Lessons from Teaching Israel's First ETA Course (That Go Beyond the Basics)

Guy Solomon and I just taught the first-ever Entrepreneurship Through Acquisition course in Israel, at Reichman University. Three hours, case method, no slides. Here are some of the lessons that surfaced. ***You don't have 24 months to search. You have nine.*** The first several months are learning, not searching. You're figuring out what a business looks like, how to talk to sellers, how to read a teaser quickly. Then a deal takes roughly six months from first conversation to close. Do the math: 24 minus 9 minus 6 = 9 months of actual productive searching. My biggest regret was wasting early months on business cards, websites, and phone numbers instead of getting into the market and learning by doing. ***The real education is learning what "good enough" looks like.*** You don't get to spec out your dream business the way you'd configure a new car. This is buying used. There are dents, mileage, and issues. Your job is to distinguish a lemon from a car that just looks rough. Almost every searcher I know, including me, bought a business they would have passed on in month three. That's not desperation. It's education. I wouldn't have touched my deal early on because of customer concentration. By the end, I knew how to structure around it with a seller note. The shift from "what's a good business" to "what's a good enough business" is the most important mental transition in a search. ***Running a search is running a sales operation.*** Thesis, identification, research, outreach, engagement, offer, diligence, close. Each stage is a cognitively different function, and you're constantly balancing top-of-funnel volume against bottom-of-funnel depth. If you're not tracking your pipeline with stage-level targets and conversion metrics, you're flying blind. The irony of search is that people think the real work starts after acquisition. It doesn't. The search itself is a business you're operating: sourcing, qualifying, managing a funnel, hiring interns and managing a team, allocating scarce time across competing priorities. The skills that make you a good searcher are the same ones that make you a good CEO.