SerpApi.Org
In 2015 Bakari Akil was a homeless college dropout with a single focus: figuring out how to get rich.
Sleeping in WeWorks, on the subway and in airport waiting areas, Akil watched videos, listened to podcasts and pored over personal finance books.
He needed to own a business, he decided. But how to do it with no money?
Then Akil read a Harvard Business School case study that described how M.B.A. graduates were running around the country trying to buy companies with money from something called a search fund. He felt like he had discovered a secret.
In the decade since, Akil, now 37, has bought two multimillion-dollar companies. He has spent each month of the past three years living in a different country. He is now worth seven figures.
Akil is part of a growing wave of people looking for a shortcut to private-equity riches. Armed with grit and determination, they are ditching the well-worn path from spreadsheet-wielding associate to managing director and finding ways to buy HVAC and plumbing outfits, specialized manufacturers and other small and midsize businesses.
Financing such deals is a far cry from traditional private equity, where firms use funds they raise from institutional investors and the ultrawealthy, plus debt. Instead, these would-be business owners scrape together financing on a deal-by-deal basis. They use loans from the U.S. Small Business Administration; seek funds raised from specialized investors; or cobble together money from friends, family offices, private-equity funds and SBA-licensed small-business investment companies.
And that is just the start. Convincing the owner to sell and executing an improvement plan is a daunting task for even the most skilled dealmakers. While these buyers typically pay far lower multiples of earnings than big private-equity shops, they make up for it in “brain damage,” said Eli Albrecht, an attorney who founded a law firm in 2024 focused on such deals.
“I view these guys and gals as the homesteaders of the Wild West,” said Albrecht, who previously represented big private-equity firms at law firm Gibson Dunn. “They’re heading out without a dollar to their name, and if they make it back alive, there’s a lot of money to be made.”
Many caught the bug at a top business school where “entrepreneurship through acquisition” courses are now a standard part of the curriculum. They are drawn by the promise of a more flexible schedule, a conviction in their own operational know-how and a desire to avoid grunt work that ends up lining the pockets of others.
Further fueling their rise: a perception that it isn’t as easy as it once was to make big money on Wall Street. The private-equity industry is struggling to profitably unload companies, causing midlevel employees, dubious of their chances of receiving pay tied to deal performance, to jump ship.
Some 77 search funds—money from specialized investors to back individuals looking to buy a business—were raised in 2025, according to an annual study conducted by researchers at Stanford. That is historically high, though down from a 2023 peak of 101. Meanwhile, the number of firms doing deals as “independent sponsors,” without a fund, has roughly doubled since 2019 to about 1,400, according to Jon Finger, a partner at law firm McGuireWoods, which hosts an annual industry conference.
Caroline Sabatt bought a Boston-area plumbing business in 2025 and merged it with a smaller one her husband Nat had started.
The Sabatts both got joint degrees from Harvard’s government and business schools after nearly 10 years in the U.S. Navy. Nat, a former Navy SEAL, launched Minuteman Plumbing, Heating & Cooling with a master plumber he met through a Harvard mentor between graduation and starting his job at a consulting firm.
Caroline, who spent her last year at Harvard Business School taking classes on buying and operating small businesses, took over running Minuteman after Nat’s job started.
“All of a sudden I’m working 15-hour days on this plumbing business,” said Caroline, now 35, who managed a crew of nine as a naval flight officer. “It was going well, but not well enough that you can light your high-paying consulting gig on fire.”
Caroline decided to buy a business to kick-start growth. She found one they could finance with an SBA loan. These typically come with a lower interest rate than a bank loan because they are government-backed.
The Sabatts had to personally guarantee the loan. Caroline also had to take out a life-insurance policy. She bought the business for 1.8 times earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization—a tiny fraction of what most private-equity firms pay.
The deal closed in May 2025, right after Caroline delivered their third child. Minuteman’s revenue doubled overnight, with sales that year reaching $2.2 million. This year, the company is on track to do more than $6 million in revenue and aims for more than $1 million in earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization.
The Sabatts started paying themselves a salary—albeit a fraction of what they would earn in corporate life—and Nat, now 37, quit his consulting job in December.
“Working for someone younger than me and having to live life one PowerPoint slide at a time was torture,” he said.
The desire to escape her consulting job also motivated Rachel McGrath, a former oil-and-gas engineer, to become a searcher after she learned about it at Harvard Business School.
She joined the Search Fund Accelerator. The firm raised a pool of money from investors to pay each of five searchers in her 2021 class about $90,000 a year for two years and to cover all expenses related to finding and acquiring a business.
Working out of SFA’s New Orleans office, she had between five and seven initial conversations with business owners a week. McGrath sent over 20 indications of intent, visited 10 businesses, signed three letters of intent and paid for two quality of earnings reports. In August 2023, she bought Tower Products, an Easton, Pa., maker of chemicals used in printing, with SFA’s backing and became its CEO.
“I’ve given up six years of raises,” said McGrath, now 38. But she could collect up to 25% of the profit from a sale, having invested no money of her own. Another perk: “I don’t have to travel Monday through Thursday, and I get to get my daughter dressed in the morning.”
Search funds typically only back someone with an M.B.A. or similar pedigree, something Bakari Akil soon learned. He sneaked into a class at Columbia Business School taught by SFA CEO Timothy Bovard. Bovard said he couldn’t let Akil audit the oversubscribed course. Then the professor discovered an iPhone Akil had left in his class to record it and allowed him to continue doing so. Bovard later invited Akil back as a guest speaker.
Still, no search fund would back him, so Akil spent five years trying to buy a company on his own. He took $10 bus rides to Boston to meet with investors and attend HBS conferences. He once slept in a Harvard meeting room ahead of an investor meeting the next day.
Akil raised $7 million to do a healthcare deal only to have it fall apart. He assembled $6 million to buy a manufacturing company in 2019. That deal also failed.
“When I could have given up, I reached out to more business owners,” Akil said. Finally one of them bit. It was a company that made educational technology for retraining people who had recently left the workforce, something that became more attractive when Covid-19 hit.
An investment firm bought the company and paid Akil a six-figure fee for delivering the deal.
It was a life-changing amount of money for Akil, who could then use his windfall to finance his next search. In 2023 he bought NYP, a maker of burlap bags. His backer was Chicago private-equity firm Granite Creek Capital Partners, which aims to invest $10 million to $30 million in companies with at least $3 million of Ebitda, according to its website. This time he did the deal as an independent sponsor, which meant he had an ownership stake.
The standard compensation for such buyers is a 2% closing fee, 5% of Ebitda a year and 20% to 30% of carried interest—pay tied to the performance of the deal. Akil also got a seat on the board.
“I come from the Queensbridge projects,” he said. “I didn’t know anybody who had more than $5,000 to their name.”
Write to Miriam Gottfried at [email protected]