Acquisition Lab is the home of acquisition entrepreneurship
Buying a business is too expensive to learn by trial and error. Acquisition Lab gives you a place to test the deal before your money, debt, and personal guarantee are behind it.
We’ll help you search, fund, close, and operate, with Advisors and support for need at each stage of the journey.
You don’t get a practice acquisition.
Once you close, the money is committed, the debt starts getting paid, and whatever you missed becomes your problem.
That’s why the name is literal. Deals are tested inside the Lab. Bring it in, pull it apart, challenge assumptions, and see whether it still holds up before the consequences are real.
Courses can teach you what to look for. Brokers can bring you deals. Funds can provide capital. The Lab puts those pieces in the same room, but the final decision is always yours.
Sit in on a Roundtable, ask them yourself, or see what happened after they bought.
Join a RoundtableWe can tell you how the Lab works, but our members can tell you what it’s actually like.
Watch our members succeedGive acquisition entrepreneurs somewhere to get a real answer
Buying a business creates questions at every stage, and the stakes only get higher as the deal moves forward.
The Lab exists to give acquisition entrepreneurs a place to bring those questions from search through ownership, with experienced people around them when the answers matter most.
Jordan Fliegel
Chief Executive Officer
Tim Ericson
Chief Operating Officer
Chelsea Wood
Cofounder & Advisor
Walker Deibel
Board Member & Venture Partner
Chief Executive Officer
Chief Operating Officer
Cofounder & Advisor
Board Member & Venture Partner
How it started. How we got here.
Walker Deibel published Buy Then Build in 2018 and gave a name to a path that was still unfamiliar to most entrepreneurs: buying an existing business instead of starting one from scratch.
The book came out before acquisition entrepreneurship became crowded with courses, communities, and search programs. The idea was simple: buying a business could be a legitimate path to ownership, but buyers needed a better way to do it.
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At the end of 2019, Walker and Chelsea Wood launched Acquisition Lab.
The goal was to give serious buyers somewhere to work through a search with experienced people around them instead of figuring out every deal, lender, Advisor, and decision on their own. The Lab started before the current wave of interest in acquisition entrepreneurship and grew alongside it.
Tim Ericson joined the Lab as a member in 2022 and went through the same search process as everyone else. He bought a business, then started investing in other members’ acquisitions alongside Jordan Fliegel.
Those investments worked, and Tim and Jordan built Shareholder Ventures around them.
After close, Tim ran into another problem. The finance infrastructure he needed as a new owner did not exist in a form that worked for him, so he built it. That operation became SMB Edge.
The Fund and Operate did not start as ideas on a whiteboard. They grew out of problems members were already running into.
In late 2025, Acquisition Lab, Shareholder Ventures, and SMB Edge came together under one company.
Shareholder Ventures became Fund. SMB Edge became Operate.
These were already working businesses with real track records before they became part of the Lab. Bringing them together connected the search, financing, closing, and post-close work under one name.
The next step is making more of the path open to everyone.
Education is free. Deal search is free. Roundtables are free. Fund and Operate are available beyond Lab membership.
Joining the Lab adds the deeper layer: Advisors, the member room, deal reviews, sourcing, and support throughout the search.
One place for the whole acquisition journey
You can start with Acquisition Lab long before you join it.
Learn and Find a Business are free. Joining the Lab will add deeper support to your search. Fund and Operate are available when they fit your needs.
Most of what we know how to teach is free.
Read the full library, work through the acquisition process, and build the knowledge you need without paying for a course or handing over your email.
Search the market for free.
Find a Business brings on-market deals from broker lists, listing sites, and direct submissions into one place so you can spend less time chasing listings and more time evaluating businesses.
Apply to join the Lab when buying a business becomes a real plan.
Members get Advisor access, live deal reviews, off-market sourcing, a vetted deal team, and a room full of acquisition entrepreneurs working through the same decisions.
Get more equity behind a deal when you need it.
The Lab’s Fund is the largest in the acquisition space and can invest in live acquisitions or commit capital before the search is complete.
Funding is available to both Lab members and non-members.
Get the finance function ready before you take over.
Operate can help set up the books, reporting, cash forecasting, and financial systems before close, then stay on as your finance team after the handoff.
Meet the people doing the work.
Join free virtual Roundtables, attend Searcher Circle meetups across the country, or come to the annual summit to connect with Searchers and Operators in person.
Everything below follows from one fact: Acquisition Lab only profits when a member buys a good business
Every deal has hair on it, and you can talk yourself into any of them after a long enough search.
Our job is to name the part you are explaining away.
Out of a bad deal, and out of joining if the fit isn’t there. Nobody here earns a dollar on either decision.
Our fees are public. Advisors are paid hourly and have no stake in whether or not you close.
Every way we make money sits on a page anyone can read.
All the tools and resources from the Lab exist because someone in our community or on our team needed it and didn’t have it.
Walk away from a hundred wrong deals and it costs you nothing here.
The only failure we recognize is the wrong business.
The bet is yours
Still wondering if ETA is right for you? Join a live roundtable.
