Entrepreneurship Through Acquisition · Schulich

Skip the startup. Buy the business.

A quieter, more certain path than founding from scratch: buy a business that already works, using other people's money.

You put someone in to run the everyday. You own the cash flow. Ownership is the strongest generational wealth builder there is.

in Canadian businesses are changing hands this decade as their owners retire. Almost no one on campus is being trained to catch it.

01 / The opportunity

The path to ownership no one told you about.

Founding a startup is the entrepreneurship everyone celebrates: zero to one, total risk, and most of them fail.

Acquisition is the other kind. You find a real business with real customers and real cash flow, buy it, and become the owner-operator on day one. You skip the riskiest part, proving the thing can make money, because it already does.

The default path

Start from zero

× A blank page. No revenue, no customers, no team.
× Roughly 9 in 10 startups don't make it.
× Years before the business can pay you.
× You need the rare, original idea, and luck.

The acquisition path

Start from cash flow

+ A proven business with existing customers and profit.
+ A team that already knows how to run it.
+ Cash flow from month one, and you own the upside.
+ Often seller-financed, so you don't need to be rich to start.

You don't build lasting wealth by earning a salary. You build it by owning things that make money. Acquisition is the most accessible door to ownership, and most students have never been shown it.

02 / The wave

The biggest handover of businesses in Canadian history is happening right now.

An entire generation of owners is retiring at once. They call it the "silver tsunami."

Most have no successor and no plan. Their businesses are profitable, established, and looking for someone to take the keys.

of Canada's small-business owners plan to exit their business within the decade.

Source / CFIB

$0T

in business assets are expected to change hands as those owners step away, one of the largest wealth transfers ever recorded.

Source / CFIB

small-business owners across Canada. This is the supply of businesses to buy.

Source / Statistics Canada

have a formal succession plan. The other 9 in 10 have no clear path forward.

Source / CFIB

fewer entrepreneurs than 20 years ago, even as the population grew by 10M+. Fewer builders, more sellers.

Source / Statistics Canada

These owners need buyers. Most have no plan and no successor. That isn't a crisis if you're the one who's ready to step in. It's the opportunity of a generation.

03 / What the club does

Three things, done well.

We don't just talk about acquisition in the abstract. We teach the mechanics, practise on live deals, and put you in the room with people who've actually done it.

PILLAR / 01

Educate

Workshops and a speaker series on how acquisition actually works: valuation basics, deal structures, seller financing, the Canadian equivalents of SBA-style lending, and how a real search runs.

PILLAR / 02

Analyze

Member working groups source real listings, build simple deal screens and valuation models, and present teardowns. You learn by analysing live opportunities, not textbook cases.

PILLAR / 03

Connect

Panels, fireside chats, and a growing alumni and mentor network of searchers, small-business owners, brokers, and acquisition entrepreneurs who can open doors.

04 / The gap

Every top school teaches this. Schulich doesn't, yet.

Entrepreneurship through acquisition has dedicated clubs, courses, and case competitions at the schools students look up to:

Ivey Queen's Smith Rotman UBC Sauder Schulich / nothing Harvard Stanford GSB Wharton Columbia MIT Sloan

Ivey & Queen's

Ivey runs a dedicated Entrepreneurship Through Acquisition program and student club, with a case competition that includes Queen's. Both treat ownership as a serious career path.

Schulich today

Strong finance and entrepreneurship clubs, but nothing built around buying and owning existing businesses. The succession wave is loudest here in Canada, and no one's talking about it.

The opening

That's the gap this club fills. A genuine, unfilled niche, and the chance to be early to it.

05 / Why I'm starting this

A note from the founder.

For a long time I believed there was a right path, and that my job was to find it and get on it.

Hi, I'm Maliya. I enrolled in engineering because I was never sure what I wanted, so I defaulted to what looked like the correct answer. I burnt out. I took a gap year to work out where I actually saw myself going, rather than drifting further into someone else's plan.

What I noticed is that the defaulting doesn't stop. In business school it just changes names: banking, or consulting. Same instinct, different lane.

Nobody had ever told me you could simply buy a business and own it. That's the whole reason this club exists.

Maliya

Founder · Acquisition & Ownership Club

The plan

What the first year looks like.

Launch

Get chartered

Lock in the founding exec, secure a faculty advisor, finalize the constitution and mandate, and submit the UBS ratification package.

Term 1

Build the base

A kickoff info session, an intro-to-acquisition workshop, and a first external speaker event to grow a real member base.

Term 2

Get hands-on

Launch a member deal-analysis working group, host a panel of acquisition entrepreneurs, and start building the alumni and mentor list.

The goal

A signature that lasts

Establish a repeatable annual event, an acquisition panel or case night, that anchors the club year after year.

Join

Be one of the first.

The founding cohort shapes what this becomes.

If owning something real sounds more interesting than another recruiting pipeline, put your name down. No commitment, just first access to events, workshops, and the founding network.

Founding cohort Takes about 30 seconds

Name, email, and what pulls you toward ownership. That's it.

Prefer email? Reach the founding team at hello@acquisitionclub.ca