The elite MBAs ditching corporate America

Lexey Swall for BIIn the summer of 2019, Dan Schweber was grinding through yet another career pivot. Straight out of college, he landed what he thought would be a dream job as a healthcare consultant, only to discover that he couldn't stand being a nobody in a giant bureaucracy. So he joined a tiny healthtech startup, until it was acquired by a series of bigger companies that eventually laid him off. He came to believe that a better path would be to start his own business, where he could call all the shots. So at age 28, he enrolled in Columbia's executive MBA program. In between his day job in healthtech and his weekend classes, he used every free moment he could find to rack his brain for startup ideas.A year in, Schweber had narrowed down his list to one promising contender: an app for physical therapy exercises. He was being treated for a back injury and, as if it were still 1995, his PT was giving him printouts of exercises to do at home. There should be an app for this, he thought. But the more he considered the logistics, the more doubts he had. Who would write the code? How would he find customers? With his student loans hanging over him, could he afford to forgo an income while he got the app off the ground? It all seemed so daunting, the prospect of manifesting a viable business out of literally nothing in a process that was statistically doomed for failure. Then he saw a weeklong intensive elective in Columbia's course catalog that sounded kind of interesting: an introduction to an unusual way into small business entrepreneurship known as search funds — or more formally, entrepreneurship through acquisition. He had never heard of it.It was love at first case study. By the end of his first day of class, he knew he'd found the path he'd been looking for. "I couldn't believe it," he says. "I was like, I can do this."Today, at 36, Schweber is the CEO of a 60-plus-person company, calling all the shots as he intended.The core idea behind search funds is that, in order to become an owner-CEO, young people don't need to start their own business from scratch. Instead, they can buy a business that already exists — one that comes preloaded with loyal customers, steady revenue, and a healthy profit margin. America happens to be chock-full of these businesses, many of which are owned by aging boomers preparing to retire. The caveat is that most of them are hidden in the unglamorous, overlooked corners of the economy. The duller the better: think car washes, plumbing, snowplowing, pool construction, dumpster rentals, grease trap maintenance — or in Schweber's case, air duct cleaning. All you need is to raise an initial round of funding from investors so you can search for your business. Then, once you find the perfect business, you raise a bigger round to acquire it and install yourself as CEO."I will never work in a corporate job ever again," Schweber told me. "There's no amount of money that you could give me."Lexey Swall for BII first heard about search funds last fall, from a friend who was giving it a go after quitting her prestigious job in venture capital. A few weeks later, a management consultant I met was telling me about his Harvard Business School reunion, where so many people he ran into were starting a search fund that it became an inside joke among his former classmates. He kept trying to explain to me the mechanics, but everything about it was bizarre: that MBAs with pristine résumés would ditch their fancy corporate jobs to devote their lives to septic tanks; that 20- and 30-somethings would suddenly become the CEOs of multimillion-dollar businesses; that investors would give real money to people who have zero company-running experience to go run a company in a blue-collar industry they know nothing about.It turns out that search funds date all the way back to 1984, when an HBS professor dreamed up the concept as a more attainable path to entrepreneurship for his students who didn't want to start a whole new company. For decades, the idea slowly gained traction within tiny circles at the top business schools. A study from Stanford found that from 1984 to 2019 investors had deployed a total of at least $1.4 billion into search funds and the companies that so-called searchers went on to acquire. But it was during the pandemic that the movement really took off, fanned by a growing number of business school classes and TikTok influencers and podcasters spreading the gospel. In just the four years since, another $1.5 billion has poured in. Add to that the rise of self-funded searchers, who combine their own savings with low-interest government loans to finance their purchases, and you get an ever-expanding web of young people buying and running small businesses all over America.In the wake of a pandemic that changed so much about our relationship to work, in an economy that's made constant layoffs the norm, with a future in which AI is almost certain to shrink the opportunities of the white-collar class, the dream of climbing the corporate ladder has never held less appeal. A growing contingent of elite millennials and Gen Zers has sought and found an alternative, and I set out to talk to as many of them as I could find. I wanted to learn exactly how a person actually goes from Point A (cog in the corporate machine) to Point B (CEO of an extremely random and surprisingly lucrative business). That's how I ended up in Fairfax, Virginia, on the doorstep of Atlantic Duct Cleaning, the business Dan Schweber bought in 2022.Even with his salt-and-pepper hair, there was a boyish enthusiasm to Schweber, as if he still couldn't quite believe that this — the 30 trucks, the 61 employees, the 4,600 Google reviews of the company with an average five-star rating — was all his. "It's just the best," he told me over and over again. "I will never work in a corporate job ever again. There's no amount of money that you could give me."Growing up in the suburbs of Atlanta, Schweber was preternaturally driven, a little bundle of ambition dressed in his favorite truck-print shirts. At age 6, he started attending a Saturday school for gifted students at the local university. At age 10, he wrote a newsletter and sold ads in it to businesses like the neighborhood handyman. Even as a teenager, he rarely slept in: By the time his mom came in to wake him up, he was already at his desk. And he stayed just as determined as an adult.A couple of years after Schweber quit his consulting job and moved to New York City, he developed an instant crush on someone who was friends with his friends. They refused to set Schweber up with her — he was too reserved and she too outspoken to be a good match, they thought — but he pursued her for years until she finally agreed to a first date. The two were engaged by the time he took his search fund class, and it didn't surprise her one bit that he was all in from day one of the class. "That's the most consistent thing about Dan," Ally says. "That 100% this is what I'm doing, and this is what I need to do."With one year remaining in business school, he started laying the groundwork for his search fund career. He decided he wanted to buy a healthcare business.Schweber estimated he'd need to meet 50 owners and have 500 introductory calls a year. That meant that he'd need to send initial emails to 4,800 businesses.Step 1 was raising his search fund, the money he'd need to go look for a business. Some people skip this process if they have savings, but you need a lot more than you might think. Searching is a full-time endeavor that typically stretches over two years, requiring the searcher to contact hundreds if not thousands of business owners, court a fraction of them, and scrutinize every detail of their businesses to see if they're worth acquiring. The point of the search fund is to cover the searcher's cost of living during that time, as well as all the expenses of due diligence, like lawyers, accountants, and travel. Schweber made a list of about 100 search fund investors he could find online and cold-emailed them.At first he felt sheepish about it. Why would anyone give an MBA student who has managed at most two or three direct reports money to go buy and run a whole business? But a fellow searcher reminded him that these investors needed him just as much as he needed them: They were looking for returns on their own money. Historically, searchers have gone on to deliver bewilderingly high returns that have few parallels among other asset classes: an average 4.5x, or an annual rate of 35% (compare that with the S&P 500 at 10%). By pitching in on this initial fund, investors get access to invest in the company the searcher goes on to acquire with very favorable terms. In just a few short months, Schweber raised his target $480,000, which would pay him an annual salary of $120,000 for the next two years.Schweber's office bookshelf at Atlantic Duct Cleaning.Lexey Swall for BIStep 2: the actual search. Schweber quit his day job, and with a couple of months left till graduation, he began his search on Monday, March 9, 2020. He had a whole plan to start attending trade shows and conferences and visit his old clients in the healthcare industry. Then, on Wednesday, the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic.With his road show plans now a bust, Schweber had to come up with another way to scout for businesses. One option was to work with business brokers, who represent owners hoping to sell their companies. Searchers often go this route because it's more efficient. But what's easy for you to find is also easier for other buyers to find as well, and the competition ratchets up the price. Schweber opted to source his acquisition targets himself. He made a huge list of businesses that were in healthcare using information he scoured from industry association websites. Then he blanketed those businesses with automated emails, informing them that he was an interested buyer.Like a good millennial professional, he tracked yearly and monthly KPIs for his outreach in a Google Sheet that he called his "battle plan." He worked backward from one of the last steps of the search: getting a signed letter of intent, a nonbinding agreement that kicks off a monthslong due diligence process before the buyer and the seller ultimately agree to a sale. To get two signed LOIs a year, he estimated, he'd need to meet 50 owners in person. To get that, he'd need to have 500 introductory calls. That meant that he'd need to send initial emails to 4,800 businesses a year.The resulting stream of rejection was relentless. "If you're lucky, people respond and say no," he says. "It's mostly silence." On the rare occasions an owner agreed to an initial call, it'd turn out they weren't serious about selling their company, or the business wasn't quite what Schweber was looking for. (One time he unwittingly got on a call with the owner of a business that turned out to specialize in collecting recordings of extraterrestrials.) Some days he felt so dejected he didn't even open his laptop: "I was like, I've got to get a job. I've got to give this up."By the end of 2020, he decided against looking in the healthcare industry, which seemed too mired in complexities around insurance reimbursements and regulations, and made a hard pivot to home and commercial services. Part of his decision was based on his belief that DIY was on its way out and that younger generations were willing to pay someone else to do the labor-intensive dirty work of improving their homes.In the spring of 2021, he started discussions with his most promising prospect yet: a company in the suburbs of Chicago that installs and maintains fire safety devices like extinguishers, alarms, and sprinklers. He loved it, his investors loved it, and he and the owner had even agreed on a preliminary purchase price. But after months of deliberations, the owner went quiet. When Schweber finally got ahold of him, the owner had bad news: He just wasn't ready to let go of his company, and he also didn't think Schweber was ready to be a CEO. It gutted him. It felt, he says, "like a breakup."By the time 2022 came around, Schweber was 22 months into his search with nothing to show for it. About a third of searchers never end up buying a business. But Schweber wasn't willing to conclude his search empty-handed. "I had to buy something," he says. "I need to just get in the game and make this worth it."One day, Schweber typed "HVAC" into Google Maps in the Washington, DC, suburbs of Northern Virginia. Among the companies that came up was Atlantic Duct Cleaning. He had no idea what duct cleaning was at that point, but no matter: He put Atlantic into his CRM software, which emailed Atlantic's owner, Tom Keys. Then it emailed him again, and again, and again. After 11 emails, Schweber had no reply.After Schweber took over, he showed up at 7 every morning as the technicians prepared their trucks. He went to duct cleaning jobs with them. He absorbed their knowledge and deferred to their expertise.Lexey Swall for BIUnbeknownst to Schweber, Keys was used to receiving emails like this. He had started Atlantic in 1995 as a 28-year-old with several years of experience in the heating, ventilation, and air conditioning industry. Even today, duct cleaning is pretty obscure. But back then, virtually no one thought about the dust, bugs, pet hair, skin cells, mold spores, and all the other gunk that piles up inside a building's ventilation system — and the occasional need to clean it out. Keys had the idea to do it with newer equipment than the tiny operations he knew of that ran on bare-bones crews. He grew the company painstakingly, bit by bit. By 2021, Atlantic was bringing in $4 million in annual sales, with impressive profit margins and a few dozen people on staff.Many of Keys' suitors were private equity firms with deep pockets that were consolidating HVAC shops in the area. They offered Keys huge sums of money for his business, but he knew the PE playbook: They would almost certainly fire many of the employees he would leave behind. Other suitors were young searchers like Schweber who would, in theory, be less likely to strip his company into pieces. But when he'd suggest they come out to see Atlantic in person, they didn't seem to want it all that much. "So many people were like, Oh, let me look at my calendar three weeks out," Keys says. "I wanted to know what their attraction was to such an unsexy business."Upon receiving the 12th email from Schweber, Keys finally picked up the phone and called him. At the end of the call, Keys suggested Schweber come out to see the business. "OK, can I come tomorrow?" Schweber asked. He told Ally he would be visiting a duct cleaning business. "What the fuck is that?" she said, and he didn't have much of an answer. He spent the rest of the day trying to familiarize himself with the art of duct cleaning, rooting through industry websites and watching amateur YouTube tutorials. The next morning, he drove three hours from their home in Philadelphia to Manassas, Virginia, where Atlantic was based at the time.From that day on, the two spoke every day. Keys came to trust Schweber as a young guy with integrity, someone who would look after the legacy of his creation. Schweber came to see Keys as an honest businessman, someone who wasn't hiding skeletons that would later sink the company — something fellow searchers warned him about. Over the course of a three-month due diligence process, Schweber furiously scrutinized Atlantic's business with his investors and bankers. In the end, 15 of his original 18 investors — a mix of wealthy people managing their own assets and institutional investors — in his search fund chipped in, and a loan from a private lender got him over the finish line. Schweber declined to disclose the purchase price. (The median price for companies bought by investor-backed searchers in 2022 and 2023 was $14.4 million.)"Every day for the first six months, I said, What the hell have I done?" one searcher said. "I had this desk job. I had all this salary coming in. Did I just blow up everything?"On May 31, 2022, Schweber and Keys signed the paperwork to complete the transaction. After, Schweber got into his car and cried. In the three years since he first decided in his Columbia class to buy a small business, he had faced relentless doubt from skeptical friends, confused family members, and tough investors who were trying to discern whether he had what it takes; even he admitted it was a "relatively crazy" career choice. But after 3,592 initial emails, 375 introductory calls, 30 introductory in-person meetings with owners, and six signed letters of intent, he was now the proud owner of what was by all accounts a trusted local business. That night, he and Ally opened a bottle of champagne to celebrate.The next morning, a nervous Schweber joined Keys, who gathered the staff in the office to break the big news: Schweber was the new owner of Atlantic. No one even knew the company was up for sale, aside from the two managers Keys had informed the day before. What? The staff erupted. Why? Schweber knew what it looked like: Here he was, a 32-year-old, telling this staff of 40 or so, many of whom were decades older than him, that he was suddenly their new boss. He was walking a tightrope that every searcher does on day one as CEO: projecting an air of both authority and humility as a first-time boss-in-chief. "I bought this company because I like what you guys are doing," he told his new staff. "I think we're the best in our market at what we do, and I just want to do more. So as long as you want to work hard and grow, you'll always have a spot here."Schweber's long, tortuous search for a business was over. Now came the hard part.No one goes into a search thinking they'll tank the company they buy. "If you think about these people, they've had tremendous success," says Matthew Zucker, a cofounder of ETA Equity, who's been investing in search funds since 2008. "They've always been top quartile of everything, so they think they're going to get top quartile results."But even among these extreme overachievers, not every deal goes on to mint money. Of all the searchers who buy a company, 31% end up losing money for their investors. Usually those businesses limp along; occasionally, they implode spectacularly — straight into bankruptcy. A recession hits. A flaw missed in due diligence brings the business to a screeching halt. Or the CEO just can't cut it — in which case, if the board catches on quickly enough, they'll fire the searcher and bring in someone else. These are the nightmare scenarios that start to haunt young entrepreneurs once they take over the companies they've just purchased. Having taken on millions in investor capital and debt, suddenly responsible for the livelihoods of dozens of employees, and facing an impossibly steep learning curve, many struggle to adjust to the crushing pressures of being CEO.One guy who bought an electrical contractor in Grand Rapids, Michigan, told me he spiraled into what he called a "crisis of self-doubt" in the early months. "I started to panic. Do I have what it takes to run this business? Are people going to see through me? Are customers going to think I'm an idiot because I don't understand electrical theory?" Another guy who bought a small transportation software company in New York City told me that, for the first year, he often cried in the morning in his car before walking into the office. A third guy — they're pretty much all guys; in the most recent count, only 17% of new searchers were women, an improvement from the 0% for much of the 2000s — watched his newly purchased car wash's revenue fall off a cliff during a historically rainy stretch. He had underestimated just how volatile the car washing business can be. It got so bad that he and his wife had to float a couple of checks to the company just so it could make payroll. "Every day for the first six months, I said, What the hell have I done?" he told me. "I had this desk job. I had all this salary coming in. Did I just blow up everything?"Schweber's goal is for Atlantic to make $25 million a year by 2028. By then, he wants it to be the largest air duct cleaning company on the East Coast, maybe even the country.Lexey Swall for BIWhat Schweber remembers from those early months is just the sheer number of tasks he had to tick through. He spent the first few weeks resetting passwords, getting access to the business' bank accounts, and figuring out which employees had company credit cards. Then he focused on getting to know his staff. He showed up at 7 every morning as the technicians prepared their trucks for their assignments of the day. He went to duct cleaning jobs with them. He took them out to lunch. He absorbed their knowledge, solicited their feedback, and deferred to their expertise. He occasionally floated some new ideas — could they overbook jobs the way airlines oversell seats, because some customers cancel last-minute? — but he backed down as soon as he faced a little resistance. He didn't change much, and Atlantic kept chugging along.But Schweber's mandate wasn't to keep Atlantic chugging along. The whole model of search funds, the reason investors take a chance on these unproven entrepreneurs, is that they expect substantial growth. Schweber's goal is for Atlantic to make $25 million a year by 2028 — six times its revenue in 2021. By then, he wants it to be the largest air duct cleaning company on the East Coast, maybe even the country, with five to 10 locations. About a year after taking over, he realized he was never going to get there by staying the course. A CEO coach he started seeing at his investors' urging — someone who exclusively works with search CEOs — told him he was making a common rookie mistake. "I didn't want to break anything," Schweber says. "I didn't want to lose money. I didn't want people to quit." It was time for him to start taking bigger risks.A lot of the changes he's made since then have been expensive. He's hired a whole team of inside and outside sales reps and two managers to join his leadership team. To get the caliber of talent he wanted — and to persuade them to come work for something as unglamorous as a duct cleaning company — he's paying much higher salaries than he initially expected. Schweber wants me to know his top sales rep made more than $200,000 last year — "selling duct cleaning," he adds with a grin.He's also trying to get more comfortable being a little tougher as a boss. A few months into the job, Schweber discovered that one of the technicians was using the company credit card — distributed to them to put gas in the trucks — to fill up his personal car. Schweber saw it as akin to theft and took it hard. "I gave everyone raises," he remembers thinking. "Why would someone take from that?" Eventually, he came to see it as a reality check. "You can't be so friendly that people take advantage of you," he says. He fired the employee.Since then, he's fired three other employees he says were underperforming — all salespeople he had personally recruited. He agonized over the decisions, remembering how blindsided he felt when he was laid off himself back in 2017. That moment was kind of why he decided to become an entrepreneur in the first place: Suddenly scrambling to figure out how to pay his rent, he never wanted to be that vulnerable to another person's decisions again. Now here he was on the other side of it. "I didn't like thinking that I might be putting someone else in a situation like that," he says. And yet he had a business to grow.Today, Schweber is three years into running Atlantic. His crew runs 19 routes, up from 13 or so when he bought the company. He has some 20 more employees. He's expanded into cleaning kitchen hoods. And thanks to all of that, he's expecting Atlantic will bring in more than $7 million this year. Perhaps the most visible manifestation of the company's growth is its new headquarters in Fairfax. When I visited in May, Schweber greeted me in a company polo, jeans, and sneakers, and as soon as I put my bag down in his office, he took me outside. "I'm really excited about the actual building," he said, beaming. "It's a representation of my ownership of the business."Schweber's crew runs 19 routes, up from 13 or so when he bought the company. He has some 20 more employees. He's expanded into cleaning kitchen hoods.Lexey Swall for BIThe previous office, he explained, was a cramped suite in an industrial park, more of a "dingy warehouse." At three times the size and four times the rent, this new space has plenty of room for his growing staff. It's filled with natural light. It's right on a busy highway with a huge company sign, and near that sits a bright-yellow inflatable duck flapping in the wind that's impossible to miss. The duck is the ultimate duct cleaning inside joke that no outsider would possibly get: Duct cleaning is so random that people often mishear it as duck cleaning.Three technicians vacuumed out a ton of dust and debris from the building's air ducts — and the culprit of the odor, a dead bat.Inside the main entrance is where the managers, sales reps, and customer service reps sit, and it has more of the look of a suburban wealth management office than a space for a company that throws out hundreds of trash bags full of dust every month. Behind this front office is a "go room" where the technicians gather each morning to get their assignments, and a short flight of stairs below is a garage full of compressors, industrial-strength vacuums, and lots of spindly eight-tentacled tools called octopus whips. As Schweber explained how they work — they connect to a compressed air hose and then their silicone legs thrash around to dislodge all the dust clinging to the inside of air ducts — he pulled out his phone to show me a bunch of before and after pictures of Atlantic's work. Every before photo featured a duct caked in an alarmingly thick layer of dust — dust that the occupants of each respective building were presumably breathing into their lungs every day."That is disgusting," I said."Yeah, it's vile," he replied, in a tone that actually said, "Yeah, it's the best thing in the world." For him it is: As long as people use air conditioning, their air ducts will always get dirty, and as long as there are dirty air ducts, there will always be business for Atlantic. And there are a lot of dirty air ducts out there. After showing me around the office, Schweber took me out to a day care center that had hired Atlantic for the day because of a smell wafting from the AC. By the time we got there, three technicians had vacuumed out a ton of dust and debris from the building's air ducts — and the culprit of the odor, a dead bat.One of many before and after photos of air ducts that Schweber gleefully showed me on his phone.Courtesy of Dan SchweberIf this all goes according to plan, Schweber is in for a big payout. Of the search entrepreneurs who eventually sell their business, just under a quarter of them get nothing; another 27% get less than $4 million in equity; 28% get $4 million to $10 million; and the luckiest 18% get more than $10 million. That eight-digit reward is what every searcher dreams of. Schweber wants a beach house and a Bentley — so much so that he's named his dog after the car and keeps a poster of one in his office. Ally wants to move back to New York City one day with their two kids and "live like Kelly Ripa," she says. Most of all, Schweber says, he wants to know that he did it all — from having been a lowly cog in corporate America to raising money and searching for a business, buying one, and then growing it into a huge enterprise. "That would be so awesome," he says. "I would be so proud." After that, as a successful search alum, he'd have all kinds of options available to him in the ever-growing search ecosphere. He could become the CEO of a different company. He could become an investor in search funds. Or he could search for and buy and grow a business all over again, with the benefit of knowing everything he learned the first time around.All of that is a ways away. On a recent call, we discussed his $25 million revenue goal. "That seems a little," he said, pausing, "fantastical. Is that an accurate word?" Later, he settled on "aspirational." Some days, he gets frustrated that he's not there already. "I want to be so much bigger and do all these things, and it seems like it's so far away."Despite his impatience, it's clear he loves pretty much every aspect of the job. Everything about it is different from the consulting job he landed out of college. Back then, he says, "I felt like I was building spreadsheets and PowerPoints for my boss, who built it for their boss." It would take 12 to 15 years just to get high enough on the totem pole to make any decision of consequence — and from what he could tell from his lowly vantage point, even that job as a managing director didn't seem all that great. At any rate, he wasn't willing to sit around for that long to find out.Now, as the CEO of Atlantic, he has the power to make all the decisions. That includes the big ones — like offering health insurance to his employees for the first time, and experimenting with a new line of business cleaning trash chutes. And it includes the small ones — like taking his son to swim lessons every Wednesday during the day, and wearing shorts to the office when it gets hot in the summer. They're liberties he's still getting used to. "I can't control every customer that we have or every employee that works here," he says. "But I can effect change. If this doesn't work out, I probably have no one to blame except myself. I feel like I have total control over my destiny."Cheesy as it sounds, that's the sentiment I've heard most from the searchers I've spoken with in these past few months. They say the salary is decent (the average search CEO makes between $200,000 and $300,000, which is more than most people but often less than their MBA peers in finance, consulting, and Big Tech). The work-life balance is so-so — you control your schedule, but you're never truly unplugged. The financial windfall down the road is potentially life-changing. But what matters most to them is the agency to make their own decisions, and to see those decisions move the needle. They're not changing the world, but they are making a difference in the lives of the handful of employees they have and the customers they serve."In the corporate world, you're always going to get that layer where it's just not your strategy," the transportation guy told me. "My managers really drove the business, and all I did was help them. I can't go back to an environment where I'm somewhere in the middle." That's why, after selling his company for three times its original value, he ultimately decided against getting another job. Recently, he raised his next search fund to do it all over again.In his corporate career, says Schweber, "I felt like I was building spreadsheets and PowerPoints for my boss, who built it for their boss." Now, as the CEO of Atlantic, he has the power to make all the decisions.Lexey Swall for BIAs the world of white-collar work gets ever more depressing by the day, an entire generation of smart, ambitious young Americans is out there searching for a new dream to aspire to — one that replaces the one their parents and grandparents had of becoming senior vice president of a large corporation one day. Ever since the pandemic, I've been asking: What will that new dream be? For some, it's been work-life balance. For others, it's been the passive-income side hustle or retiring early or becoming a digital nomad. For Schweber, it's been buying and running a duct cleaning business in the Virginia suburbs.Schweber insists that anyone could do it. I'm skeptical. To make it work, it takes extraordinary persistence and an ungodly risk appetite — and most importantly, a resolute belief that you could successfully run a company you're unqualified to run in almost every way imaginable. But if that still doesn't scare you off, Schweber has one piece of advice — the same thing he tells aspiring searchers who come calling. "You've got to be all in," he says. "If you have the safety of a job, you're never going to need it enough. You've got to burn the boats."Aki Ito is a chief correspondent at Business Insider.Read the original article on Business Insider