Royce Yudkoff

Welcome to Think Big, Buy Small, a podcast from Harvard Business School about entrepreneurship through acquisition.

We're your hosts, Royce Yudkoff and Rick Rubeck.

Rick and I are delighted to have as guest Louis-Claire François Ponce, who is a former student of ours, who has gone off to execute entrepreneurship through acquisition in his home country of France, where he's been... doing a HVAC rollout.

We're going to learn a lot about the similarities and differences in ETA between North America and Western Europe, because the truth is ETA has become a worldwide activity.

Indeed, and this is why we try to have a local density by having strong presences in a few regions and by doing tokens acquisitions and buying very small plumbers, you know, with five people to gain more density locally.

And this is why we're putting tools to increase the number of maintenance per day.

And so to come back to your question, Royce, in 2022, when we launched, I think one of the things we did well was to very quickly start speaking to business owners.

Like we decided to run after HVAC and day two, we were speaking to a business owner.

And, you know, it's always an exciting day in Develop This when we have a returning guest.

And today I'm really pleased to be rejoined by Royce Yudkoff.

And if you remember Royce, he's with the Harvard Business School.

He has a little podcast along with his partner, Rick Rubach, called Think Big, Buy Small.

Welcome to Think Big, Buy Small, a podcast from Harvard Business School about entrepreneurship through acquisition.

We're your hosts, Royce Yudkoff and Rick Rubeck.

Today, Rick and I are going to focus on a very important element of buying your own company, which is how to negotiate the letter of intent and the purchase agreement and the other related legal documents that get your deal done.

As our guest, we're hosting Jared Shwartz.

Yeah, I agree.

I think that is the way to select an attorney, particularly for some tasks like this, which is to talk to a few clients who have used them.

Royce, as I think about what Jared's telling us, I just can't help but coming back to Adam

Smith.

Welcome to Think Big, Buy Small, a podcast from Harvard Business School about entrepreneurship through acquisition.

We're your hosts, Royce Yudkoff and Rick Rubeck.

In today's episode, Rick and I are interviewing

Kristin Wehra, who executed a search and

did not find the business that she wanted to buy and ultimately wrapped up the search in a fail to find mode.

We're going to hear her reflections on why that happened, and we're going to do a deep dive into what that experience is like.

And we should also say, Royce, that you and I were

investors in her search.

[upbeat music] Welcome to Think Big, Buy Small, a podcast from Harvard Business School about entrepreneurship through acquisition.

We're your hosts, Royce Yudkoff

And Rick Ruback.

Royce and I are delighted to welcome Aaron Wyatt to our podcast today.

Aaron is different from a lot of our podcast participants because Aaron is a kind of self-made entrepreneur that didn't follow the classic ETA route.

And so we're excited to hear about his journey.

It runs on an ancient mainframe using ancient software, and it's just a cash cow.

But if you look, what you'll see is that they're just going down really slowly in revenue.