I’m trying to decide what to do. My father in law owns 1/3rd of a sizable (~$50 million ish) revenue business. He called me yesterday out of the blue and said he has been thinking about how to exit the business and wanted to know if I’d be interested in working there for 3 years before buying him out over 10 years on a seller note. Debt and terms I’d never get from a bank.

Additional context, Im 29 and my wife and two children (<2yo) and I live a thousand miles away from the business in a place we really love. We have a community and feel really at home here. We don’t want to move our family and our lives back to my wife’s hometown.

But I can’t shake the feeling that this is an opportunity of a lifetime. My FIL takes like 16 weeks of vacations a year, the business does net profit in the 5%-7% range (2.5M-3.5M net profit) and employs about 150 people. This is a real business, not the “buying a job” stuff you see on here all the time. Two of the three owners only come in for quarterly board meetings. My goal would be to grow it and really put some energy into it, so I wouldn’t be taking that amount of vacation and would treat it like my full time job + a lot.

I’m really torn about overvaluing our community and home here and passing up a clear path to significant wealth in the next 15 years. Some back of the napkin math excluding any business growth has us at like $6m net worth by 40 if we do this.

I know it wont be easy but I’ve wanted to own a business and this would give us a high likelihood of accruing life changing wealth. We wouldn’t be miserable there, but the winters suck and would have to rebuild friend groups which is hard especially in a small town.

What would you do? Take a shot on yourself to provide your family wealth and the freedom that comes with it for a short term quality of life hit? Or stick where I am, perfectly fine upper middle class life, but unlikely to accrue more than say $5-$6M by retirement age.

If you are still with me I appreciate it. TLDR is money really that great? I can’t think of what I’d even spend that kind of money on.