The Other Side: 3 Deals. 3 CEOs. No Filter.
Three executives, Mitch Harris, Mario Antwine, and Rock Irvin, on the unfiltered reality of buying and running the companies they now own.
Most acquisition content sells the outcome and skips the middle. This panel does the opposite.
Mitch Harris, Mario Antwine, and Rock Irvin left high-paying corporate careers, ran multi-year searches, and now run the companies they bought. They spend most of the conversation on the parts that usually get left out. The trigger for Mario was a Fortune 500 CFO telling him his exact career track to his face. He already knew it. Hearing it said out loud was different. He came out of Wall Street finance and M&A and self-funded Pearl Interactive Network, a contact center with a top line north of $50 million.
Mitch led advertising sales teams at Meta before his CMO seat. He searched 20 months before closing on Vertex Communication Group, a digital marketing firm specializing in scaled email programs. Roughly a hundred days in, he describes the work as grimy: about seventy-five percent of his time goes to administrative work like QuickBooks, a benefits dispute, and state tax websites. He says he wanted the challenge, and the challenge is what he got.
Rock came off the operations side at Vista Equity Partners and acquired Alumitec, a Chicago building services contractor, solo, as 100% owner. His search produced roughly seven thousand no’s. His system for surviving it was to batch the rejection to one day so the rest of the week stayed clear. At least five times he asked himself what he was doing and considered going back to corporate. He kept going.
The common thread across all three deals is that the financing solves once you find the deal. Finding the deal is the hard part. And for all three of them, staying put stopped feeling like the safe option. The panel walks through deal size and the danger of buying a job, partner and spouse alignment before the search starts, search discipline, financing a larger deal, the first hundred days, and the resilience the path actually requires.
Three takeaways from the conversation
The money problem solves once you find the deal
All three operators landed in the same place from three different deals: the financing follows the deal, and finding the deal is the real work. Mitch searched 20 months, Rock collected roughly seven thousand no’s, and Mario took on a business with a top line north of $50 million. The search, not the capital, is what separates the people who own from the people who only talk about it.
Stop screening for the perfect deal. Start screening for mitigation.
Mitch describes the shift that finally got him to a close: he stopped looking for the perfect deal once he realized it does not exist. Every real company has some hair on it. He bought one with customer concentration, the exact thing the textbook says to avoid, then structured the terms to mitigate almost all of it. The edge is not finding a clean company. It is what you can de-risk.
The freedom is real, and so is the load
Mario’s read on surviving year one is that the hours were not the hardest part. The mental load was: holding the thesis, the team, and the clients in his head with nobody above him to escalate to. He is not sure he took a single day off that first year. The seat is real, and at the start it is grimier than the highlight reel, which is exactly the part worth hearing before you romanticize the title.
Watch the full conversation
About this guest
Mitch Harris is CEO and Owner of Vertex Communication Group, a digital marketing firm specializing in scaled email programs, and founder of Claymont Capital Partners. Mario Antwine is CEO and Owner of Pearl Interactive Network, a BPO contact center with a deep focus on hiring people with barriers to work, and Managing Partner at Ascentium Holdings. Rahman “Rock” Irvin is CEO and Owner of Alumitec, a Chicago building services contractor, and President of The January 23rd Company.
Resources
Book Mitch 1-on-1: gravywealth.com/expert/mitchharris Book Mario 1-on-1: gravywealth.com/expert/marioantwine Take the complimentary Ownership DNA Assessment and see how you compare to other professionals making the shift. Methodology reviewed by Archie Jones, Senior Lecturer at Harvard Business School. go.gravywealth.com/DNA Subscribe to Owner Mode on YouTube: youtube.com/@gravywealth
The Owner Mode podcast on Apple, Spotify, and everywhere podcasts live: gravywealth.com/podcast
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