Alex Glasner's Transatlantic Search: Buying a UK Workforce Training Firm at $1M+ EBITDA

The Setup Alex Glasner set a clear target before he started prospecting: a business doing $1M+ EBITDA. Instead of jumping into outreach, he ran what amounts to a pre-search apprenticeship. He interviewed roughly 50 acquisition entrepreneurs who had already closed deals, mining them for patterns on what worked, what wasted time, and what killed deals late in diligence. He also made an unconventional geography call. As an American searcher, he committed to searching in the United Kingdom. That introduced visa friction, currency complexity, and a seller population unfamiliar with search funds as a buyer category. He accepted the friction because the UK SME market is less picked-over than US search territory and seller expectations on multiples are often lower. The Deal The target was Workpays, a UK workforce training provider. The business holds government contracts across multiple departments, which is the kind of customer concentration story that looks scary on a one-pager and stabilizing once you dig in. No single department can sink the business, and government procurement cycles create predictable revenue visibility that most SMBs would kill for. Deal size was not disclosed publicly, but Alex's stated floor was $1M+ EBITDA. He self-funded the search. Financing specifics on the acquisition itself were not shared. Curriculum IP came with the business. Workpays owns training content that was being delivered in-person to government-funded learners. Alex flagged commercialization of that IP online as a post-close growth lever, not a day-one fire drill. Operating Moves - Six weeks of infrastructure before first outreach. Target lists, pitch decks, CIM templates, CRM, LOI templates. The point was to never lose a week responding to an interested seller because the materials weren't ready. - Blended proprietary and broker channels. He didn't pick a lane. Broker deals surface faster; proprietary gives leverage on price and terms. Running both meant pipeline never dried up. - Radical transparency on the visa and location questions. Sellers in the UK wanted to know why an American was at the table and whether he could actually close. He put the answer in the first conversation rather than letting it hang as a trust deficit. - Customer concentration framing. Rather than hide the government exposure, he leaned into the multi-department diversity and the regulatory moat it creates for incumbents. Operating Lessons - Interview 50 operators before you start. The cost is a few weeks of calendar time. The benefit is pattern recognition that compresses a year of mistakes into a notebook. - Infrastructure is not procrastination. Six weeks of setup beats six months of fumbled responses. If a hot seller calls on week two of outreach and your NDA template isn't ready, you lose. - Decisiveness beats optionality. Alex called out waiting for the perfect deal as the failure mode. The right posture is to move on clearly qualified opportunities and let go fast on misses. - Surface deal-breakers early. Visa status, location, funding certainty, rollover expectations. Raise them in conversation one. Sellers reward clarity and punish surprises in diligence. - Government revenue...