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Every year around this time, somebody in the break room makes the announcement.
"This year I'm eating clean through the holidays."
And they mean it. They buy the glass meal-prep containers and a cookbook with a very confident kale salad on the cover. They even toss the leftover Halloween candy (after eating the Reese's, obviously).
Then reality hits ’em with a croissant.
By mid-December, the meal-prep containers are full of leftover stuffing and the diet-friendly cookbook is propping up a wobbly laptop.
The plan wasn't bad, per se…
But it was set up before temptation hit and your grandma asked why you weren’t eating her apple pie.
When you plan something based on a “normal” week without factoring in all the chaos of life, it’s doomed to fail.
We see the same thing with business buyers ALL the time.
Maybe you've been there yourself.
You decide this is the year you’re gonna finally own something, so you go all in. You read Main Street Millionaire twice, set up deal alerts on 3 listing sites, and learn SDE so well that all your friends leave the room when it comes up.
Then there's a big launch at work.
Or the water heater picks this exact month to die.
Whatever it is, your business search gets pushed to "the weekend." Then next weekend. Then "after the holidays."
A broker leaves a voicemail and you call him back Friday, but the laundromat you'd been eyeing goes under LOI before you even open the CIM because you got burnt out.
Here's what’s happening: you built your search as if you didn’t have a full-time job and a life.
The good news? Plenty of people in the Contrarian Academy have hit this exact wall.
Here's how 3 of them got past it.
Brian Barnett is a physician assistant who closed on a senior home care company in Stuart, Florida, in August.
By his own account, though, his first 8 months in the Academy almost didn't count.
"I realistically didn't spend enough time searching as I realized I needed to."
He was scrolling listings between travel PA contracts, and while it felt like progress, scrolling doesn't translate to deals made.
So he started treating the search like a shift. He stayed on top of broker outreach and built a bare-bones CRM in Excel to track where he stood with each broker.
-Sent info
-Call scheduled
-Followed up
-Passed
"Once I really started taking it more seriously, that's when I started to notice the difference."
The lesson: Schedule your search like a shift at a part-time job. When you try to “find” time it almost never materializes, but if you put it in the calendar it’s harder to skip.
Krista Sohmer has spent more than 12 years in tech marketing, and she's not planning on leaving anytime soon. So her search happened on nights and weekends. And that limit ended up doing half her filtering for her.
She needed to keep her salary, so any business that needed a full-time owner got cut on sight.
"A lot of what I was seeing and evaluating was like, no, this would take, like, everything."
She landed Poppy and Pine, a flower shop outside Denver whose previous owner spent about 5 hours a week on it. The employees run the day-to-day, and that kind of schedule worked perfectly for Krista.
Plus, the search hours gave her a sneak preview of ownership, allowing her to smoothly transition the search time into time spent on the business.
"I got like a good understanding of, okay, this is probably about the hours that I'm going to be able to dedicate towards something else outside of my work."
The lesson: The hours you can keep up while searching are the best preview of what you can give a business. Buy something that fits your actual schedule.
(We’ll teach you how HERE)
Christian Riboldi writes software for a living. He’s also got a wife and 4 kids. The 4th actually arrived mid-search (babies don't care about your LOI timeline).
After baby number 4, the search stalled, but 2 things got it moving again.
First, his wife joined the hunt and started surfacing deals.
Second, at our Main Street Over Wall Street event, he sat down with fellow members and talked about partnership for the first time. He'd bring the capital and the technical chops, and a trusted operator would bring the man-hours.
"If I hadn't had that mindset of being willing to bring someone on, I would never have closed on this deal."
In July, he closed on a managed IT services business.
The lesson: When your calendar can't stretch any further, bring in someone who has the time you don't.
Brian, Krista, and Christian all hit the same wall, and each one of them got past it by getting honest about their time first.
So go ahead and grab a pen.
1. What does your real week look like?
Pull up last week's calendar, and count the hours that weren't spent on work, family, sleep, or one of the random fires that always pop up. That’s your search budget.
If it's just 3 hours, you can still work with that. Pick 1 industry, keep your list of listings short, and build 1 broker relationship you stay in touch with.
What you can't do is run a full-time searcher's process on 3 hours.
That's the failed holiday meal plan all over again.
2. What's getting bumped so the search doesn't?
Something's gotta give. If you can't point to what it is, the search is gonna lose every time. That’s why it’s an apple pie problem. If you haven’t meal prepped and an apple pie shows up in the break room, you’re screwed.
Figure out what you’re willing to give up ahead of time so you’re not negotiating when you’re tired after work and just wanna order takeout and watch Netflix.
Maybe it's the weekly trivia night, or playing 2 rounds of golf a month instead of 4.
Whatever it is, write it down now.
And remember, the search is just the warm-up. Once you own the business, it'll ask for more of you, at least for a while. If 5 hours a week for listings feels impossible right now, that tells you something about where payroll and customer calls will fit later.
Whatever you come back with, now you know how much time you can realistically allot every week.
This is what it takes to become an owner. And while the sacrifice upfront isn’t always easy, it’s 100% worth it.
Just stay the course, and try to avoid the apple pies.
- Team Contrarian
P.S. Brian, Krista, and Christian all ran their searches with the Contrarian Academy members and advisors in their corner.
So if you KNOW you want to become an owner, but you’re not sure where to start…
We can help.
Codie’s putting on a FREE MASTERCLASS to show you how to find and buy a profitable business, even if you’ve never looked at a listing.
You’ll learn:
Plus there’s a 30 minute Q&A with Codie, so bring your burning business questions and a pen.
The best part?
This stuff works.
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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.
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