The hardest part

By now, most of my fellow grads have gone to work. My business partner and I have, too, but our days look nothing alike.

Most "day jobs" involve an eight to six (or if you're lucky, a nine to five) schedule. Be it planned or ad hoc, there is some sort of structure to the productivity within the firm, and occasional checks on how you stack up to others' expectations. There's some direction to your career too: up or out, up or stay -- there is an actual "up." In theory, it's also possible to draw the line between your day job and the rest of your life -- doing so could be as simple as putting down the Crackberry and walking slooowly away, or as complicated as managing an unforgiving workload or an overbearing boss. Most important, there's a paycheck.

Searching for the right deal means that these certainties go away. First of all, nobody knows what success will look like. Obviously success will be a deal that goes to completion, but beyond that: Will we start up a new concept from scratch? Will we become master franchisees of a foreign fried chicken joint? Will we acquire and convert (into a plausible target for resale) a rundown mid-sized donut shop chain? Will it be a small multi-unit California casual restaurant that we join and help grow into a national chain? Do we try to go the private equity route and pitch ourselves as the dynamic duo for portfolio operations in Texas? There are many roads to Damascus, as they say, and we've seriously considered each of these. There are probably others too, but we don't know which will actually get us to the destination.

The uncertainties are what make this occupation difficult. Losing the luxury of a bi-monthly direct deposit and spending down the last of my assets are symbolic of a deeper psychological inquiry into how I value myself as a business person. In this search, nobody affirms my contributions with dollars or positive reviews. I dip into an accumulated pride in my skills and judgment to keep the search engine running. The virtuous cycle of working hard and being rewarded for it has been temporarily suspended. And it's not clear when it will be reinstated, or when the search will end. It's not hard for the search to take over all my waking hours (and even those when I should be sleeping).

All the uncertainties: that's the hardest part about being a search funder.