\n<\/p>\n
Aliev, who had worked in finance before doing her MBA, was wary of first impressions at the firm.<\/p>\n
“If you judge a book by its cover, it’s very easy to be like ‘oh, young girl, Wall Street background, coming in here and telling me what to do’\u2026 I was really conscious about that,” she says. “And I really didn’t want to come off that way to my team.”<\/p>\n
Aliev says her approach was initially to just observe and learn. “Not coming in and telling them ‘this is how things are going to be’.”<\/p>\n
The practice of a young entrepreneur borrowing money to buy a company and become its boss is known as entrepreneurship by acquisition or “search-fund investing”.<\/p>\n
The would-be business owner sets up a fund, called a search fund, and aims to attract money from both institutional investors and wealthy individuals.<\/p>\n
At the last count, in 2023, a record 94 search funds, external<\/span><\/a> were found to have been launched that year in the US, with $682m (\u00a3505m) said to have been invested in funds and the companies they bought across 2022 and 2023.<\/p>\n In turn, there are now investment companies in the US that specialise in backing young entrepreneurs and their search funds, such as Search Fund Partners, Aspect Investors and Anacapa Partners.<\/p>\n They are attracted by reported high rates of return. For while some people may question the wisdom of putting a 20-something in charge of an established business, a report by Yale School of Management found that “juicy returns by any standard”, external<\/span><\/a> are available, and funds generally “remained relatively stable”. <\/p>\n For existing business owners, selling to a younger entrepreneur is a chance to move on and perhaps retire. For would-be company leaders the aim is to grow the business for perhaps five to 10 years, before selling at a profit.<\/p>\n Now more than two years since taking over at Life Support Systems, and 30-years-old, Aliev has led the takeover of a competitor, which she says has doubled the size of the business.<\/p>\n She says that this focus on growth has been welcomed by most employees. One, Meaghan Richardson, says: “It can be a little bit challenging sometimes for those of us who have been here a long time… but it’s been really great since she’s come in because she’s just turned a lot of stuff around, which is really exciting.”<\/p>\n But not everyone has been happy with Aliev’s new approach. Some workers have left and she has made others redundant as “they just didn’t want to work in a growth company”.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n