Meet Blake Harber
From Scaling Startups to Buying Small Businesses...
Hey, it’s Alex!
This week, we’re diving into a conversation with Blake Harber, a former venture-backed tech exec who took an unconventional leap into consulting and small business acquisitions.
From scaling startups to building a portfolio of vending machines and an electronics distribution business, Blake shares the hard-earned lessons of solopreneurship, pricing, and finding product-market fit outside of tech.
If you’re curious about the realities of owning multiple businesses—or what happens when your best customers retire overnight—this one’s for you.
Dive in below!
📊The Numbers:
🏢 Businesses Owned: 3
💼 Consulting: $600K, 90% margin
🔌 Appleton (Electronics): $450K, 35% margin — $1M purchase
🍫 Vending Machines: $180K, 50% margin — $220K purchase
😤 Times he almost quit: ~24
Before business ownership…
I spent the last twelve years in venture-backed tech.
Before that, I built and sold a digital marketing agency— really just a business that played ads on TVs placed around high foot traffic areas in my hometown.
I built that business from the ground up and did it for two years and then had a media company acquire me, which was a catalyst to get into tech.
But I didn't want to go to the Bay Area, so we came here to Salt Lake. I joined a company called HireVue. They were doing about 3 million in revenue and ended up building their inside sales team out. We had a pretty big exit to PE.
Then I joined a company called Lucid.
They hadn't built a B2B function yet and built out their go-to-market team and went from $3 million to $100 million in four years.
I left there and joined a company called Workstream based in Palo Alto. They wanted to build their go-to-market team here in Salt Lake, so I was brought in to build that from the ground up.
We went from $400k to about $ 20 million in two years and raised $100 million Series B.
It was a hell of a run, but I've got four young kids and a wife, so I wanted to be able to spend more time with them.
So, I left and took about six months off.
At the time, I thought I'd go back to something full-time at a startup. But as soon as I announced that I left Workstream, a bunch of people reached out and wanted consulting, so I decided to take a few projects on.
Here I am two years later — doing the same thing.
Figuring out consulting…
Consulting was a little bit of a shit show from the get-go.
I’d never done anything like it…
I’d never sold my time, I didn't understand how deliverables work.
I have tons of friends that are actual consultants, and I had a very basic understanding of what it was like for them, but I had no clue how to craft an offer and then go to market with it. To be fair, I hadn't anticipated building a business out of it at first. I just had two small customers that were willing to just take a chance on me.
They were willing to pay me something, but also let me test the waters and figure it out as I went.
I was very upfront with them throughout the whole thing, basically saying, “I've never done anything like this, but I think this is how I would structure this.”
I followed Justin Welsh, and that was really helpful. I got some exposure on what to do from him, and I also have a handful of friends that were extremely helpful.
So, as I got a few months into these initial engagements, I started to get a ton of interest from people on LinkedIn. People interested in wanting to do what I was doing, transitioning careers, trying consulting on the side, things like that. And it led me to realize two things:
Number one, there's a ton of demand in consulting.
Number two, there was an enormous group of people that wanted to be able to do what I'm doing. That led to me blogging about the whole thing in public.
I have no problem being an open book about what's working, what isn’t, failures — all the above.
That alone drove a ton of interest on social media as well as lead gen for me, because the more that they liked and shared my blog, the more leads I got from it.
So, after about four months of working with those first couple clients, I thought it was worth trying. My wife and I had twelve months of runway in the bank, and really, the worst case scenario was that it didn’t work and I just went and got a job. So we did it.
We knew that we wanted to hit some certain goals and if we could do that in the first twelve months, then we would keep doing it. And we hit that goal within 90 days, so here we are.
Thoughts on pricing…
I started by breaking it into an hourly rate and comparing it to a full time job.
If I was the VP of sales somewhere, that’d be about 300k a year.
So, what does that come down to? We'll call $150 an hour.
And so I thought, okay, I've got to be doing more than that.
And I just kind of picked a number…
I think I started like $350 and thought, okay, if I do 350 an hour, what am I actually willing to dedicate to a single project each week?
If I'm willing to spend 5 hours a week with one customer, what can I produce in that?
And I learned so much here because I was able to start on the lower end where I was winning every deal, and then slowly increased over the course of my first six months that per-hour rate, until I found more product-market-fit there.
And what I found was that some of my early customers, those deliverables, were really hard to achieve when there weren't existing sales reps in the seat.
And I had to pivot a lot of that into working with customers that have existing sales reps or were immediately hired.
That gave me a lot more leverage to say, okay, I could do 5 hours a week, but I felt more confident we could produce the right metrics necessary to prove or disprove product-market-fit at the stage that we're at.
If anything, there was mismanagement of expectations on my side.
I ended up doing a stupid amount of work on my first couple projects by myself, where my hourly rate was probably $30 an hour, ultimately.
In doing that, I realized the value that I was providing was worth significantly more.
I started comparing it to a junior sales employee — they couldn’t even have hired an SDR to create as much value as me, and that could cost you 50, 60, $70k a year.
How do I price against that?
Thinking that way has helped me completely reframe my offering around building, go-to-market early stages, and what value I can bring comparable to someone they would hire full time.
Buying existing businesses…
I grew up around small business entrepreneurship — my parents acquired and sold a few small businesses when I was a kid…
My dad still owns a small business that does about $20 million a year.
He's retired now, but it was a business that provided for our family my whole life, so I was familiar with the small business world at least, and I always thought that I’d love to try it someday.
I was just searching for deals and I started really wide, looked at everything, and slowly started narrowing toward a thesis.
We made two acquisitions last year, and I think I realized that all of my net worth is tied up in tech.
My publicly held stock is predominantly tech, and my knowledge base tech.
I left the tech world full-time at the peak of it, and it’s gone downhill ever since.
I realized I needed to figure out how to diversify my portfolio outside of tech.
I didn’t have any regrets, I just wasn’t interested in continuing to put my eggs in just tech.
I’m also thinking about my family, and putting them in a good position if I was gone tomorrow, because the reality is, I'm selling my brain right now, and it’s really hard to scale that up.
Ultimately I recognize there are a lot of things that can't be taught — which is what led us to making two acquisitions outside of tech last year.
On picking the right deal…
A year and a half ago, when I started looking, I didn't want employees…
I wanted as much revenue as possible with the least amount of employees or operating expenses.
I wanted it to be as remote as possible.
And, honestly, I just didn't have the balls to buy something huge, so that led to the vending machine business acquisition.
Initially, the types of businesses at the top of my list were car washes, laundromats, and vending machines.
My dad's in car washes, so I know that business model pretty well, but it's damn hard to find a car wash for less than $2 million, and I wasn't willing to spend $2 million.
Laundromats were equally hard to find, and I knew less about them. Then, I stumbled on a vending route that came up for sale here in Salt Lake.
It was one owner, and it was like $200k.
And I thought, I'm totally willing to pay cash for this.
It’s a simple business, I don’t have to leverage it, and I really can't screw it up.
And as I narrowed in on that, I looked at a ton of deals elsewhere.
I looked at everything from $500k gross to $7 million gross with 10% - 40% EBITDA margins.
That was my thesis going into it.
Lessons Learned…
After all was said and done, I ended up buying two small businesses with one employee.
And thank God my wife is willing to run our vending business, because I still run two businesses: I run my consulting business, and this electronics distribution company.
Initially I tried to disprove the idea that buying a $20 million business is the same amount of work, effort, time, and energy as buying a $1 million business, but in hindsight, I think I was wrong.
And I’ll explain why:
There is something to be said about having a few people that know the business or understand what's going on to at least talk with on a regular basis.
My electronics business — it did a million last year and has a 48% operating margin, but I have nobody to talk to about it other than the previous owner.
And the guy's 65 years old and retired, so most of the time, he doesn't want to talk about it.
It's extremely difficult to be you and only you, where nobody else actually knows the inner workings of something in an industry I know nothing about, selling products I know nothing about.
Figuring out where the hell to take this thing is really difficult.
I'm only giving it a fraction of my time because I have another business to run, but this one has debt service. So I got to figure out how to pay for that.
Coming full circle: I understand why people are buying $20-$30M businesses that have infrastructure in place, because I think the same emotional toll that I go through now would be the exact same on a bigger business. I would have a hell of a lot more brains that care about what I'm doing that can share the weight of that burden. Whereas right now, it's just me.
On the electronics business…
It’s a 38-year-old business. At its peak, the owner scaled it to $20M a year with a full team. After a divorce, he scaled it back down and turned it into a lifestyle business.
That gave me confidence—it had scale before, and the market is huge.
The core business?
Selling obsolete electronic components to contract manufacturers.
Think of companies making test and measurement devices—handheld tools that need circuit boards. They don’t manufacture the boards themselves; they outsource it.
Each board has 100+ microchips. If even one gets discontinued—say, by Texas Instruments—that board can’t be produced anymore.
That’s where we come in.
We source excess inventory from companies that over-ordered, buy those components at a discount, and resell them to manufacturers who still need them.
Top-line last year was $450K. This year, slower—likely ending around $400K.
Gross margins are down a little bit, not a ton.
But the first six months of the year, the five biggest customers we have — which have also been our biggest customers for the last six years straight — our main contacts retired.
That kicked my ass — when those contacts retire, we're technically in the database as a supplier, but when they get backfilled, new employees bring their old relationships and we often get cut out.
I have no other contacts in a lot of these businesses, because the guy who took it over had 90% of the business in his head and the rest was in QuickBooks. I could only see and have access to who he was sending invoices to, so it made it extremely difficult to see anyone else that he had any sort of contact with — every single one of which required an enormous amount of prospecting on my side.
Add to that, I don't have a ton of time to figure it all out, because I'm trying to run a consulting business to pay for all this shit.
It has been a brutal year.
I have been fortunate to talk to some other business owners that are going through the exact same thing and a lot of them say it's been the worst in the last 18 years.
This industry's wildly susceptible to election years, where a lot of these large manufacturers are just pausing and holding until they see what's going on.
We're not out of business, so that's a win.
I don't think we'll be out of business anytime soon, but I'm finally to the point where I understand the business enough to have a slight degree of confidence of where to go next.
Everyone talks about acquiring businesses from someone retiring, but the idea their clients would be retiring too never even crossed my mind.
Reflections on solopreneurship…
I spent a lot of time being very bitter about being an employee — feeling like I got taken advantage of. I think some of my feelings are still valid there, especially now realizing that my stock is probably worth nothing.
I think a lot of people experience that.
But there is something to be said clocking in and out — I don't believe everyone has to be an entrepreneur. People talk as if everyone should be one, and I think that’s completely wrong. Most people are not cut out to do it, and that's okay.
I respect the hell out of people that are actually okay with working 40 hours a week and just satisfied with that. I envy it often, and especially this year because I have this idea of what I want to build for my family. And right now, I hope it happens…
But a hope doesn't confidently get me there. A job might! laughs
I think a lot of the business content out there led me to believe that the path to retirement was to go buy a small business and I would be retired.
Don't get me wrong, I have a ton of freedom.
I don't have to answer to anyone…
That alone makes it worth it for me.
But there's something about being an entrepreneur, and literally not knowing what more than three months ahead of you looks like — financially, emotionally, physically.
You don't know what you're going to be doing in three months, and that is so fucking scary.
And I don't know if you ever get past that.
I can't see past it at this point, having done it for two years.
To sum that up — I think my assumptions were wrong that this was the path to retire early.
The second point that I want to make is that I thought that buying a business outside of tech was the right way to go.
If I could go back and do it all over again, I would still buy a vending business.
It's easy.
But if I took a million dollars and dumped it into a small software company, I would have a hundred times more confidence in knowing what to do and what levers to pull.
In my ignorance, I thought that go-to-market or understanding sales was horizontal across every industry. I'm embarrassed to say at 34 years old that that is so far from the truth.
I am in the thick of learning that if I would have poured the energy and emotional effort and time into a million-dollar acquisition for a software business, I would probably be in a much different spot.
Right now, my network is in tech, my network is in software. And to some extent I took what I built over the course of twelve years and I set it aside completely.
I would never do that again—big lesson learned.
I'm now in a state of starting to go back to that drawing board to some extent and say, can I use this network for this business? And how the hell do I do that?
It’s not like my target customer is on Apollo — it’s a completely different game, so in a lot of ways I'm building up from zero.
Staying in your zone of competency — Alex Hormozi talks about all the time.
The first time I listened to that, I wanted to punch him in the face...
Now I feel like an idiot.
I spent twelve years learning a skill and thought it was transferable into any industry, and I could not have been more wrong.
And it’s been challenging to the point where at times, I just want to block everyone and everything out.
The last thing I want to do is fucking talk to other people.
I've had to really force myself to because I know I'm not the only one.
And until you're an entrepreneur and you've done the shit, it's hard to relate to.
I hadn't spent enough of my earlier career, pre entrepreneur, talking with entrepreneurs in that stage because I wasn't in that realm.
I wasn't in the arena.
And now it's, like, really validating to talk with people in the arena every day.
On what’s working…
I think the biggest victory is the fact that because my wife and I own a portfolio of small businesses, we can afford one to get its ass kicked for a while.
It's kept us running and allowed us to be able to iterate without having to do anything crazy financially.
Thank God that's worked.
I think building in public has worked extremely well for me, and I continue to learn that lesson again and again. I didn't do it for any selfish reason other than people seemed interested and I was willing to share.
I've been doing it for two years, and I'm just starting to recognize that I can actually use it to my benefit.
A lot of my audience is willing to share my content, and I'm getting connected to people that know these industries a hell of a lot better.
This year has been about focusing on me and figuring my shit out.
Because, in reality, success is not a great teacher.
And I've had a shit ton of success in my tech career.
What all this has taught me is that if I can't take care of my own self, our businesses are dead and I need to learn how to work better, and take care of my mental and physical health, or it's all gone and none of this mattered.
On building a portfolio…
I wish I would have just given a little bit more thought to having a portfolio of businesses which can work together — like what shared services we can have across the portfolio.
Whether it's like chips that are getting distributed or microchips, we're starting to marry those two and they're slowly coming together.
But it's a stretch right now.
I would say most of the stuff I've tried or been thinking about is more agency adjacent.
Stuff that I could build in addition to consulting as a value-added service.
That being said, a lot of it would require more people and just more time spent consulting — and I enjoy consulting — but I don't really want to grow that business.
I want to just keep it steady.
And really, knowing what I know now, I probably would have doubled down on vending.
But the thing that concerned me about vending was that the average vending location does $300-$500 a month, gross.
That's great, but it means that you need an enormous amount of volume in order to scale. It can be done, but I believe that there is a faster path to higher ticket items.
To be fair, the margin is pretty hard to beat vending.
We're about 50% operating margin, so it's pretty damn good, but still.
I actually think that if I could rewind twelve months, I probably would have doubled down because there's adjacent services that I believe vending can turn into.
We're exploring a larger distribution model in vending where we’d take our existing infrastructure and build it into an e-commerce brand to some extent — infrastructure we have from shipping and warehousing.
If I dedicate the time and effort to do that, we could build something pretty interesting.
But I don't have the time and energy right now… laughs
On finding customers…
Right now, I have a hunch about what’s working—like the onsite visits.
I didn’t try that until two months ago, and within 90 days, I got $30k in purchase orders from a net new customer after going onsite. It cost me about $600 to fly out there, knock on doors, and hustle. I mean, I was scrappy—eating tuna packets in the rental car, just trying to make it work.
It was a shot in the dark.
I had no idea if it would work or be a total waste of time. Spent 18 hours figuring it out, and even though it worked, I’m hesitant to do it again.
Maybe it’s a timing thing. Maybe I just don’t want to.
I know I should go local, knock on doors, put in the hours. But the thought of spending 12 hours doing that instead of consulting—where I know I’ll make money—feels overwhelming.
Cold-calling old customers? A grind. The lists are outdated, contacts are gone, and I’m chasing people who don’t know me. I’ve outsourced parts of it, but at the end of the day, it’s on me.
And that’s the hardest part. The unknown.
I have no clue if this will pay off. I just keep showing up and hoping consistency wins.
Maybe that’s just entrepreneurship. Betting on yourself and doing the work, even when you don’t know if it’ll work.
At the end of the day, I own my calendar. That’s what I signed up for.
That freedom is what I’ve always wanted.
If this is the price I have to pay for it, so be it.
No regrets.
That’s it for this issue!
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If you, or someone you know would like to be featured, or just want to connect, feel free to message me on LinkedIn, or, if you’re building a business of your own and need some support, we should chat!
Interview by: Alex Tribe
Edited by: Angus Merry