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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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CHAPTERS
- 0:00 – 6:12
Shaan's Intro: The Viral Story of Sarah Moore and Eggcartons.com
Shaan explains how he told Sarah Moore's story on the podcast, how it went viral, and why she agreed to do one interview. He sets up the episode as a deep dive into buying a business with no money.
- •Sarah bought Eggcartons.com with all debt and no cash down, owning only a RAV4
- •The story went viral though she had no social media or interviews
- •Attention brought unwanted contacts, including people showing up at her door
- •She agreed to one interview to share the good, the bad and the mistakes
- 6:12 – 7:27
Life After Going Viral: Sarah's Inbox and Unwanted Attention
Shaan welcomes Sarah, who says she deliberately stayed private. She describes the flood of inquiries since the story blew up, from offers of money for her time to people showing up at her business.
- •Sarah intentionally avoided public attention
- •Someone offered her $500 for five minutes of her time
- •People ask about financing and no-money-down deals
- •She asks people not to contact or show up at her business
- 7:27 – 12:44
Why Buy a Business: Search Funds and Rejecting the Goldman Path
Sarah explains she learned of search funds between her first and second year of business school. She tells the Goldman 15-minute-rule story that convinced her she didn't want to work for someone else, and Shaan shares a similar story about a friend who left banking.
- •A search fund lets you buy a business and become CEO without money or experience
- •A classmate described Goldman's rule of responding within 15 minutes, always
- •Sarah decided she didn't want to be a consultant or banker
- •Shaan tells the 'ASAP or sooner' story about a friend who quit banking
- 12:44 – 16:37
Going It Alone: Skipping Investors and Scraping the Databases
Sarah explains why she rejected the investor-backed search route, given the 1.5x payback, and decided to search on her own. Step one was having a friend scrape a database of private companies near Boston and cutting the list down by obvious exclusions.
- •Investor-funded searches require paying back one and a half times the money
- •A friend compared searching to dating: enough reps and you recognize a good business
- •A smart friend scraped all private companies within an hour and a half of Boston
- •The database was accurate only about 50% of the time
- 16:37 – 18:34
Why Industry Is Overrated
Sarah says she initially followed industry theses but concluded industry is irrelevant. What matters is a business that is established and consistently profitable.
- •Investors expect you to have industry theses, but they proved irrelevant to Sarah
- •Good industries like pest control give a false sense of security
- •Her steel industry employer was a great business despite the industry's reputation
- •Look for an established, consistently profitable business
- 18:34 – 22:07
Building a Free Workforce of Interns
Sarah describes recruiting interns by offering private equity experience and full transparency, including a conference line for all her calls. She found her best interns on Craigslist rather than student job boards.
- •Each of five interns had to find 50 companies a week
- •Private equity firms rarely offer free internships, so she offered one
- •She opened her calls with owners, brokers and attorneys to the interns
- •Craigslist produced better interns than student job boards
- 22:07 – 25:46
Mass Outreach: Guessing Emails and 'Bombs Away'
When response rates proved poor, the team switched to emailing everyone. They guessed email patterns, verified addresses, and sent emails that looked customized so replies would self-select the right businesses.
- •Most email addresses follow the same four patterns
- •They verified guessed addresses with a bulk email checker
- •Emails looked targeted, so wrong recipients corrected them and effectively filled out a survey
- •Her initial criteria were $4–20M revenue and $1.5M EBITDA, which she later relaxed
- 25:46 – 29:11
Finding Eggcartons.com: Simplicity Over Innovation
A reply from the Eggcartons.com owner caught Sarah's interest, since only about 5% of businesses she looked at were established and consistently profitable. She chose a simple, old-school wholesale distributor that played to her limited technical strengths.
- •The owner replied that the business started in 2001 and had been consistently profitable
- •The company is a wholesale distributor that buys, stores and sells egg cartons
- •It also had proprietary products and some patents
- •Sarah picked a business simple enough to understand on day one
- 29:11 – 36:05
Closing the Deal: Pricing, Seller's Note and Bank Financing
Sarah explains how she raised price early at about three to four times profits, insisted on a seller's note, and kept terms simple instead of using earn-outs. She financed 25% with the seller's note and 75% with a bank loan, finding banks that treated the note as equity after 20-plus tries.
- •She quoted a multiple of profits quickly to see if the seller was realistic
- •A seller's note was non-negotiable as a substitute for equity investors
- •She avoided jargon and complex terms because simplicity builds trust
- •The bank's priority over the seller's note and the long profit record helped win financing
- 36:05 – 39:36
Not Counting Yourself Out: The Hustle Recap
Shaan recaps the hustle, including the fake student IDs for interns, and says the lesson is not counting yourself out and treating it as a numbers game. Sarah says anyone who wants to buy and operate a small business can.
- •Interns needed library access, so they sourced student IDs from alumni
- •It was a numbers game across businesses, interns and banks
- •Shaan says the rules are largely imaginary
- •Sarah says it's a matter of will or won't, not can or can't
- 39:36 – 44:08
Growing the Business: Specialty Packaging and COVID
Sarah says the first couple of years were rocky, then she realized she was in specialty packaging, not the egg industry. About 40% of revenue has nothing to do with eggs, and sticky custom products plus COVID drove big growth.
- •Order history showed customers buying for crickets, bath bombs, cupcakes and small parts
- •About 40% of revenue is unrelated to eggs
- •Custom-mold proprietary products keep customers buying
- •The business grew five to six times during COVID
- •She is buying domains like machine shop trays and bath bomb cartons
- 44:08 – 47:44
Biggest Mistakes in Year One: Hire and Fire Fast, Change Nothing
Asked what advice she'd give her younger self, Sarah cites her mentor's advice: hire and fire fast, and change nothing big in the first year. She shares the VoIP phone-line switch that took the business's phones down for nearly a week.
- •She didn't hire and fire fast, which was a huge mistake
- •Switching to VoIP phones seemed small but was one of her biggest mistakes
- •Spectrum lost the 1-800 lines mid-porting and phones were down almost a week
- •Customers wondered whether the company had gone out of business
- 47:44 – 53:13
Sarah's Unlikely Background: From Juvenile Trouble to Harvard
Sarah tells of a childhood without parents, truancy and jail, then being taken in by the Bracken family and supported by her employers, who paid for college. She recounts her low reading level, paying her sister to take the SAT, and her fear of disappointing those who believed in her.
- •She lived in unstable homes and says she was a troubled teen
- •The Brackens' care and honest talk turned her around
- •Employers Steve and his wife paid for Northeastern after she was wait-listed
- •Steve urged her toward business school
- •She tested at a 33% reading level and studied relentlessly
- 53:13 – 1:04:24
Being That One Person for One Person
Sarah describes her idea of being that one person for one person, which came from the families who invested in her. Shaan shares his own experience of being believed in by an investor family, and Sarah says she now does one-on-one mentorship and explains her scared-straight rewiring.
- •Sarah vowed to be for someone what these families were for her
- •Shaan and Sarah discuss the pressure of having a few people believe in you
- •Sarah practices one-on-one mentorship with her team and won't give up on people who try and are honest
- •She changed her habits out of fear of who she'd been
- 1:04:24 – 1:07:41
Skeptics Call It Too Good to Be True
Shaan reviews his original tweet and the backlash from people calling the story fake, including his worry that he'd been duped and his researcher's fact-checking. Sarah recalls her interns and sister wanting to defend her, and her priority of protecting the business.
- •Half of reactions called the story impossible
- •A researcher contacted Sarah's old interns to verify the story
- •Her sister created a Twitter account to defend her
- •Sarah's main concern was preserving the business
- 1:07:41 – 1:11:54
The Craigslist Intern Ad and Direct Outreach Emails
Shaan walks through Sarah's Craigslist intern post and the Kenston Green name, which was designed to prompt a story. They discuss how the ad was honest, avoided busywork, and offered recommendations, plus her direct email to brokers.
- •Kenston Green combined her high school name and the family she worked for in steel
- •The ad promised exposure to live M&A deals and honestly described an unpaid role
- •It promised no wasted work such as financial modeling
- •Her broker email stated clear criteria
- 1:11:54 – 1:16:25
Being a Human Billboard: Heels, Sweatshirts and Faxes
Sarah describes using her gender as an advantage, wearing five-inch heels and loud outfits to broker events, biking in a sweatshirt that said she wanted to buy a business, and faxing her picture. Shaan praises the 'nothing is off limits' mentality.
- •Brokers remembered the extremely tall woman in a loud outfit
- •Her sweatshirt displayed her phone number and a request to buy your business
- •A mass fax campaign with her photo targeted businesses that still use fax machines
- •Shaan says the all-in mentality matters even when individual tactics don't land leads
- 1:16:25 – 1:20:37
Sarah's Closing Message and How to Follow Up
Sarah leaves listeners with a message about freedom and using whatever you have, saying anyone willing to put in effort can buy a business. She explains the Q&A Google Doc form instead of direct contact, and Shaan offers to help serious people.
- •Sarah says freedom means using everything at your disposal, and she credits her upbringing over Harvard
- •Thousands of messages make individual replies impossible
- •A form in the description will let people request information
- •Shaan may help serious applicants buy businesses
- •Searching teaches you about how the world's businesses work
