Every founder who hits a plateau starts googling “business growth strategist.” I get it. When growth stalls, an outside expert with a plan sounds like the fix. Here is the problem. Most people selling growth strategy sell theory, slides, and frameworks. The ones worth paying have actually built and scaled something. I built FreeUp from […]

Let me kill the fantasy first. Buying a business with no money down is real, but the version sold to you on the internet is mostly hype. I buy businesses for a living. Through my holding company, Hirsch Gillivan, I have acquired 6 companies, and I am working toward 10. Not one of those deals

Most people hear “entrepreneurship development” and picture a classroom. A program. A certificate on the wall. A tidy set of stages in a textbook, maybe. My version looked nothing like that. I started an Amazon business out of my college dorm in 2009 because I was annoyed at the school bookstore. Six months in, my

Ask a founder how the year went, and most will hand you one figure: revenue. I understand the reflex. It’s the number that feels like winning. But I’ve watched businesses post their biggest top line ever while cash dried up, customers slipped away, and the owner stayed chained to the desk. When Connor and I

Most founders don’t have a scaling problem. They have a systems problem. I put $5,000 into FreeUp and grew it to $12 million a year in four years, with no US employees and no outside funding. The revenue wasn’t the hard part. Building it to run without me was. Everyone points at Tesla and Netflix