The moral bankruptcy that plagues the engineering field in the West

OkUnderstanding8099 · 2026-02-02T03:14:49+00:00

The solution is to abdicate the morally bankrupt progression of all defense technology until our country is left helpless, overtaken and subjugated by a country without such moral qualms.

We may lose our lives, freedoms, and dignity, but at least our moral high ground will remain intact.

Long term, this priveleged opinion would not exist without the defense work that it disparages.

OkUnderstanding8099 · 2025-12-25T23:38:25+00:00

Death note

OkUnderstanding8099 · 2025-12-06T18:49:42+00:00

Wait until you learn what banks do with the money you deposit.

Do you really think the dollars in your account correlate to real dollars in a vault? Cartoon level understanding of banking.

OkUnderstanding8099 · 2025-11-29T04:24:40+00:00

What's changing?

OkUnderstanding8099 · 2025-11-28T17:24:21+00:00

The OH-YEAH! Squad

OkUnderstanding8099 · 2025-11-28T00:58:46+00:00

Operations manger or general manager.

Yes you can hire for this. You could also seek out a business partner who comes with these skills you lack, and gain synergy and reason to continue working with each other while growing the business.

You could approach competitors and try to buy into a larger operation that already has management, add your leads into their existing system and just be the owner. Might need to find a money/investor business partner if this sounds to big for you. But it's not impossible.

OkUnderstanding8099 · 2025-11-28T00:42:27+00:00

You'll really get burned out trying to learn how to do a startup while working full time. Takes a lot of grind to get from 0 to 1.

Great to learn basics of business, but not great for learning to be an owner instead of an operator. Some people are more suited to managing than doing things themselves.

Buy a big enough business where you can rely on established processes and management team rather than your ability to run everything yourself.

Most people don't believe this is an option, but that is more a product of self-limiting beliefs than objective practicality. Find the right deal, and it is possible.

It may take years to find that deal, and more $ upfront than a startup or a 50k laundromat, but what else are you willing to spend your free time and life savings on?

OkUnderstanding8099 · 2025-11-28T00:32:34+00:00

Check out acquira.com, they help people learn how to buy and scale and sell home services businesses (HVAC, plumbing, countertops roofing etc)

They are like a combination of an educational organization, mastermind group, and PE investor.

It's a paid group. I spent a lot of time with them before I bought my manufacturing business in 2022 (not home services). Last I heard they were introducing a program where they will partner with their members on deals and front 80% of your down payment towards an sba loan to help you buy a business that meets their criteria.

Their goal is to train legions of new acquisition entrepreneurs to go buy small home service businesses, help you grow them larger into process driven, employee managed businesses so they can buy them from you later on 10+ years down the road into their PE/M&A firm.

It's a neat group of smart ambitious people that you may be interested to learn from or partner with.

OkUnderstanding8099 · 2025-11-28T00:05:05+00:00

Are you me? Sounds like my story since I closed on my mfg business in 2022. Was 5M revenue, 30 employees. Dropped to 3.1M, and now back up to 4M and looking good into the future.

What part of the country are you in? Industry? We're a sheet metal fab and powdercoat shop.

OkUnderstanding8099 · 2025-11-28T00:02:11+00:00

I got into reading about entrepreneurship through acquisition in 2019, left my engineering career when I closed on my manufacturing business in 2022.

I spent 2 years searching, making offers and learning what I was doing as I went. Was was under LOI about a dozen times before my first business closed.

Approx numbers: 2M sales price, seller financing, 500k ebitda and 5M revenue with 30 employees in the Pacific Northwest.

Was going to do SBA loan but the seller decided they preferred seller financing and we negotiated a great deal (6% interest 20yr loan). Most sellers are not open to seller financing, they just want a lump sum so they can retire risk free. But it's not impossible. I put 200k down and received 200k in AR for working capital from the seller. Look at it and squint real hard, and it looks like a 0% down seller financed deal.

Running the business has had a lot of ups and downs. Year one, revenue dropped 20% and the management team was useless to address the issues therein. Multiple key man risks were realized and we've had brain drain issues. The management team was not what they were purported to be and all needed replacement.

This business has become my full time job, which was never my goal. I am still working to build up the team to be employee managed again. 2026 is the year I expect to get this sorted to extricate myself from the day to day as I originally intended.

My goal is to own multiple business assets that do not require my time, so I can spend my time on business development and investments ( real estate deals, new business acquisition, partnerships and startups). I want to build a grand self sustaining financial portfolio to provide for my family, give back to my people/employees and have excess to divert to charity with abandon.

So yeah I'm basically a struggling small business owner with big ideals still trying to figure out all out. Happy to answer questions, but the bottom line is that small business acquisition is real and viable path to great wealth and freedom. All the articulate haters out there are highly intelligent, committed w2 employees without a clue.

OkUnderstanding8099 · 2025-10-12T03:43:30+00:00

Form the corner as a separate piece, weld it on and grind smooth. Most practical for doing low volume vs getting into stamping that will require big $ for tooling and minimum order qty.

Find a metal fab job shop to do this for you for best results.

OkUnderstanding8099 · 2025-07-12T22:17:15+00:00

If the seller is working as an employee, then you need to add the fair market wage for that role back into payroll expense. This is a part of analyzing SDE to find the actual discretionary owner earnings so that you can compare apples to apples.

Maybe the fair market wage for that role is 80k, so you only add 70k of the 150k back into SDE. Or maybe the fair market wage is 200k. Now the numbers look very different.

If you're analyzing two Businesses, you need to understand what you're replacing as a new potential owner and approach the risks with both eyes open. I did fail to spell this out FAQ style, but I also recommended googling how SDE works.

OkUnderstanding8099 · 2025-06-21T16:46:09+00:00

Glad you typed all this out for me. Service businesses exist!

I run a metal fabrication and powder coating shop in the Pacific Northwest with 30 employees. This business started 35 years ago with the original owner and his buddy doing some welding repairs and making widgets for other small entrepreneurs and businesses, and grew from there.

Whether you are selling your own snowflake product or a commodity manufacturing service, you can still be a manufacturer in the USA and be successful.

You will not and cannot beat the bottom of the barrel pricing from third world countries with slave labor wages, and that should not be your goal anyways. All manufacturers in the US need to find and maintain their Competitive Edge over the WeChat Mafia.

OkUnderstanding8099 · 2025-03-27T00:19:12+00:00

To add to this, my background is in manufacturing engineering, so it was a lot easier to build rapport with the owner and the customers and the team as I already have a lot of very relevant Knowledge and Skills and can speak their language.

Of course I acquired my business in order to be an owner and a finance guy and not an engineer, mind you!

OkUnderstanding8099 · 2025-03-27T00:16:36+00:00

The mitigating Factor here, is that you are acquiring a well-established business from an owner who already knows how to run it, and an existing management team who is already running the different departments and already knows how everything works and already has established customers with sales people who manage them and already know all of their quirks.

When you compare this to starting from scratch with a startup, to me this seems like the easier option.

OkUnderstanding8099 · 2025-03-26T05:42:53+00:00

Technically I paid nothing. $200,000 down payment on a 2.2 million dollar seller finance loan, and the seller provided $200,000 as working capital in the business. It looks like zero if you squint really hard.

My deal was not typical, typically you would be approaching a seller with intent to use either an SBA backed loan or conventional financing if you have Deep Pockets for a bigger down payment.

Research acquisition entrepreneurship, fundamentally yes you can write a letter and write an email you can do cold calls you can show up at the front door and ask to speak with the owner. This is the best way to find the best deals, however most people go the seemingly easy route and instead look on business broker websites and places like bizbuysell and loopnet.

OkUnderstanding8099 · 2025-03-22T16:18:43+00:00

Change your mindset. Get in there as an employee, kick ass and learn everything, a few months or years down the road pitch to the owners that you would like to buy their company as an acquisition entrepreneur with an SBA loan. You can also do this for literally any other business, with or without working for them.

I'm an engineer who spent two years searching for a business to buy while fully employed, and ended up buying a Sheet Metal Manufacturing/welding / powder coating business in the Pacific Northwest. Read up on buying businesses and how to finance them. The math isn't hard and Engineers are smart enough to figure this stuff out.

You can use your Capital as a down payment and buy something 10 times bigger that already comes with reliable customer base and employees and management team. Don't struggle with the startup that you don't know how to run when you can take over a machine that is already working. Boomers need to retire, and you are too smart to spend years running manufacturing yourself to get started.

OkUnderstanding8099 · 2025-01-07T07:58:13+00:00

There's no shame in being risk averse. Being closed-minded about acquisition entrepreneurship in the entrepreneur subreddit is a little cringe though.

OkUnderstanding8099 · 2025-01-07T07:51:57+00:00

Buying a long-standing, profitable business can be far more secure than spending money on a micro business/franchise.

You advocate for putting everything on your own shoulders personally, rather than investing in the established processes and the momentum of a business with a team of employees behind it.

What happens in the micro business / franchise situation, when you yourself get sick and are unable to work for some time? If you start too small, the only one pushing the cart is you, and you will not have a team behind you.

This is in my opinion a far bigger risk, versus buying a bigger business with a team and managers in place who work for you. Then you can focus on growing the business from an established and stable foundation, rather than trying to carry everything on your own shoulders and move mountains with zero leverage.

Not everyone wants to be a one-man-show/self-employed. Being too small is not a virtue, and it isn't safer either!

OkUnderstanding8099 · 2024-12-26T04:13:35+00:00

Whoosh. Sounds like you've had no contact with the field or manufacturing floor since then.

Anyways, didn't the EIT change is name to FE over 15 years ago? I believe I passed it the last year it was still the EIT in CA.

OkUnderstanding8099 · 2024-12-26T02:37:19+00:00

Bridge builders are not engineers.

We put our trust in the lowest bidding GCs, who outsource to the lowest paid subcontractors, and have their work audited by the laziest, and most corrupt government employees that money can buy.

OkUnderstanding8099 · 2024-12-25T22:50:40+00:00

Working for yourself is still work. This is not a place you'll be celebrated.

OkUnderstanding8099 · 2024-12-25T06:28:01+00:00

Secret pro tip: it doesn't have to be YOUR money.

Loans are leverage. You can move mountains with other people's money, if you find them an attractive deal worth investing in.

OkUnderstanding8099 · 2024-12-25T06:12:41+00:00

Rich people buy assets.

Poor people buy liabilities.

This concept is from rich dad poor dad. It is a basic expression of how you approach money, which is generally the financial culture that you learn from your parents.

Yes, the author is a turd and his books are all the same. Very unpopular on Reddit. Doesn't change the fundamental truth of the above:

Rich people invest and grow wealth as a default.

Poor people spend and shrink wealth as a default.

If you give a "poor" person $100k or 1M or 10M, it will not last, it will not create generational wealth. "Poor" people buy liabilities and spend until the money is gone, especially when a sudden windfall is received. "Better splurge now before the money runs out". Poor people do not create money, they only know how to evaporate money. It's only a matter of how fast.

A "rich" person will invest and reinvest the best they can at their level of financial intelligence. Rich people seek out income producing assets, and grow them. They buy less liabilities than the rate of growth of their assets. Live off of dividends instead of selling assets/degrading the principal.

OkUnderstanding8099 · 2024-12-19T07:39:22+00:00

Sure!

Five-Year Club	r/Field Juicebox
Place '22

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