When I started exploring business acquisitions, I approached them as if I knew very little. In some ways that was fair enough, because buying a business was new to me and there was a lot I needed to understand. I mentally put myself back at beginner level, almost as though none of the experience I’d built up over the years would be relevant.
That was quite different from how I felt when I started exploring product ideas. Understanding what a product should do, how someone might use it, where the problems are and what needs to change is work I’ve done for years, so I could see fairly quickly how my existing experience applied. Acquisitions felt completely different, and for a while I treated them that way.
A couple of months in, I had one of those moments where something suddenly seemed very obvious. A good part of the process I’d been trying to understand was not as unfamiliar as I’d made it out to be.
I’d spent years working around lending processes in banking: the movement between different teams, the information needed to make a decision, the risks and controls, and all the things that can delay a process when one part depends on another. I wasn’t the person applying for the finance. In fintech, I’d been on the side providing systems and services to the internal teams who were dealing with the client. With acquisitions, I was suddenly looking at a lot of this from the other side. Now I was the client.
Even though I was looking at it from the other side now, a lot of the process was familiar. I knew what it meant for decisions to move through credit, legal and documentation, and why a relatively small missing piece of information could hold everything up. I hadn’t initially made that connection because I’d been so focused on the fact that acquisitions were new.
Of course, recognising those similarities didn’t mean I suddenly knew how to buy a business. There were still different commercial decisions to understand, people to speak to and plenty of things I’d only learn by actually going through the process. But I could approach those gaps more sensibly once I stopped treating every part of it as completely unfamiliar.
It’s made me think a little differently about what it means to start something new. I might be a beginner in the specific subject, but I’m not necessarily starting from zero.