# Buying an Existing Business Instead of Starting From Scratch

- URL: https://girisimcikafasi.com/en/blog/buying-an-existing-business/
- Published: 2026-10-02
- Updated: 2026-10-02
- Category: Starting and growing a business
- Publisher: Girişimci Kafası

Paris, the mid-1880s. A young painter called Édouard Michelin is exhibiting his work at the Salon. He is a pupil of William Bouguereau, who is said to have remarked that he "paints like a pig but draws like a master". His career as a painter never quite takes off.

Just then, the family comes knocking. Barbier-Daubrée, a small rubber workshop making hoses and brake pads for horse-drawn carriages, founded in Clermont-Ferrand in 1832 by relatives on his mother's side, is on the brink of bankruptcy. His elder brother André took over the business in 1886. Édouard, too, puts down his brush and heads for the factory. On 28 May 1889 the company changes its name: Michelin et Cie. Fifty-two people work in the factory.

One day a cyclist with a punctured tyre turns up at the factory gate. Sources give different dates for this day, but the story is the same. The tyre, as was usual at the time, is glued to the rim. Removing it, repairing it and refitting it takes hours, and the glue has to be left overnight to dry. The next morning Édouard tries the bicycle in the yard, and a few hundred metres later the tyre bursts again.

The painter's eye sees not a problem but an opportunity: a tyre that can be taken off and put back on. The patent is granted on 18 June 1891. In September that year Charles Terront wins the first Paris-Brest-Paris race on Michelin tyres, finishing its 1,196 kilometres in 71 hours 22 minutes.

A year later, on 5 June 1892, Michelin organises a race of its own, from Paris to Clermont-Ferrand. Without telling the competitors, Édouard has nails scattered along the road between Nevers and Riom. The aim is to show that the new tyre can be changed in two minutes. Sixty-one of the seventy-six competitors reach the finish line. The race goes down in history as the "nail race".

Michelin was not a company built from scratch. It was a sinking workshop taken over with fresh eyes.

## Starting from scratch is not the only way

Say "entrepreneurship" and people picture a blank page: a new idea, a new product, a first customer. But there is another route. Buying a business that already has customers, a team, suppliers and cash flow, and growing it.

In an interview on Starter Story, Frank Pedeflous describes this route. He was a sales engineer at a large company and had realised he would not be promoted. In 1996, with his wife Sandy, he bought a small but profitable company making blind-cleaning machines for $535,000. To do it, they took out a loan secured on their house and borrowed $75,000 from Frank's family.

## For anyone thinking of taking over an existing business

### Know what you are buying

As Pedeflous tells it, he spent months working with business brokers and visiting firm after firm before he found the company he was looking for. When you take over a business, you are not buying just the machinery: you are buying customers, habits, reputation and sometimes hidden problems. Do not sign anything without looking at the books and talking to customers.

### Keep the previous owner around for a while

The previous owners stayed on for less than six months to teach the new owners the business. Pedeflous says he knew nothing about blinds or about the industry. During the handover, the previous owner's knowledge is the fastest way to pass on things that are not written down anywhere.

### Be realistic about money and time

The couple started with too little capital and in the industry's slow season. Pedeflous's advice is clear: whatever you think it will cost, multiply it by three; however long you think it will take, multiply by two. He does not hide that the first ten years were financially very hard, or that had he known this at the start, he might not have taken the plunge.

### Look for the opportunity the business you bought has missed

Within six months they renamed the company Omegasonics and changed direction. As Pedeflous explains, the Montreal Protocol, signed in 1987, had begun phasing out some of the solvents used in industrial cleaning. So they turned to machines that clean parts with ultrasonic waves, water and detergent. Just as Michelin got tyres out of a brake-pad workshop, existing know-how was carried into a new market.

### Rein in growth

Pedeflous deliberately keeps growth between 5 and 15 per cent a year. In his view, most businesses fail either because they run out of money or because they try to do everything at once. Consolidate the business you have taken over first, then expand.

## Devir: the turning of the wheel

The Turkish word for a handover or transfer, "devir", comes from the Arabic "dawr". According to the Nişanyan Dictionary, it means a turn or cycle, and later also time and era. Even the example sentence in the first definition given by the TDK, the Turkish Language Association, looks like a coincidence: "the turning of the wheel". Taking over a business means taking hold of a turning wheel without stopping it.

In Latin, the word for this is "tradere": to hand over, to pass from hand to hand. According to Etymonline, the English "tradition" comes from it. The same verb also gave rise to "traditor": one who hands over, one who betrays. The word came to mean both teacher and traitor; "traitor" is born from it. A business you take over offers two paths as well. Either you teach it something new, or you betray what was entrusted to you.

## Final word

In Goethe's Faust, in the "Night" scene of Part One, Faust looks at the geared instruments he inherited from his father and never used in his study, and says:

> "Whatever your fathers left to you, earn it anew in order to possess it."

Buying a business does not mean owning it. It truly becomes yours when it starts turning in your hands. Is there a business around you whose owner has grown tired but whose customers are still waiting? And with what fresh eyes would you look at it?

*If you are getting ready to talk to the customers of a business you are thinking of taking over, have a look at [How to Run a Customer Interview](https://girisimcikafasi.com/en/blog/how-to-run-a-customer-interview/).*