For students
You could be running a company in two years.
Not a startup you have to invent from nothing. A real business, with customers, employees, and cash flow, that someone spent thirty years building and now needs a successor for.
Why search
The other entrepreneurial path.
You are the CEO on day one.
Not an associate, not a VP of strategy, not a founder waiting on a Series A. You own meaningful equity in a company you control, and the P&L is yours.
No product-market fit risk.
The company already has revenue, customers, and a history. The risk shifts from “will anyone want this” to “can I lead this well” — a risk you can actually prepare for.
A recognized post-MBA path.
Search is pursued by graduates of every leading business school and is increasingly treated as a legitimate alternative to consulting, banking, tech, and venture-backed founding.
Straight talk
Search is not for everyone.
We would rather you find that out here than eighteen months into a search.
The searchers who thrive tend to share a few traits, and none of them are about being good at spreadsheets.
- You are genuinely comfortable cold-calling strangers — and doing it again after two hundred of them go nowhere.
- You can tolerate two years of ambiguity, modest pay, and no institutional validation.
- You would rather run a $20M HVAC distributor well than work on something more impressive-sounding.
- You can hold authority over people who have been doing the job longer than you have been alive.
- You are prepared for the real possibility that you never close a deal.
If most of that sounds energizing rather than exhausting, the course is a cheap way to test the hypothesis.
Getting involved
Four ways to start.
Take BAEP-560
Search Funds & Entrepreneurship Through Acquisition, offered in the fall at the Greif Center. Open to Marshall graduate students. The single highest-leverage step.
Join the community
Get on the list for the speaker series, deal jams, and introductions to Trojans already searching or operating an acquired business. Open to students across USC, not only Marshall.
Work on live deals
Support an active searcher with sourcing, screening, or diligence. It is the fastest way to find out what the work feels like — and the best way to be worth backing later.
Talk to someone doing it
We will connect you with an operator, searcher, or investor in the network for a frank conversation. No commitment, no pitch.
Resources
Where to start reading.
You can get a genuine education in this asset class for the price of two books and a few free PDFs.
- HBR Guide to Buying a Small Business
- Richard Ruback & Royce Yudkoff. The standard text. Read this first.
- Buy Then Build
- Walker Deibel. The accessible entry point to acquisition entrepreneurship.
- The Stanford Search Fund Study
- Published biennially by Stanford GSB. The definitive data on the asset class, and free.
- A Primer on Search Funds
- Stanford GSB’s free primer on structure, economics, and process.
- Think Like an Owner · Acquiring Minds
- Two podcasts where working searchers describe deals in unusual detail.
- Searchfunder
- The community platform where most of the ecosystem actually talks to each other.
A fuller reading list and the BAEP-560 case index are distributed to enrolled students.
Questions
Frequently asked.
Do I need finance or investing experience?
No. The technical skills are learnable in a semester. The harder inputs — comfort with rejection, judgment about people, willingness to lead — are what we screen for and what the course develops.
Can undergraduates get involved?
BAEP-560 is a graduate course, but the community, speaker series, and introductions are open to undergraduates. Several of the most useful ways to learn this work — sourcing support for an active searcher, for instance — do not require an MBA.
How much capital do I need to raise?
A traditional search fund raises roughly $400K–$700K to cover two years of salary and deal expenses, typically from ten to twenty investors. Self-funded searchers raise nothing up front and finance the acquisition directly, usually with SBA debt. The course covers both routes and their very different economics.
What if I want to do this in five years, not right after graduation?
That is common and often wiser. Many successful searchers spend a few years in operating roles first. The network is the part that compounds, so building it now is the right move regardless of your timeline.
Does USC have capital to invest in my search?
Not yet. Standing up a USC-affiliated fund is the long-term goal, and it is genuinely the goal rather than a talking point. Today we can offer coursework, community, and warm introductions to investors who are already active.