How to Scale by Buying Businesses (Not Building Them)
About this episode
Lee Smith discusses the psychological barriers to scaling businesses through acquisitions rather than building them from scratch.
Lee Smith is a UK-based M&A operator with more than 25 years of experience buying, fixing, and scaling businesses, and the founder of Verdani Capital. After a bumpy early path — and a childhood on a council estate — he discovered mergers and acquisitions in 2013, and it became the lightbulb moment that opened a path to financial freedom. In this episode, Lee unpacks the counterintuitive lesson at the center of his career: the jump from a small business to a much larger one is psychological, not financial. He spent his early years on distressed, basket-case companies before realizing that bigger, profitable businesses were actually easier to acquire and run, because the infrastructure already existed. The thing holding most founders back, he argues, isn't money or experience — it's the quiet belief that they aren't good enough to play bigger. He and Virginia also dig into his win-win approach to acquisitions, where owners keep equity and share in the upside rather than selling everything outright, why he removed himself from day-to-day operations to focus on strategy, the mentors who shaped his thinking, and how he's using AI and preparing for the volatility he sees coming for…
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