acquisition update - 2 months in!

Howdy everyone!

Just a heads up to all of you, I’m going to begin regularly publishing this newsletter on a monthly basis.

As a reminder, if you’re subscribed here it means you’ve attended or RSVPd to one of my SMB/ETA meetups in your city (or, clicked the newsletter “subscribe” button on my webpage).

I’m an avid writer, and I want this newsletter to be an unfiltered look inside real small business operations, with some anecdotal storytelling of what I’m seeing in the SMB/ETA ecosystem.

I have more exposure to small business owners and acquirers than most people do, and every week I get the raw, transparent view of what is actually happening inside these companies. Not the fluff you see on social media.

So inside this letter, I’ll be sharing a lot of what I’m seeing in the market. I expect this will be content that you can’t find anywhere else.

Now, If you’re unfamiliar with my journey so far, let me catch you up:

- In February 2022, I met a business owner experiencing light depression as he was near bankruptcy after acquiring an $18M HVAC new construction company. He introduced me to the “loneliness” problem in small business ownership as he had no one to turn to to help him navigate what he was going through.

- In April 2022, I started my first peer group with him and a handful of others. Totally free, just to help him go through this difficult period of his life. Shortly after, I started another peer group.

- I ran both peer groups for free for ~18 months, before committing to grow this as a real business, having decided that I get a ton of fulfillment out of helping small business owners build relationships with each other

- Since that point (approximately Oct 2023 - April 2025) we grew from ~10 members to ~40. Also during this time I hosted SMB/ETA events in over 40 cities, and met over 1,300 people personally. I even bought a camper van to save myself some money on flight and hotel costs!

On top of that, I was mentioned in Forbes, started a youtube channel, traveled to 3 South American countries for 2-4 weeks each, started writing a book, and acquired my first business.

- On May 1st 2025 I acquired Scalepath - another community of small business owners, and if you keep reading, you’ll see how it’s going so far.

During this period, I’ve learned a lot.

And predictably, I think my #1 lesson so far is… Drumroll

Growing a business is difficult…

Who could have guessed!

Okay, let’s get on with what I want to talk about today. We are 2 months into our acquisition of Scalepath, and I want to reflect on how it’s gone…

Acquiring Scalepath:

Before I get into this, I have one recommendation for all of you:

I’ve started to write Decision Memos for every large decision I have in life.

The purpose of this is 3 fold:

1. Practice Makes Perfect. Being a good decision maker is a core life skill, it can be trained and mastered, but only if you practice, document your results, and learn from your mistakes

2. Documenting your decisions before you make them forces you to sit down and think deeper than you normally do, as a result of documenting your big decision, you’ll likely think about new angles and make an even smarter decision as a result

3. After the decision has been made, and the impact of the decision has occurred, you will discover how right or how wrong you were. If you were wrong, that’s good! Because now you can go back to your Decision Memo and see any judgement errors you made, and recalibrate your process for future decisions.

BAM! A great systemized way to learn from your mistakes and intentionally develop an incredible skill.

I recommend this habit to you because the only reason I’m able to clearly articulate what happened in this acquisition is because it’s documented, and I’m reviewing my decision memo as I write this email to all of you now.

Okay, here’s how the acquisition is going:

My previous company (called SMB Community) had almost 40 members, and Scalepath had almost 50.

Going into the acquisition, here’s why I decided to buy it (screenshot from the memo I wrote in April)

Good news, so far all of those expectations have come true. A rare occurrence in acquisition land. But I guess that’s what happens when you acquire a business very similar to the one you’re already running.

Oddly enough, the most profound impact has been on business scale.

Before acquiring Scalepath my priorities were relatively simple. Grow top of funnel, sell the membership, get them into peer groups.

But now, I’m having to work “on” the business A LOT more. Everything now can’t rely on just me. Now I’m delegating, managing priorities, building systems and implementing things like EOS (In reality, our head of community is implementing it… #delegation!)

We’re still in the low 6 figures of revenue, but this acquisition came with a very strong, competent head of community who I can truly hand off complex/contextual work to, and know it’ll get done well.

Smallish change in revenue, big change in scale/capability. And I would not have predicted this difference given our small size.

The largest challenge for me at the moment is prioritization. We’re unlocked a ton of capacity with this acquisition, but choosing the *right* thing to work on has taken more effort than I’m used to, as it’s a bit ambiguous.

The other large impact has been on our ability to sell customers.

Previously, if I did not have a peer group to put someone in relatively quickly, I basically lost them. OR they weren’t a fit for a peer group we could build and we’d lose them.

Now, we have a Base Membership, which is a different, lower tier service. And for some people, it's a better fit than joining a peer group.

Since acquisition, we’ve gotten almost 10 customers who I would not have been able to get prior to acquiring Scalepath. FANTASTIC!!!

And a quick mention on point (A) from my memo

Scalepath was owned by Michael Girdley, a holdco business owner doing (I think) 9+ figures in total annual revenue.

He’s got ~400,000 followers across all of his socials, and has a team dedicated to growing it.

This is a far cry away from anything I’ll be able to accomplish in the next 3 years, probably more.

So Girdley retained a minority equity position in the company, and we expect that content marketing through his channels will be an easy win to help us get our message across to a much larger audience than we used to have.

We’ve seen a bit of success with this already, and with our future endeavors into local events and retreats, I expect this will be a huge value add.

On top of that, Girdley has already been a very helpful advisor in helping me craft what the future of Scalepath looks like.

And I want to make one final note on point (E) from my memo

SMB Community was 100% peer group focused, we’re very good at building amazing peer groups. We also had a private members-only podcast, and some discounts to services. But 99% of the value was in the peer group.

Scalepath had every other feature we didn’t have

• Engaged slack forum

• Weekly guest expert calls

• playbooks/resources

This is now the base membership that I spoke about above, plus the private podcast and the discounts.

Combining these services has totally unlocked a real, professional product, and it’s making winning sales easier.

What’s Next For Us:

I want to leave you with this…

1. On September 23-26 this year, we’re hosting a manufacturing retreat for manufacturing business owners. Gathering ~15 owners of manufacturing companies to go one a couple factory tours, with some intentional relationship building and experience sharing activities.

If you know a manufacturing business owner who may be interested, you can send them our info for the event.

2. We’re planning a Costa Rica surf retreat in January 2026, this is another business-owner specific event. If you’re interested in this, please reach out as I want to gather a small, intentionally curated group of successful business owners for fun in the sun.

3. We’re in the preliminary stages of offering a low-cost, local business owner network in cities across the U.S. This will not be a typical peer group, but rather it’s focused on fun, local, optional events organized exclusively for business owners.

4. We’re building a bunch of peer groups right now, if you’re an owner in any of the following industries, we’re building something specifically for you:

- Local B2B service
- B2B Products/Materials Distributors
- Construction
- Ecommerce
- Professional services
- Manufacturing

If any of the above is interesting to you, please reply to this email, I respond to everyone personally.

Until next time!

Rand Larsen