From Ellis Island to Newark: One Entrepreneur's Acquisition Playbook
Lucas Philips is 29 years old, owns a niche manufacturer of custom automotive interiors in Newark, N.J., and has a hard-won rule about rental cars: take the Camry.
The lesson came early. On one of his first attempted bolt-on acquisitions — a tiny shop in rural Oregon run by a craftsman who spent decades fabricating custom interiors for Porsches — Philips flew to Portland and picked up a brand-new convertible Mustang on a free upgrade from his Hertz President's Circle card. He drove three-and-a-half hours south through what he described as 'the most beautiful' Oregon landscape. The seller had quoted $40,000 for the operation. After watching Philips pull up in a gleaming convertible and spend time on site, the price became $320,000.
'I regret that so much to this day,' Philips told Fortune. 'I should have just taken the Camry.'
The numbers come first. Since acquiring Newark Auto, Philips has grown annual revenue from 'a little over a million' at purchase to more than $3 million this year, across roughly five years of operating time. He told Fortune he doubled revenue in three years — a figure driven by bolt-on acquisitions, long commutes, and a workforce of hourly employees who have never seen a startup ping-pong table.
Philips traces the instinct to something deeper than any business school. His family immigrated to New York in the Ellis Island era roughly 100 years ago, and, as he put it, nobody wanted to hire them. He comes from several generations of Jewish small business owners: one grandfather sold paper goods to New York's Jewish bakeries; his father sold sunglasses imported from China before that trade was common, then hair accessories, then acquired a high-end custom furniture business with a showroom on Madison Avenue and a factory in Christiansburg, Virginia.
As an undergraduate at Northwestern, Philips launched a coffee concept and raised 'millions of dollars in outside capital' before graduating — only to find that reporting to investors and clashing with an MBA co-founder was not the life he wanted. He left that venture disillusioned with the equity-funded startup model.
A friend from Kellogg pointed him toward Walker Deibel's book Buy Then Build and the idea of entrepreneurship through acquisition. Philips said reading it 'clicked' in a way academic guides had not: he could 'buy a business with debt' rather than raise another equity round. At age 23 in 2021, he joined the Acquisition Lab. Within ten weeks of completing the program he had a letter of intent to buy Newark Auto, and closed two months after that.
The capital structure is what separates his path from the MBA search-fund world. The search-fund model — popularized at Stanford and Harvard — lets MBAs eventually own 20%–25% of a business backed by institutional equity, with no personal guarantee on the debt. Philips used the SBA model instead: 10% down, a personally guaranteed note on the remaining 90%, and 100% ownership. He frames the difference through Noam Wasserman's The Founder's Dilemmas: the 'king outcome' versus the 'rich outcome.' He wanted to be king.
'Once you buy the business, it is your business,' he said, 'and no matter what skeletons are buried in the closet, you're stuck with the thing.'
CEO Times editorial read: Philips's story is a clean illustration of what free enterprise actually looks like when stripped of venture-capital mythology. No institutional backstop, no equity cushion, no option to write off the loss and move on — just a personally guaranteed note, full ownership, and accountability that cannot be delegated. The SBA loan mechanism, whatever its bureaucratic imperfections, enabled a 26-year-old to acquire a going concern, keep 100% of the upside, and grow it on his own terms. That is the kind of capital formation that built the American middle class, and it still works when entrepreneurs are willing to take the risk — and, ideally, drive the Camry.
