Product Manager Buys a Dog Training Franchise: Chirag Shah's Systematic Search Pays Off

A self-funded searcher applies Kanban, time-blocking, and weekly retros to land a $2M revenue, $600K SDE franchise in Austin.

TL;DR

Chirag Shah and his wife Tara ran their acquisition search like a product backlog: Kanban, daily time blocks, weekly process reviews. They closed on a Sit Means Sit franchise in Austin doing $2M revenue and $600K SDE.

The Setup

Chirag Shah spent his career in product management. When he and his wife Tara Nair Shah decided to buy a business, he did the only thing that felt natural: he treated the search itself as a product. Not a vague hunt for a good company. A pipeline with stages, throughput metrics, and weekly iteration.

Self-funded searchers usually burn out at month nine. The CIM volume is relentless, brokers ghost, LOIs collapse, and most candidates work alone in a spare bedroom without a manager to keep them honest. Chirag's answer was to install the operating system before he needed it.

The Search System

Three habits did the heavy lifting.

- Kanban for deal flow. Every prospect moved through explicit stages (sourced, teaser reviewed, CIM requested, CIM analyzed, call scheduled, IOI, LOI, diligence). Nothing lived in his head or his inbox. When a broker pinged him about a listing, he knew in thirty seconds whether it belonged on the board and where. - Morning time blocks. Search work got the first hours of the day, every day, blocked on the calendar. No email triage first. No drifting into other projects. The block was sacred because search activity is pure volume math: more CIMs reviewed means more conversations means more LOIs. -