About the school
A school, and only a school.
Searcher School exists because nearly every number the acquisition industry recruits on is published by someone paid when you transact. The school is the other side of that ledger: a curriculum written from the failure record, a library of verified research, and frameworks anyone can study and use.
The charter
The charter
This is the only acquisition curriculum written from the failure record up. Nearly every other body of instruction in the industry comes from someone who gets paid when you close: brokers, lenders, quality-of-earnings shops, even the investors. This one is written by a buyer who signed the personal guarantee, lost the business, carried the debt, rebuilt as an independent sponsor, and then interviewed sixty more buyers who failed.
It teaches acquisition the way aviation teaches flying: the failure record before flight hours, checklists over confidence, primary sources over folklore. And it withholds nothing that can be published: the full method, the full math, and the full record of how this goes wrong.
The point is never that you should not fly. The point is that it is survivable if you fly by instruments.
House rules
How the school cites
- 01Every figure carries a year and a primary source, or it is tagged folklore and said so.
- 02Annual and cumulative rates are never mixed. Loan performance is never presented as owner outcome.
- 03Investor-backed fund aggregates are never applied to self-funded deals.
- 04Findings from the founder's interview corpus are attributed to that corpus, with its approximate size, and never restated as industry statistics.
- 05Third-party research is cited and linked, never redistributed. Case studies from live deals are anonymized, with figures rounded on purpose, and nothing leaves the internal curriculum until its scrub rule has been applied.
- 06The school criticizes models and practices. It does not criticize named individuals.
Plainly
What the school is not
It is not a broker, a lender, an investor, or an advisor, and nothing on this site is legal, tax, or investment advice. It promises no outcomes. The curriculum, the library, the frameworks, the events and the three tools are published for anyone to study. The community and the two instructional programs are listed on their own page.
Disclosures
Disclosures
- Searcher School is the education arm of Sunset Coast Partners, San Diego, California, the founder's acquisition and advisory firm.
- The LOI Generator is co-branded with Barlow and Williams, a law firm that sponsors the school. The template is theirs; the school receives sponsorship from the firm.
- The founder's own story, including the failed acquisition and its debt, is told on this site as the teaching license for the curriculum. The figures in it are his.
The founder
Written by someone who signed the guarantee.
The full story, the numbers in it, and why they are the teaching license for everything here.