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My First MillionHow I Bought A Multi-Million Dollar Egg Carton Business For $0 | Sarah Moore Interview
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At a glance
WHAT IT’S REALLY ABOUT
Broke Harvard MBA Buys Egg Carton Business With Debt
- Sarah Moore describes buying Eggcartons.com with a 25% seller's note and a 75% bank loan, putting no money down, after sifting through huge databases of private companies with free interns.
- Her search relied on mass outreach that looked customized, industry-agnostic criteria focused on established and consistently profitable businesses, and plain language with sellers instead of financial jargon.
- After buying, she made mistakes like changing the phone system, then grew the business by recognizing it was really specialty packaging, with about 40% of revenue unrelated to eggs and a 5-6x jump during COVID.
- Her life story includes a neglectful upbringing, jail, and two families who invested in her, which shaped her motto of being that one person for one person and her drive to keep from disappointing them.
- She and Shaan Puri discuss the skeptics who doubted her story, her gender-leveraging hustle tactics like heels, a sweatshirt, and faxes, and her message that anyone willing to work can buy a small business.
IDEAS WORTH REMEMBERING
5 ideasA seller's note can replace equity and enable a no-money-down deal
Sarah did a 25% seller's note and 75% bank loan, and it took 20-plus banks to find ones that treated the seller's note like equity. The business's long profitable track record and the bank's priority repayment helped.
Industry matters less than an established, consistently profitable business
Sarah says industry theses give a false sense of security. She found only about 5% of businesses she looked at were both established and consistently profitable, and that was her filter.
Search is a numbers game that rewards creative scale
After finding customized outreach too slow, her team blasted emails guessing common address patterns, written to look researched. Replies, even angry corrections, filtered out unfit businesses.
Simplicity builds trust with sellers and fits your strengths
Sarah avoided jargon like EBITDA, kept deal terms straightforward, and skipped earn-outs because sellers get skeptical. She chose a simple business she could understand on day one given her limited technical skills.
Don't change much in the first year
Sarah's mentor told her to hire and fire fast and change nothing big in year one. She failed at both, and switching to VoIP phones took the lines down for nearly a week, which worried customers.
WORDS WORTH SAVING
5 quotesIt is not a matter of can or can't. It's a matter of will or won't.
— Sarah Moore
I honestly think ignorance truly is bliss here because the less you know, it's kind of better, 'cause you can keep things extremely simple for the seller. And I think that breeds trust.
— Sarah Moore
I just wanna be that one person for one person.
— Sarah Moore
What matters is that you find a business that is established and has been consistently profitable for a number of years. Everything else, garbage.
— Sarah Moore
It's a signal to yourself, it's a signal to your interns and your team, it's a signal to everybody in the world that I am all fucking in and no idea is off limits.
— Shaan Puri
High quality AI-generated summary created from speaker-labeled transcript.
