An exclusive community and data backed acquisition system to buy your first or your next business and build a lasting legacy.
You're not stuck, you're just alone at the top. Most entrepreneurs hit a ceiling, not because the opportunity isn't there, but because you're solving $10M problems with $1M strategies.
Unsure where to start?
Try our concierge.png)
A young apprentice once asked a master carpenter, “How long will it take me to be great?”
“Five years,” the master answered.
“But what if I study really hard?” the apprentice replied.
The master smiled. “Then, it’ll take ten.”
By the end of this piece, you’re going to unlearn everything you thought you knew about learning business.
But first a warning...
Today, we’ll start with a powerful idea. Something we believe to our core to be true. Education is an investment in the future. We’re sure many of you believe this, too.
But if traditional business education were a stock, we worry it could be one of the worst-performing investments of the next 20 years.
20, 15, 10, and in some cases even 5 years ago, if you wanted to study “business,” where would you go? It’s a rhetorical question. Of course you’d go to BUSINESS school, right? Today, though, you’ll see it’s no longer an obvious choice.
Here’s a recent article from the New York Times.
It describes how businesses are complaining about MBA graduates. What frustrates them?
It also warns that, at a time when business is changing, business schools suffer from ”cookie-cutter syndrome” and offer “insufficient training for entrepreneurship and small business.”
Our guess is some of you are reading this thinking... Yup, sounds about right.
Except, we lied to you. This actually isn’t a recent article at all... It’s from January 1981, or almost 50 years ago. Now, let us be clear...
What this is not going to be is an MBA diss track. Codie herself got an MBA. Certainly opened doors for her.
The top schools know their customers, too. What are millennials more afraid of than war, death, and debt? Fear of missing out.
What do the top schools do really well? They foster elite networks.
Many MBAs will tell you the network alone is worth the cost. The S&P 500, arguably the most accessible and reliable wealth-creation tool in the history of capitalism, is largely a network of MBAs.
MBA programs crank out plenty of top talent. No doubt about it. But today they’re facing what is potentially the first real crisis of purpose since their creation, for 2 reasons.
They’re just not getting people jobs like they used to. The traditional elite MBA path:
These are some of the industries MOST immediately impacted by AI-driven disruption, hiring pauses, cost-cutting, and capital re-allocation.
What about MBAs for entrepreneurship? Some of the most successful business builders in history have MBAs. But go to a party in Silicon Valley this Friday night and tell people you have one? Cringe.
To half the folks in the valley, getting an MBA to learn entrepreneurship is like going to celibacy school to learn sex. It’s not just MBAs feeling this heat, by the way.
New college grads are facing their cohort’s worst relative unemployment numbers in decades.
“Student coders seek work at Chipotle...” 10 years ago, did you think that would be a headline today? Cause it is.
Young male college grads, in particular, are having as much trouble getting jobs as their non-college-educated peers.
But here’s the really weird thing. Despite all this, MBA applications are rising. Law school applications are surging, too.
Grad school applications rising while job prospects fall is the data’s way of telling you some of our smartest young people are lost and buying time.
So that’s problem number 1.
Utility. MBA programs have been:
What do we mean by slow to adapt? This:
AI moves at warp speed, but curriculum development moves at DMV speed. Two years and $200k to emerge with the skills most attractive to employers in 2017 is not a great deal.
Oh, “But the brand association with a top school is worth it!”
Well, not according to the brand.
“Going to Harvard is not going to be a differentiator for you,” says Harvard. The market no longer cares what’s printed on the diploma. It cares what you can do on Monday morning. Good for Harvard for acknowledging that reality.
To be clear, business schools are still required and HIGHLY relevant for a specific set of jobs and roles. But…
If you run a small shop, chances are you don’t need a case study from 2007. You need help negotiating a deal on Tuesday and making payroll on Friday.
Here’s something else to consider.
What do our kids think about this?
Turns out, a lot. 75% of Gen Z say they’re intrigued by vocational school. The problem is, only 5% say their parents feel the same way for them.
“Welding over Wharton? Not in this house, Jimmy.”
56% of Gen Z now believe that “blue collar” jobs will offer them more job security than “white collar” ones. 33% say that white-collar jobs are less stable today than they were for their parents’ generation.
So what jobs are they gravitating toward? The ones that appear more durable than any other: the trades.
3 out of every 4 home service jobs are must-haves, not nice to haves. Pain killers, not vitamins.
This is only going to rise. Why? Boomers are entering their hip replacement years, and so is their infrastructure.
Now, Codie is certainly no electrician or plumber. But remember, she did own a laundromat and now owns a number of businesses.
When you try to buy or own a business, you inherit every problem all at once: hiring, firing, cash flow, competitors, and banks. There’s no pause button while you figure it out.
The hardest part for her? There was no place to go to learn this kind of stuff and apply it in real time. No school made sense. She felt like she was all alone.
Of course, what she realized over time was that she wasn’t alone at all. There were thousands of other business owners or aspiring owners out there just like her, for whom traditional business education just didn’t make sense.
...So we ended up creating something different to serve this community. Another way for current and aspiring business owners to get the rapid, tactical education they need, for so much less money.
Our founding belief was this:
There is a massive market out there for business education that doesn’t happen in lecture halls.
Business schools teach theory. Accelerators teach startups. But there’s almost nothing built for Main Street, like the person working through a deal in real time or the owner scaling a small chain in need of help that very day.
So we designed a distributed system with:
With this distributed structure, we were able to build something that's a fraction of the cost of a traditional full-time, multi-year MBA...
...But 10x more focused on what actually matters to our specific avatar: people who want to buy or build a business TODAY.
Right now, our alternative format is actively serving thousands of people, all around the country and even the world. Here are some of their backgrounds...
You’ll notice they come from all walks of life. By the way, we think this is where education is heading across many sectors, not just business:
Immediate application. Focused on results.
Results mean that aspiring business owners get the skills, network, and actionable education they need to thrive.
Results mean that profitable businesses live on, and don’t just fade into obscurity because no one was there to take the baton.
Results mean that if you want to run a plumbing business or a car wash, you don’t need two years and a quarter-million dollars just for tuition.
Americans were results-focused entrepreneurs from the start, when a group of people decided they’d rather get on a boat, leave everything behind, and build something great than settle for what they had.
Others thought that was dumb.
Extrapolate that mindset a few hundred years, and this is what you get:
If we redouble efforts on results, we’ll continue to bear the fruit for decades to come.
Which brings us back to where we started: with a question.
With what you now know, if you wanted to learn how to build or buy a small business today — that is, something real, built to thrive in the AI age, and that you could pass down to your kids…
Where would YOU learn how to do it?
You should come to Main Street Over Wall Street, the event we’re hosting in Austin next week.
It’s for investors, owners, business buyers, and operators who want to own and scale enduring local businesses.
For 3 days, some of the best people in small business will be under one roof doing what they do best: deals. Plus, you’ll hit morning workouts with other builders, and swap ideas over drinks. It’s equal parts business and energy.
Will we see you there? Secure your spot and check out the speakers, schedule, and more here:
.png)
📊 Get the Main Street Minute, the only free newsletter that makes you a smarter business buyer every time you open it.
The information contained here is educational, may not be typical, and does not guarantee returns. Background, education, effort, and application will affect your experience and the profitability of any business. Individual results may vary.
.png)
.svg)
