HBR's 10 Must Reads on Entrepreneurship and Startups (featuring Bonus Article “Why the Lean Startup Changes Everything” by Steve Blank)

Buying Your Way into Entrepreneurship

by Richard S. Ruback and Royce Yudkoff

MANY ASPIRING LEADERS take conventional routes to the top in business: They get on a C-suite track at a large company, climb the ladder to partnership at a consulting or investment firm, or launch their own start-up. But there is another career path that has become increasingly popular in recent years: buying and running an existing operation—or what we call acquisition entrepreneurship. A record number of such transactions occurred in the United States during the first three quarters of 2016, according to BizBuySell, an online small-business marketplace.

Every year, we teach a course at Harvard Business School on this kind of entrepreneurship, which dozens of students—and ...