Deciding to Start, Not Buy, a Small Business

espite all of our enthusiasm for buying an existing business as a path to ownership, we are not dogmatic about it.

There are any number of reasons why starting, not buying, makes perfect sense.

And today we hear from someone who looked closely at buying a business, but chose against it, opting to start from scratch.

The perspective of Kevin Moyer is valuable not just because he'd neatly organized his thoughts in a great article on Substack, but because he has much more experience as an owner-operator than many contemplating this decision.

Kevin had actually started 5 territories in the Smash My Trash franchise network.

He'd built these territories up to over a million in revenue and $260k in SDE.

And, get this, has them running mostly passively. So a small blue collar business running on its own — a real and rare accomplishment deserving of its own interview.

But point is, it gives Kevin a lot of SMB credibility, and you will learn from his experience & thoughtfulness.

Now, the caveat here is that Kevin is just in the earliest months of his new venture, so we'll have to get him on again, a couple years from now, to see if he reflects differently on this decision to start a business versus buy a business.

Here he is, Kevin Moyer, co-founder & owner of Golden Home Access.