Zahoor Kareem is the Co-founder of K&L Capital, a private investment firm that acquires and grows small to midsized non-tech businesses. With a background spanning logistics, franchising, and business services, Zahoor focuses on building sustainable companies that thrive beyond their original owners. Over the years, he has led multiple successful acquisitions and divestitures, bringing operational excellence and long-term value to each venture. Zahoor is passionate about empowering teams, creating enduring businesses, and giving back through thoughtful entrepreneurship.
Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:
- [1:53] Zahoor Kareem shares his first entrepreneurial experience recycling juice cups for profit
- [6:33] How Zahoor paid for college by launching creative campus businesses
- [9:47] Viewing capital accumulation as a strategic and purpose-driven game
- [19:39] Lessons Zahoor learned from acquiring and operating a FedEx delivery business
- [29:30] How Zahoor transitioned into the water and fire mitigation industry with franchise acquisitions
- [37:11] Building businesses that prioritize hope, resilience, and employee well-being
In this episode…
What does it really take to thrive in the high-stakes world of business acquisitions and franchise operations? Many entrepreneurs jump in, only to face unexpected pitfalls, rising costs, or the harsh reality of customer concentration. So, how can you build businesses that not only survive but scale successfully across industries?
According to Zahoor Kareem, a seasoned entrepreneur and acquisitions expert, success comes from focusing on businesses with clear, simple operating models and opportunities for improvement. He highlights the importance of balancing hands-on involvement in the early stages with long-term systems that allow the business to thrive without the owner. This approach reduces dependency risks and builds sustainable growth. Zahoor also emphasizes learning from past mistakes, quickly identifying deals worth pursuing, and maintaining a deep commitment to taking care of the people inside the business.
In this episode of the Rising Entrepreneurs Podcast, host John Corcoran sits down with Zahoor Kareem, Co-founder of K&L Capital, to discuss what it takes to succeed in franchises and acquisitions. They explore Zahoor’s approach to evaluating deals, building resilient teams, and overcoming hidden challenges. Zahoor also shares insights on transitioning into new industries and creating businesses centered on long-term value.
Resources mentioned in this episode:
- EO San Francisco
- EO Accelerator
- Entrepreneurs’ Organization (EO)
- John Corcoran on LinkedIn
- Rise25
- Zahoor Kareem on LinkedIn
- Greyhound
- Berkshire Hathaway
- FedEx Ground
- Servpro
- Blackstone
Quotable Moments
- “Capital accumulation is a game, right? I think ultimately for me it’s like, how do you acquire?”
- “I can start something from scratch, but I don’t want to, nor do I like to.”
- “You attract bees with honey, and that line has stuck with me ever since then.”
- “If I get hit by a bus today, the business still continues without relying on me.”
- “We’re actually in the business of taking care of our people, so they take care of customers.”
Action Steps
- Prioritize businesses with simple, understandable models: Focusing on straightforward operations reduces complexity and improves your ability to identify improvement areas.
- Build systems that operate without you: Creating self-sufficient businesses ensures long-term sustainability and reduces risk tied to the owner.
- Learn from past acquisition mistakes: Reflecting on what went wrong sharpens future deal evaluations and strengthens overall investment strategies.
- Focus on employee well-being and support: Investing in your people drives customer satisfaction, operational success, and long-term business resilience.
- Stay open to new industries and opportunities: Expanding beyond familiar sectors fosters innovation and diversifies your portfolio for greater stability.
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Episode Transcript:
Intro: 00:03
Welcome to the Rising Entrepreneurs Podcast, where we feature top founders and entrepreneurs and their journey. Now let’s get started with the show.
John Corcoran: 00:12
Alright. Welcome everyone. John Corcoran, here I am, the co-host of the show. And you know, if you check out the archives, we’ve got lots of great episodes with smart CEOs, founders and entrepreneurs from all kinds of companies. And I’m also the Co-founder of the company Rise25, where we help connect B2B business owners to their ideal prospects with done-for-you podcast and content marketing.
And you can go to our website at rise25.com and learn about what we do. And this episode is brought to you by EO San Francisco. EO San Francisco is the Bay area chapter of Entrepreneurs’ Organization, which is a global peer to peer network of 20,000 influential business owners across 200 chapters, 60 plus countries. And if you are the founder, co founder, owner or controlling shareholder of a company generating over $1 million a year in revenue, and you want to connect with other like minded successful entrepreneurs, EO is for you. And the EO San Francisco chapter has about 130 members across all kinds of different industries.
You can learn more about us at eonetwork.org/SanFrancisco. All right. My guest here today is Zahoor Kareem. He is a relatively newer member of the San Francisco chapter. He’s a seasoned entrepreneur with a track record of acquiring different businesses across a number of different industries, which is kind of fascinating because he’s looked at very various different industries.
And so we’re going to learn about the world of M&A and acquiring different businesses who are such a pleasure to have you here today. And I always like to start by hearing about what people were like as a kid. And you had a bunch of different ideas, but let tell me about this one, where you were interning in a hospital and you saw a business opportunity, saw these nurses that were making money by basically recycling their juice cups for a nickel. And you saw an arbitrage opportunity, I love it.
Zahoor Kareem: 01:53
I did well, thanks for having me. And that’s correct. I was volunteering in the summer at a hospital in Calgary, where I was for middle school and high school, and I noticed all the nurses collecting in garbage bags, like the leftover juice cups right there, like the tiny little juice cups with the little aluminum foil on top. And so I had a curiosity. I asked the head nurse.
I said, why are you collecting these? I was like, oh, because we just at the end of the week, we we take them to the recycling center and we get a bunch of money and then we use it for, for fun stuff for, for, you know, for the, for the unit. And so my parents at the time ran a wholesale bakery. And, you know, they had a supplier. And I picked up the cup and I looked on the back of it and I was curious.
And so I asked the distributor, I said, do you guys carry this cup? And he happened to say that they did. And I said, all right. He said, how much is it? And I don’t remember the exact number, but it was something less than $0.05 at the time.
And he said, but you have to buy them in like boxes of 2000. And I said, sure, like I’d like to buy it, a bunch of them. And thankfully he didn’t ask why.
John Corcoran: 02:56
And this is just buying them. Like the raw material.
Zahoor Kareem: 02:59
Like the raw material.
John Corcoran: 03:00
The raw uncut. Yeah.
Zahoor Kareem: 03:01
I don’t even know this was such a thing. Like, you could literally buy the cup. Yeah. And you know, in my adult self and being more environmentally friendly probably wasn’t the best thing to do. But I, you know, so I ended up ordering, I don’t know, thousands of these cups.
And rather than just taking them to the recycling center and wondering them wondering why these were like unused, I would basically every day dump them into our bathtub at the time and add a bunch of Kool-Aid powder to it, because it made like a color, and I would rinse them out and dry them and put them in a garbage bag. And then every week I would take them to the recycling center. And that was kind of my summer project of, you know, earning, I don’t know, a penny or two per cup.
John Corcoran: 03:40
You saw an opportunity. Yeah. So you want to make sure that those recycling snoops didn’t rat you out. Those guys. Yeah.
Zahoor Kareem: 03:48
And I and it’s funny, I, it’s funny you asked about the story I love that recycling business in in Calgary. Right. Because it was one of those where they just had a warehouse and they just collected a bunch of stuff and they paid you pennies on it, and then they sold it to a larger company. Right. And it was a really hard business to actually acquire.
No one wants to sell them. But it was an interesting thing as a, as a, you know, as a summer project. Well, it gets back.
John Corcoran: 04:13
To kind of your thesis behind your investment now is, is simple concepts. And that’s kind of like a simple concept, right. You know buying.
Zahoor Kareem: 04:22
Simple to me. Yeah.
John Corcoran: 04:23
Yeah. Right, right. Exactly. So so we could talk about that as it gets to your present day and the types of companies that you acquire. But you also had an idea to start a company that was like webvan for those that don’t remember Webvan explain what Webvan was, because it’s an interesting idea from the early dotcom days.
Zahoor Kareem: 04:43
Yeah, that might be a little too much credit for me, but yeah, Webvan from in the early.com days, probably the late 90s in essence started, you know, your What is it? Instacart was like the precursor Instacart, right?
John Corcoran: 04:57
Yeah.
Zahoor Kareem: 04:58
You could order groceries. And their model, which was flawed, is they started to build warehouses and host all this inventory everywhere. And my idea before.
John Corcoran: 05:08
Super capital intensive.
Zahoor Kareem: 05:10
Right. My idea before all this started was, well, what if you’re busy and this is really pre-internet, and you could just call a phone number and tell us what you wanted for your grocery orders, and we would go do it for you, and we’d charge you 5 to 10 bucks. Again, another kind of high school project. And it didn’t get off the ground, but I literally printed flyers, went to the grocery store and put them up on a bunch of different cars and tried to see if it would work. And interestingly, it didn’t work, for better or for worse.
Otherwise, I don’t know how I would have. I would have then had to figure out how to actually solve the problem of I have your order now. Now I have to go to the store and find a way to pay for it.
John Corcoran: 05:45
Yeah.
Zahoor Kareem: 05:46
And collect money and then make $5. But.
John Corcoran: 05:48
But you weren’t wrong that one day someone would be interested in this. busy people would want someone to deliver the groceries for them.
Zahoor Kareem: 05:56
Yeah. And, you know, it’s interesting. One of my tenets is I can start something from scratch, but I don’t want to, nor do I like to. Right. And and I and I’ve made that mistake a couple of times.
But typically my my, my, you know, my SOP is find something that works and either clone it or make it better. Right. I don’t have any, I don’t I don’t think I have any bright ideas, I just, I like I, I ran businesses in college and I learned from what other people were doing, and I put him out of business by doing it better, faster, cheaper than how they were doing it.
John Corcoran: 06:29
What other ones? So you had some other businesses during college?
Zahoor Kareem: 06:33
Yes, I paid for, paid my paid my way through college by I think it was I noticed at the beginning of the year that someone was selling t shirts and I went to McGill, which is in Montreal, and it’s probably a top 20 school.
John Corcoran: 06:45
Very well.
Zahoor Kareem: 06:46
Respected.
John Corcoran: 06:46
School. Yeah.
Zahoor Kareem: 06:47
And someone was selling in September a t shirt with Harvard’s logo on it and underneath it, it said, America’s McGill. And I.
John Corcoran: 06:57
Love.
Zahoor Kareem: 06:57
The t shirt. Right. And so I’m like, oh, that’s interesting. And I made a couple of phone calls. My parents had a friend of a friend that owned a screen printing company, and so I got him a logo and I printed, Lord knows how many hundreds, maybe thousands of shirts.
And I knew where all the new kids were going to be on campus because I was, you know, part of the welcoming group. So I just set up a little table and we just sold these off for, at that time, like $20 a shirt was a big deal 20 years ago. Yeah. And it was just at the beginning of the year, I noticed that somebody else was, you know, recording cassette tapes of a music class. Right.
So you could actually almost like study notes. And so.
John Corcoran: 07:38
Yeah.
Zahoor Kareem: 07:38
I figured this out, and I went to talk to the professor before the class even started and said, hey, can I have the recording in advance? Like, can I have your master? Because this is what I’m going to do. I’m going to go to the library and I’m going to make copies so that not everybody has to go to the library to make their own copies. And he said, sure, here you go.
And I made a bunch of these tapes and sold them off at, you know, five bucks at a time. But the biggest business in college was I was going to Toronto with a friend who that friend is now turned into my wife, actually, of 25 years. And she’s like, oh, I’m going to take this bus. But it’s not Greyhound. And it’s like $50 to go from Montreal to Toronto, which is probably a four hour, 4 or 5 hour drive.
And I happen to sit at the front and I just peppered the operator with questions on the four hour drive, and they answered all of the questions I asked. So the next year I’m like, I think I can do this as well. And so I ended up printing up a bunch of flyers, putting them up all around campus, charged $5 less. And partly it was hard work, partly was luck because when their buses showed up, I sold out. They had some bad luck, but when their buses showed up, they were school buses and mine showed up and they were full coaches.
So after the first event, I basically they stopped providing the work and every holiday 2 or 3 times a year, I would rent 2 to 3 Greyhound buses and I would sell them out.
John Corcoran: 09:04
These were students that needed to like, get home to Montreal.
Zahoor Kareem: 09:07
Yeah, they would go to Toronto. And you know, if you took Greyhound or the train, it was 100 bucks and I was charging $55.
John Corcoran: 09:14
Yeah.
Zahoor Kareem: 09:15
And people knew that it was bus. And I’m like, it’s not my bus. But that like to this day, like people still remember that bus service. And so that was another one of those like saw someone else do it. Thought I’d give it a shot and, you know, made it happen.
John Corcoran: 09:28
So you mentioned that your parents had a bakery. So I guess you maybe observed entrepreneurship up close. But what drove this? You know what, drew? You know, if you look introspectively, what drove you to start these different businesses?
Was it you just wanted to get money in your pocket? Was it curiosity? What was it?
Zahoor Kareem: 09:47
I think it was this note. It was a game, I think, more than anything else. Capital accumulation is a game, right? I think ultimately for me it’s like, how do you acquire how do you keep acquiring capital? Not for my own good, but ultimately at the end of the day, it’s to give it away, right?
Like it’s to help make the world a better place. I’m going to quote Michael Jackson. And so it was just an interesting model, right. Like even my passion for the equity markets, like I read everything I could find on like, Buffett and Munger and Berkshire Hathaway and in high school when I came across them. Right.
And so but my uncle was an entrepreneur, ran the largest budget rent a car franchise. My parents are professionals. Dad’s a mechanical engineer. We moved to Canada. They started becoming entrepreneurs.
Right. And so they ran businesses, but they were just happy running their business. It was just a job. It wasn’t. It wasn’t a business how I think of a business in terms of it making money for you.
They were working in the business, right? Not on the business.
John Corcoran: 10:46
And did that example inspire you to not want to work in businesses?
Zahoor Kareem: 10:52
Yeah, I mean, I didn’t want to own a small business, right? Coming out of like, working in the corporate world and having a steady check, like, I didn’t want to just I didn’t want something to be dependent on me. Like all of our acquisitions, I’m really involved with the first year. But if I get hit by a bus today, like, the business still continues, right? Yeah, they might have an issue when it comes time to like closing the books at the end of the month and, you know, looking at some financial oversight.
But the businesses don’t rely on me. Like, I like my flexibility and my freedom. Yeah. And my time with my kids and my family. And so I, I don’t like to be, you know, my business partner is on the other side, right?
He loves like, knowing every single thing going on in the business. And I love him for it. I’m on a need to know and I don’t need to know everything. So.
John Corcoran: 11:35
Yeah. Yeah. So you after college, just you ended up moving to the Bay area a couple of years after college, I believe it was with the with the goal of having the business you have today. But you you found that you. It didn’t exactly work out that way.
So how’d you how’d you end up coming to the Bay area? And how did that work out?
Zahoor Kareem: 11:56
So right out, right after college, I. I wanted to acquire a business, a business. And I was looking at a bunch of different businesses, and I was young and immature and didn’t know what I knew now. And I passed on a couple of businesses, which would have been great. But at the time I thought they were too expensive.
Like I thought the multiple of EBITDA or cash flows was really high. And I’m glad it worked out that I didn’t buy anything because a year and a half later, I had a couple of mentors that said, you know, tech’s really big, like this is now 2000. Like, why don’t you start a tech company? I’m like, I don’t know how to start things. I just know how to join things and hopefully make them better.
And so I came to the Bay area to a job fair on like 24 hours notice. Really landed, landed at, you know, midnight San Jose went to a Kinko’s because those existed. Printed my resume. Because that’s still what you did back then.
John Corcoran: 12:51
What do you remember what year this was?
Zahoor Kareem: 12:53
This would have been in January or February of 2000.
John Corcoran: 12:57
Wow. Okay. Oh, this is actually March right before the peak, which was March of 2000. Oh, right.
Zahoor Kareem: 13:03
Again. No, no, I moved your right around the time the Nasdaq crashed in March of 2020.
John Corcoran: 13:07
March of 2020. Yeah. That’s right.
Zahoor Kareem: 13:09
Yeah. And so I came in January.
John Corcoran: 13:10
20th 2000 2000.
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