children, and my husband was a accomplice at an enormous regulation agency,” she says. “We actually had like two shifts of assist at house, however we checked out one another sooner or later and stated, This isn’t the type of mother and father we need to be, and my husband finally made the choice to step again and help me. So he left his job, and he now works for us.”
On the opposite finish of the spectrum, Morli Desai determined to close down her firm two years after buying it. “It turned a nightmare. I had purchased my firm utilizing an SBA mortgage, so I finally needed to file for chapter to guard myself. I liquidated the corporate final yr as a result of it was price extra,” she says. “I’m nonetheless paying the SBA mortgage again. The financial institution needed to foreclose on my home and take the fairness. Happily, my decide dominated towards the financial institution and allowed me to repay the mortgage over 10 years.”
Neither regrets her selection. “The fund that I labored for previous to buying Baskits ended up being enormously profitable. . . . I want I may have remained concerned in a roundabout way, however no, finally I don’t remorse leaving,” Kovitz says. “I feel you’re both an entrepreneur otherwise you’re not. And in case you’re an entrepreneur with imaginative and prescient, you want the liberty to construct by yourself phrases, and ETA is an excellent automobile for this.”
As for Desai, she admits that shutting down her enterprise “was essentially the most painful factor ever, even worse than going by way of my divorce. However I obtained to [live] my dream of being an entrepreneur. I don’t have anybody saying, ‘No, you’ve obtained to be at this assembly right now.’ I can put the children first, after which I do know I’ll get the work performed. I really like that flexibility.”
At the moment, Desai is working in her household’s enterprise and negotiating to accumulate it sooner or later.
Jeanne Wang spent 15 years in non-public fairness earlier than she discovered about ETA. She thought it was such a strong mechanism for girls to construct long-term wealth that 4 years in the past she pivoted to investing in ladies searchers. “I believed there was an actual alternative right here, however I used to be apprehensive there weren’t sufficient ladies taking part,” she says. “After I attended my first convention, there weren’t many.”
In 2023, Wang began a WhatsApp group referred to as the Girls Searchers Neighborhood, which is now 600 sturdy, to create a group for girls to help every on their ETA journey.
“It is a fairly compelling profession various,” she says. “For a lot of ladies, conventional company careers can place limits on each autonomy and long-term wealth creation. After they purchase an organization, they achieve the chance to construct fairness, make choices, and create the type of enterprise and life they need. It’s nonetheless extremely arduous work, however they’re in management. A lot of the wealth that’s been created within the U.S. has come by way of small-business possession.”
