Investment AssociateAcquisition Lab
Remote - LATAM
Why this job exists
Twenty years ago, if you told people you wanted to work in venture capital, most of them did not know what you meant. The industry was small, the money sat with a handful of firms, and the best people were not paying attention yet. Then it exploded.
Buying a small business is sitting in that same window right now.
Hundreds of thousands of profitable American companies are owned by people in their sixties and seventies who have to sell in the next decade. The SBA will lend a first time buyer most of the purchase price, which means someone with a good background and modest savings can own a real company outright. And the people showing up to do it have completely changed. This used to be a niche. Now it is MBAs, former consultants, and experienced operators who ran the math and realized that owning a business with a few million in revenue beats climbing somebody else's ladder for another fifteen years.
Capital is organizing around all of it, which is exactly what happened to venture in the early 2000s. That is what we are building.
About us
Acquisition Lab is the home of acquisition entrepreneurship. We were founded by Walker Deibel, the author of Buy Then Build. We help people buy profitable small businesses, we invest alongside them when they need capital, and we help them run those businesses once they own them.
We are remote first and have been from the start.
The role
You are the first conversation for anyone who comes to us looking for capital. Two halves to the job, both of them conversations.
Searchers looking for capital. People who have found a business and need to figure out how to pay for it, usually under LOI or getting close. You take the first call, understand the deal, explain how we work, screen against our criteria, and bring the good ones to our Managing Director.
EIR candidates for our Committed Capital Program. People earlier in the process who want capital committed to them before they find a deal. You run the initial evaluation. This is a real judgment call about a person, not a checklist, and it is a big part of your week.
Almost all of this happens on Zoom. If you like being on camera talking to smart, ambitious people all day, this is a good job. If you do not, it is a bad one.
What you will do
- Run first calls with searchers evaluating outside capital and with EIR applicants
- Learn our deal structure well enough to explain it clearly to someone who is skeptical of it, including what changes with the new SBA rules effective October 1
- Screen against written criteria and say no early when it is not a fit
- Hand qualified candidates and deals to our Managing Director with enough context that the next conversation starts clean
- Show up where this community actually lives. Searchfunder, ETA forums, podcast audiences, and a few conferences a year
- Stay close to people who are six months out from needing us. Most of this pipeline is about timing, and the win is being the person they call when they are ready
- Own the pipeline in HubSpot and know your numbers cold
What you get out of it
Be clear eyed about this. You will see more real acquisition deals in two years than almost anyone your age, you will sit in on underwriting, and you will build relationships across the entire ETA world including lenders, brokers, searchers, and the people writing the checks.
Where people go from a seat like this.
- Buy a business themselves, when the timing and the capital line up. That is usually not two years out, and we are not going to pretend otherwise
- Run a business somebody else bought, as CEO or GM of an acquired company
- Become the number two at a small business that is growing fast, which is often the best operating education available anywhere
- Private equity, especially the lower middle market firms who now compete for exactly this experience
- Join a search fund or a fund like ours in a more senior seat
You will not leave this job with the same options you walked in with. That is the point.
Who we are looking for
You are probably a couple of years out of college. You might be in an entry level sales role right now and want the ceiling to be higher. You might have interned at a search fund. You might have worked for a business broker. Or you might just be someone who read Buy Then Build, went deep on this world, and has been trying to find a way in ever since.
What actually matters.
- You are a natural on a call. You can hold a real conversation with someone twenty years more experienced than you and not shrink. Formal sales training is a plus and not a requirement
- You genuinely find this space interesting. People can tell inside four minutes whether you do
- You can run a structured conversation, take good notes, and follow up without being reminded
- You are comfortable being wrong in public while you learn, because you will be
- You are comfortable enough with financial statements to follow a conversation about a deal and know what to ask
- You write clearly
- Fluent, near native English. Most of your day is spent building trust with American business buyers in real time
What this is not
- This is not a modeling seat. You will touch financials, but you will not spend your days in a spreadsheet. Our Managing Director owns underwriting
- This is not a role where warm leads get handed to you
- This is not back office work. You will be a named, visible person in this community
Details
Reports to Andrew, our Managing Director. Remote, in the US or LATAM. A few trips a year to conferences and our annual summit.