Deciding to Start, Not Buy, a Small Business

espite all of our enthusiasm for buying an existing business as a path to ownership, we are not dogmatic about it. There are any number of reasons why starting, not buying , makes perfect sense. And today we hear from someone who looked closely at buying a business, but chose against it, opting to start from scratch. The perspective of Kevin Moyer is valuable not just because he'd neatly organized his thoughts in a great article on Substack, but because he has much more experience as an owner-operator than many contemplating this decision. Kevin had actually started 5 territories in the Smash My Trash franchise network. He'd built these territories up to over a million in revenue and $260k in SDE . And, get this, has them running mostly passively. So a small blue collar business running on its own — a real and rare accomplishment deserving of its own interview. But point is, it gives Kevin a lot of SMB credibility, and you will learn from his experience & thoughtfulness. Now, the caveat here is that Kevin is just in the earliest months of his new venture, so we'll have to get him on again, a couple years from now, to see if he reflects differently on this decision to start a business versus buy a business. Here he is, Kevin Moyer, co-founder & owner of Golden Home Access.