Buy vs. a Career
Ten Years Either Way
Before the search paths compare against each other, the whole idea competes with staying employed: ten years of salary and savings against ten years of owning a business bought with SBA leverage, downside included.
Keep the Career
$709,566
Cash plus 10 years of invested savings at 7%
Buy (Your Assumptions)
$5,302,745
Exit at 3x on year-10 SDE, net of remaining debt, plus distributed cash flow, leftover cash, and the same invested savings as the career path, all at 7%
Buy (Downside: -8%/yr)
$1,195,109
Buy (If It Fails)
$414,493
The injection is gone; only uninvested cash and the same personal savings remain, and the personal guarantee can reach further
About 4.2% of the SBA acquisition loans old enough to have failed did, across 4,809 loans in the industries this site tracks. That is the weight to put on the last column, and it is a floor rather than a ceiling: it counts loans that charged off, not businesses that merely disappointed. Failure rates by industry are on SBA Default Rates.
Ten-year horizon; both paths assume the same salary, lifestyle, and personal savings, so the comparison isolates equity built through debt paydown, cash flow, and an exit at your entry multiple against never putting capital at risk. Taxes and transaction costs are simplified on both sides.
If the Answer Is Buy
The model above weighs one path against no path. Which of the three search paths you would actually run, and what each of them leaves you holding, is Path Economics, and Choose Your Path asks which column is yours in five questions.