Weatherhead School of Management is no stranger to breaking new ground. From the first PhD program in operations research and organizational behavior, to the first executive MBA and executive education curriculum, Weatherhead has been at the forefront of innovation in management education.
Today, the school is building on this legacy by taking a major step towards becoming one of the world’s leading hubs of an ecosystem dedicated to advancing knowledge and practice of entrepreneurship through acquisition (ETA). ETA is an alternative to startups and is a path to becoming an entrepreneur by buying and growing an established small business.
Richard Osborne, a long-serving and beloved professor of entrepreneurship, was one of the pioneers of ETA. In the early 1990s, Osborne co-founded Promise Partners, a one-of-a-kind ETA incubator and a mutual support community of entrepreneurs as they design and execute their ETA plans to go from employees to business owners.
For over 30 years, Weatherhead and Promise Partners have taught the practice of ETA and acted as an incubator for alumni looking to become business owners. During this time, 65 Promise Partners members (including 44 Weatherhead alumni) have gone on to buy 85 companies.
The school expects to significantly expand its ETA curriculum in fall 2023 with the launch of two new classes, to complement Visiting Professor in the Department of Design & Innovation Scot Lowry’s current Entrepreneurship Through Acquisition course. Reid Tileston, a doctoral student at Case Western Reserve, is doing his dissertation on entrepreneurship through acquisition, and will offer an ETA course in the spring semester of 2024 geared towards mid-to-late career executives interested in self-funded ETA strategies. GJ King will offer an ETA course in spring 2024 defining the different types of ETA strategies with a particular emphasis on "search funds" and the post-acquisition experience of leading a small business.
Led by entrepreneurs who have acquired dozens of companies and are active owners and investors, the curriculum will expose students to the latest thinking on ETA models and strategies and provide practical content on how to become a business owner using ETA. The coursework will do that by focusing on tools and strategies that build entrepreneurial leadership methods, team building, mindset and investing strategies, which translate into practical methods to support their success as leaders, individuals and investors. Critically, the curriculum will provide students with direct access to guests who are investors, ETA entrepreneurs and advisors.
Unique among business schools, Weatherhead graduates will continue to receive support in their ETA journey from Promise Partners via its partnership with the school.
Besides teaching, the school will act as a home for research on the latest thinking on ETA models, cases and analysis, to be led by Associate Professor in the Department of Design & Innovation Simon Peck.
Lowry and Peck are completing a manuscript which shall provide the intellectual framework to the curriculum. The work, coinciding with the 30th anniversary of the Weatherhead and Promise Partners connection and scheduled to publish in 2023, will lay out the unique Promise Partners pathway to ETA, how would-be entrepreneurs achieve their ambitions of business ownership, and insights from several Promise Partners and Weatherhead alumni and the companies they have acquired and grown.
The school will also promote ETA efforts in the community by offering certificate programs and organizing an annual ETA symposium. Through the generous support of our alumni and friends, ETA-specific discretionary scholarships will be offered to competitively attract a diverse and high potential student talent to this unique program.
Learn more about King, Lowry, Peck and Tileston:
King is a partner at BK Growth and serves on the board of directors for a number of companies acquired via the search fund model. BK Growth is a family investment company started by Will Bressman and King that invests in search funds. Previously, in 2011, they acquired RIA in a Box, a regulatory compliance consulting company serving investment advisory firms. Over the course of ten years, Bressman and King transformed the business into a recurring revenue, software-as-a-service company, and grew both revenues and profits significantly. King holds an MBA from the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University and a Bachelor of Arts degree from Brown University.
Lowry is currently managing partner and co-founder of PromiseONE (P1), a long-term holding company that acquires small businesses using ETA strategies. Previously, Lowry served as CEO of Fathom, a national digital marketing firm and an early P1 acquisition he led. To date, P1 has partnered/invested with nine ETA entrepreneurs whom he supports in his role as P1’s managing partner.
Peck was initially appointed as a Weatherhead faculty member in 2003. His research centers on the link between corporate governance and organization performance, characteristics of the board of directors and top management, and the firm’s competitive advantage. Peck’s work looks closely at topics of executive compensation contracts, board composition and structure, and how top executives do strategic planning. He received his PhD and Master of Arts degree from University of Leeds; and his Bachelor of Science degree from University of Warwick.
Tileston co-created the ETA curriculum at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, lectures at Dartmouth, the University of Chicago and the University of California, and serves on the University of Chicago ETA Advisory Committee. He has owned and sold four companies using ETA strategies, achieving a return multiple on invested capital of over 10 times. He holds a Bachelor of Arts degree from University of California, Berkeley and an MBA from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.