Wharton@Work

September 2026 | 

Prefer to Buy Rather than Build? Start with a Plan

Prefer to Buy Rather than Build? Start with a Plan

Six million American small and midsize businesses will change hands by 2035 as their baby boomer owners retire, according to a February report from the McKinsey Institute for Economic Mobility. About a million of them are expected to sell, in transactions worth $5 trillion. Many of the rest will close, not because they failed but because there was no one to take them over.

That is the backdrop for Wharton Online’s newest program, which starts where most entrepreneurship education does not venture: with a business that already exists, and a harder question than whether the idea is good. Is this one worth owning, and can its value survive a change of hands?

Entrepreneurial Strategy: Acquisition, Commercialization, and Growth joins the Entrepreneurship Certificate as its first elective. Taught by David Hsu, professor of management, and Robert Chalfin, CPA, JD, lecturer in management and CEO of The Chalfin Group, the program brings together two disciplines that are usually taught separately. One is the transaction work of entrepreneurship through acquisition, known as ETA: finding a business, evaluating it, and buying it. The other is the strategic work that begins after the closing, when an owner has to decide where value actually comes from and how to keep creating it.

Among search funds that completed an acquisition, roughly a quarter ended in a loss of value. Of the entrepreneurs who exited, 22 percent earned $10 million or more, and 22 percent earned nothing. The program’s premise is that the distance between those two numbers is made, not found.

Hsu’s field is entrepreneurship and the management of technology, and his research covers technology commercialization strategy, intellectual property, and venture capital. He describes the output of that work in concrete terms. “We developed a set of tools through research and practice that can directly help the process of fast prototyping and testing the market,” he says. “We teach these tools in the program, and they are very practical at the individual level."

Following the Arc of a Deal

The program is also designed to be immediately applicable, with its four modules following the sequence of an actual deal. The first covers paths and opportunity selection, weighing whether to buy, partner, or compete, and produces an opportunity screening brief. The second turns to defensibility and seller insight, testing whether a target’s value is real, transferable, and monetizable. The third handles offers, diligence, and financing, including the judgment call about when new information means restructuring, repricing, slowing down, or walking away. The fourth addresses what happens after the close: leadership, scaling, and eventual exit.

That last module reflects a conviction running through the program, which is that the deal is the beginning rather than the end goal. Businesses that outlast the transactions that created them do so because someone made deliberate choices about business model, monetization, and growth after the paperwork was signed.

Anyone evaluating an acquisition encounters no shortage of advice, much of it typically from people with a stake in the outcome. Hsu draws the distinction directly. “We have no vested interest except to bring insights from research to our students and to the world, so we can raise the likelihood of success for these individuals,” says Hsu. “We are rigorous in our research, translate those insights into something actionable, and bring that to our students. It’s not just pure research. It’s done to make the world a better place through these practices.”

The program closes with a Strategy in Action project, in which participants synthesize their work into an implementable plan. There are two paths: one produces an ETA strategy for a search process or an investor conversation; the other produces a technology commercialization strategy, which suits founders and corporate innovators working to bring an existing technology to market. Both leave participants with a usable document rather than a set of notes.

The elective is designed for professionals with operating experience who are weighing a specific set of questions: whether to buy or build, how to tell a genuine prospect from an attractive story, and how to lead a company after acquiring it. It‘s also valuable for advisors, including CPAs and attorneys, who guide entrepreneurs through diligence and growth decisions.

Entrepreneurial Strategy runs six weeks, self-paced, and stands on its own. It also pairs with the certificate’s three core courses, led by academic director Lori Rosenkopf, vice dean of entrepreneurship, which move through inspiration, opportunity identification, and venture implementation. Participants who complete all four earn the Entrepreneurship Certificate with a Specialization in Acquisition and Commercialization Strategy.

A Wide Range of Outcomes

Buying a business carries the potential for real upside and real downside. Stanford’s 2026 Search Fund Study, which has tracked entrepreneurship through acquisition since 1984, reports that roughly a quarter of funds that completed an acquisition ended in a loss of value. Outcomes for the searchers themselves split just as sharply: 22 percent of those who exited earned $10 million or more, and 22 percent earned nothing.

The program’s premise is that the distance between those two numbers is made, not found. It sits in a handful of judgment calls: which opportunity to pursue, whether the value in a business is transferable, when to walk away from a deal, and how to capture a business’s existing value while growing it. Strengthening judgment about those decisions is what separates the searchers in the first 22 percent from those in the second.