I recently went one-on-one with Jordan Fliegel, CEO of Acquisition Lab.
Adam: Thanks again for taking the time to share your advice. First things first, though, I am sure readers would love to learn more about you. How did you get here? What experiences, failures, setbacks, or challenges have been most instrumental to your growth?
Jordan: I’m a big believer in the saying that “you can only understand your life looking backwards, but you have to live it forwards.” Looking back, my experience as a college and pro basketball player and personal coach led me to founding CoachUp, which led to Draft, which led to having a reputation as a successful sports tech startup founder, which led to the opportunity to launch and run my Founders First angel fund and the Techstars Sports Accelerator, which led me to realize there wasn’t an equivalent platform/community/fund for Acquisition Entrepreneurs that offered what Techstars and Ycombinator and others bring to startup entrepreneurs, which was an insight combined with my experience and the experience of my cofounder/COO Tim Ericson that led to us building Acquisition Lab into what it is today.
Adam: How did you come up with your business idea and know it was worth pursuing?
Jordan: My partner Tim and I started exploring the ETA space by each buying a small profitable business. In that process, we realized how hard it was! The educational and community support gap on the long and lonely journey to find a business to buy, the difficulty in finding it, funding it, transacting on the deal… and then you throw all that experience out the door once you have succeeded in buying the business, as you now have to operate it, without the support of a Board/Venture Capital experienced investors, or often many people in your network who are also running small profitable businesses, which is a very different mindset and skill set required from building a tech company. We leveraged our personal experience to build the platform, capital ($19M Fund I) and services (accounting/finance/staffing) arms that we wanted for ourselves, and combined that with the leading community for Acquisition Entrepreneurs that the Acquisition Lab has built over the past 6 years, and merged it all together.
Adam: What advice do you have for others on how to come up with and test business ideas?
Jordan: My only advice to would-be entrepreneurs is to stay curious. Learn as much as you can, and then go out and do something, even if it’s small at first, and if others around you don’t understand what you are doing. My experience providing basketball lessons to kids gave me the insight to build CoachUp.com into the leading coaching marketplace in the US. My childhood friend Jeremy Even and I loved thinking about the value of pro athletes, traded sports cards, played video games, and wished there were better ways to follow sports and prove your knowledge; the collective interest and experience led to our startup Draft, which we sold for $48M in 2017 to a public company in Europe. Tim and my experience struggling to buy small businesses provided the inspiration here. So my advice is to just stay curious and lean into your natural drift in life. Follow your passions, and you will uncover problems in life that you may want to solve. The best way to create amazing products and experiences, or to solve the huge challenges our country faces, is through entrepreneurship. And the best entrepreneurs are insanely curious and relentless once they’ve put their mind to improving an industry.
Adam: What are the key steps you have taken to grow your business?
Jordan: Your hero needs to be your customer. How well do you understand them and their problem set? Start there. Our hero is the Acquisition Entrepreneur, and our mission is to help them throughout their journey. That means we need to be best in class in providing them with a supportive community, relevant and constantly updated education and resources, introductions to vetted and trusted partners, a platform to bring them all on market and the best off market deals too, along with the tools to execute their search, the equity to fund their deal if they desire or need outside capital, and then the portfolio services and playbook to easily operate a business post-close. We started with this vision and have been attacking it relentlessly piece by piece. The true magic is having it all in-house, integrated, and easy to navigate.
Adam: What advice do you have for others on how to take their businesses to the next level?
Jordan: So my advice for other entrepreneurs is to get really, really clear on who your customer is and what they need. View them (not yourself or your company) as the hero of the story. They are on a hero’s journey, as silly as that might sound if you are selling pizza say, but still in that example, say mom has kids to feed, its late, she just got off work, she can be the hero tonight for her kids and their dinner or not… what is her experience like from thinking of dinner, to exploring your menu, ordering from your restaurant, picking it up or having it delivered.. how can your pizza restaurant stand out in making mom the hero at dinner that night, and make her journey from ordering, to picking it up, to opening the box at the dinner table… how can you make that better, faster, more efficient, with a bit of magic or fun surprises built in? The point is whether you are building a tech company, community, investment fund, or something as “simple” as a pizza restaurant or landscaping business. You will do better by thinking of your customer as the hero of the journey in servicing them, and importantly in celebrating their success.
Adam: What are your best sales and marketing tips?
Jordan: Your best marketing will always be celebrating your customer’s success (through your product/service as a supporting role/enabler of that success).
Adam: What are the most important trends in technology that leaders should be aware of and understand? What should they understand about them?
Jordan: It goes without saying, but AI is changing everything. I’m blown away seemingly every day by new evidence of what AI agents can do and how disruptive this new technology is to every industry and to the way we work. The job dislocation we have seen to date is just a fraction of what is to come. If 50%+ of knowledge workers today are either out of a job or have their job dramatically altered/reduced by AI in the coming few years, what will they do? Our answer, of course, is that more knowledge workers/corporate executives/accountants/lawyers/senior software engineers, etc should be thinking about buying existing small profitable (AI-resistant) businesses from retiring owners. The Entrepreneurship Through Acquisition (ETA) industry, of which Acquisition Lab is a leading player, is one of the primary beneficiaries and growth trends in the AI disruption story.
Adam: In your experience, what are the defining qualities of an effective leader? How can leaders and aspiring leaders take their leadership skills to the next level?
Jordan: Fundamentally, the CEO has 3 jobs: 1) Set and maintain the vision; 2) Hire and motivate a great leadership team; 3) Ensure you never run out of money to pay that team to execute on that vision. If there is a fourth job, it’s to be able to step out of the day-to-day “work” of the business to focus on game-changing business development or acquisitions, PR, etc., that really only the CEO can do. But you only enable that fourth category if you have succeeded at 1-3.
Adam: What is your best advice on building, leading, and managing teams?
Jordan: Find people who are better than you at every core aspect of the business, and do whatever it takes to bring them on board. If you find great executives who are intrinsically motivated, you won’t need to micromanage them or really do much outside of supporting them in hitting the ambitious goals that they set. My leadership style is to serve my team and ensure they have the resources they need. And then, importantly, to get the hell out of their way. If I am “doing something,” it’s a sign that I either don’t have a leader in place that I fully trust who owns that area of the business, that our KPI/communication/meetings process is broken somewhere, or that I am so eager to “help” that I often am undermining them. I try to avoid those scenarios.
Adam: What are your three best tips applicable to entrepreneurs, executives, and civic leaders?
Jordan: For entrepreneurs, keep at it! For executives, delegate, delegate, delegate. For civic leaders, get out of entrepreneurs’ way… complex regulation, high taxes, wealth redistribution/socialism, none of it helps grow our economy and benefit society at large. In America, we live in abundance because of entrepreneurs, not despite them. All this “billionaires are greedy/bad, etc” rhetoric is political nonsense. And as a national policy, we should do whatever we can to encourage great entrepreneurs, talented students/employees, and capital to come into our country, and to stay here.
Adam: What is the single best piece of advice you have ever received?
Jordan: Follow your intuition and natural drift in life, or in other words, find peace in truly being yourself, and out of that will come your unique passion and purpose, your art, your entrepreneurship, your impact on the world.
