For searchers
You’ve decided. Now it gets lonely.
A search is two years of rejection, spreadsheets, and unreturned calls, done mostly alone. The searchers who finish are not the smartest ones. They are the ones who stayed connected to people who had already done it.
What we offer
Concrete help, not a mailing list.
Warm paths to capital.
Introductions to investors already active in search — the ones who write the first check on a person rather than a deal. We will tell you honestly whether we think you are ready to be introduced.
Someone who has closed one.
A standing relationship with an operator who has bought, run, and sold a company. Most useful in the months when nothing is working and you are questioning the whole enterprise.
Students who want the reps.
BAEP-560 students are trained to source and screen, and they want live work. You get leverage on outreach and pipeline; they get an education. Both sides win.
Choose your structure
Three ways to run a search.
The structure you pick determines your economics, your timeline, and how much of the company you end up owning. Most people default into one without comparing them.
Raise a search fund
Roughly $400K–$700K from ten to twenty investors covers two years of salary and expenses. They get the right of first refusal on the acquisition and a step-up on their search capital. You typically earn 20–30% of the equity, vesting across the acquisition, time, and performance. The most support, the least ownership.
Skip the search capital
You fund your own search and finance the acquisition directly, usually with SBA 7(a) debt and a seller note. Smaller targets, personal guarantee, no salary while you look — but you can end up owning the majority of the company. The most ownership, the most personal risk.
Independent sponsor or accelerator
You search under an existing firm’s umbrella, or raise deal-by-deal once you have something under LOI. Faster access to credibility and diligence resources; less autonomy over what you buy and worse economics if the deal is very good.
Ranges are typical, not universal, and terms move with the market. BAEP-560 works through the actual economics of each.
Southern California
An underserved market with a very large alumni base.
Most institutional search activity clusters around Boston, the Bay Area, and Chicago. Los Angeles has an enormous lower middle market — hundreds of thousands of small businesses, a huge share of them owned by people near retirement — and comparatively little organized search infrastructure.
USC has the largest and most responsive alumni network in the region. For a searcher doing proprietary outreach in Southern California, that is not sentiment. It is a sourcing advantage, and it is the reason this program should exist here.
Stay connected
Tell us what you’re looking for.
Whether you are six months from launching or already eighteen months in, we want to know what you are hunting and where you are stuck.
- Trojans searching anywhere in the country — we want you in the network.
- Searchers of any background working Southern California deals.
- Operators who have closed and are willing to talk to the people behind them.