Why wait? Business grads buying firms to install themselves as CEO

Aliev, who had worked in finance before doing her MBA, was wary of first impressions at the firm.

“If you judge a book by its cover, it’s very easy to be like ‘oh, young girl, Wall Street background, coming in here and telling me what to do’… I was really conscious about that,” she says. “And I really didn’t want to come off that way to my team.”

Aliev says her approach was initially to just observe and learn. “Not coming in and telling them ‘this is how things are going to be’.”

The practice of a young entrepreneur borrowing money to buy a company and become its boss is known as entrepreneurship by acquisition or “search-fund investing”.

The would-be business owner sets up a fund, called a search fund, and aims to attract money from both institutional investors and wealthy individuals.

At the last count, in 2023, a record 94 search funds, external were found to have been launched that year in the US, with $682m (£505m) said to have been invested in funds and the companies they bought across 2022 and 2023.

In turn, there are now investment companies in the US that specialise in backing young entrepreneurs and their search funds, such as Search Fund Partners, Aspect Investors and Anacapa Partners.

They are attracted by reported high rates of return. For while some people may question the wisdom of putting a 20-something in charge of an established business, a report by Yale School of Management found that “juicy returns by any standard”, external are available, and funds generally “remained relatively stable”.

For existing business owners, selling to a younger entrepreneur is a chance to move on and perhaps retire. For would-be company leaders the aim is to grow the business for perhaps five to 10 years, before selling at a profit.

Now more than two years since taking over at Life Support Systems, and 30-years-old, Aliev has led the takeover of a competitor, which she says has doubled the size of the business.

She says that this focus on growth has been welcomed by most employees. One, Meaghan Richardson, says: “It can be a little bit challenging sometimes for those of us who have been here a long time… but it’s been really great since she’s come in because she’s just turned a lot of stuff around, which is really exciting.”

But not everyone has been happy with Aliev’s new approach. Some workers have left and she has made others redundant as “they just didn’t want to work in a growth company”.