Everyone's Buying Into ENTREPRENEURSHIP

Entrepreneurship through acquisition is becoming a trendy shortcut to the business world for MBA grads and other would-be business leaders.

- Brian Contreras

BUYING TO BUILD: After graduating with his MBA, Evan Reinsberg spent over a year looking for a company to buy before scooping up Chesapeake Technology.

When Evan Reinsberg left Columbia Business School in 2023, he didn’t go down a typical career path by launching a startup or joining a big blue-chip firm. Instead, he started looking for a small business to buy.

During school, Reinsberg started thinking about entrepreneurship through acquisition, or ETA, an increasingly popular approach being taken by would-be business leaders, who buy pre-existing companies to scale them up.

Reinsberg’s search took a year and a half. During that time, a group of investors, some of whom he met through Columbia’s alumni network, covered his expenses. Now 31, he estimates that he contacted thousands of companies before closing a deal last February to take over Chesapeake Technology, a seafloor mapping company founded in 1995.

“I really wanted to get as much management experience as I could early in my career,” Reinsberg, now the company’s president, says. “This is a pretty unbelievable way to do that. I mean, trial by fire, right?”