At age 23 in 2021, he joined the Acquisition Lab<\/a>, which works to help acquisition entrepreneurs like Philips source, diligence, fund and operate their new business. This includes community and events, access to a dedicated team of advisors, and sourcing deals for them to review, both on and off market. The Lab has a $20 million fund to\u00a0provide minority equity checks if they find a mutual fit, and offers portfolio services including accounting\/finance and staffing. <\/p>\n Within 10 weeks of completing the lab, he had a letter of intent to buy Newark Auto, and closed another two months later. <\/p>\n At the Lab, we help Acquisition Entrepreneurs\u00a0throughout their journey, via community and events, access to a dedicated team of advisors, by sourcing deals for them to review (both on and off market), via our $20M fund to\u00a0provide minority equity checks\u00a0in their deals if a mutual fit, and through our dedicated portfolio services (accounting\/finance and staffing.. focused on Acquisition Enterpeneurs explicitly). So net\/net we help acquisition entrepreneurs source, diligence, fund and operate their new business.\u00a0 <\/p>\n A personal guarantee and “burning the boats” <\/p>\n What distinguishes Philips’s path from the MBA search-fund world is both the capital stack and the incentive structure. The search fund model \u2014 popularized at Stanford and Harvard \u2014 lets MBAs eventually own 20%\u201325% of a business, with institutional equity and no personal guarantee on the debt. They can be fired. The SBA model Philips used is different: 10% down, a personally guaranteed note on the remaining 90%, and 100% ownership. He frames the difference in terms borrowed from Noam Wasserman’s The Founder’s Dilemmas<\/a>: the “king outcome” versus the “rich outcome.” He wanted to be king. <\/p>\n “Once you buy the business, it is your business and no matter what skeletons are buried in the closet, you’re stuck with the thing,” he said, joking that it’s not like you can go to some “customer service counter” and return it if you don’t like what you find post-closing. That’s not the way venture capital works, he clarified, where investors expect a high failure rate and simply write off the capital if an idea doesn’t work. He described the SBA loan approach as something like “burning the boats” in warfare, or “taking out a mortgage on your own career.” You are on the hook for whatever happens next. <\/p>\n Philips insisted that no one should make that kind of bet without formal training. He tells younger would-be acquirers to read Buy Then Build, sit through the lab’s modules on search and diligence, and then reconsider whether they still want to proceed. “Getting training on how to do that right is so important,” he says. <\/p>\n If his startup years were defined by pitch decks and investor updates, Philips’ life now is defined by alarms and factory floors. He lives on the Upper West Side of Manhattan \u2014 on the same block where he grew up \u2014 commuting daily to Newark to oversee a manufacturing operation whose workers are on the line at 7:30 a.m. <\/p>\n “I wake up between 4:30 and 5:30, and I’m in the office by 7, 7:30 every morning,” he said, adding that manufacturing “generally doesn’t work 9 to 5” and often runs 7:30 to 4 or multiple shifts. <\/p>\n Philips contrasted his environment with the perk-laden offices that many of his Northwestern peers inhabit. “The people who work for me do not have a background working at companies that provide foosball tables and free lunch every day.” Instead, he’s managing hourly workers who have spent their careers in plants and warehouses, and who care more about predictable schedules, overtime opportunities, and respectful supervisors than about kombucha on tap. <\/p>\n He got a dog \u2014 a mini Bernedoodle he named Mabel \u2014 about a year into running the business. After all, running a small manufacturing company “can be quite lonely at the top.” All his friends from Northwestern are in tech, finance, or consulting; the ones he relates to most are in real estate, people who “eat what they kill.” His father always had a dog at the office, too, he said. <\/p>\n One of his biggest surprises has been how much he enjoys “shaping a workplace for those people that is just better than what they’ve experienced in the past” and building a team dynamic in a context where benefits and culture look very different from a tech unicorn’s. <\/p>\n Multiplying revenue \u2014 and delaying the 401(k) <\/p>\n Philips said he’s been able to grow revenue by folding in four additional, smaller businesses, integrating their operations into his factory, and reinvesting heavily in systems rather than pulling cash out for himself. <\/p>\n Unlike older buyers in their 40s and 50s who rely on cash flow to fund mortgages and college tuition, Philips has treated the business more like a compounding asset than a personal ATM. He said he has “had to invest in the business and not invest in my 401(k)” over the past few years, and at times his family has stepped in with capital to support integration work. “The business that I have now has the potential to grow far greater than the one that I bought five years ago, but I need to grow into that, and I’m 29, and that’s fine,” he added. <\/p>\n Philips is quick to push back on the idea that his story is a plug-and-play template for frustrated twenty-somethings who can’t land a corporate job. Some of the hardest parts of his job \u2014 like firing someone 30 years older than you who has been with the company longer than he has been alive \u2014 require emotional maturity and a tolerance for conflict that most early-career workers don’t yet have. People who disrespected him for being young, he said, didn’t last: “Once that person was no longer in the business, no one felt that way anymore.” <\/p>\n He’s talked to 22-year-olds who say they want to follow his path and said that makes him queasy. “I don’t know if I would recommend that they buy a business as their first thing,” he said. When strangers reach out, he routes them first to books and courses, then warns them about the personal guarantee and the possibility of bankruptcy if cash flows falter. He wants to make sure they are truly willing to burn the boats. <\/p>\n His caution tracks with a broader reality: per the Bureau of Labor Statistics<\/a>, roughly 20% of new businesses fail within their first year and about 40% within three years, making entrepreneurship a high-risk endeavor even without a personal guarantee. Layer SBA debt and a blue-collar workforce on top of that, and Philips argues that ETA becomes a niche path for a specific kind of operator \u2014 optimistic enough to push through, but sober enough to understand the stakes. <\/p>\n AI in the back office, people on the shop floor <\/p>\n Philips is part of a micro-generation of founders as comfortable in an AI-enabled productivity suite as they are walking a factory floor. He said he spends much of his day in Claude Code building tools that help his team see their priorities, manage work orders, and reduce administrative friction. He also keeps a 1982 Porsche 911 for attending car shows \u2014 a professional necessity in his business, and a symbol of the lesson he learned in Oregon. <\/p>\n But he’s adamant that AI won’t soon replace his stitchers and cutters. “I’m never going to have AI robots running my sewing machines,” he said. Newark Auto’s work is bespoke and varied: one day the shop is redoing seats for a vintage Porsche, the next for a newer model, the next for a BMW<\/a> or Mercedes. To automate that, he’d have to convert an enormous library of product files into instructions for AI-driven machinery, a process he says would demand “tremendous resources” that neither he nor his competitors have. “AI is an enabler for us, but it’s not a substitute for any of my blue-collar workers.” <\/p>\n<\/a> Waking up at 4:30 a.m. to run a blue-collar business <\/p>\n