Bakari
Akil
Investor · Lecturer · Author · Owner
Escape the working class.
Join The Ownership Class.
Join 10,000+ learning how to own businesses — free every week.
"...a good bet for success."
— The New York Times
"A person of integrity and character."
— Dr. Cornel West
"...if he has done it once, he can do it again."
— The Wall Street Journal
About
I buy companies and teach others how to do so.
I'm the Managing Director of Graves Hall Capital. I buy cash-flowing businesses — the kind most people walk past every day and don't realize are for sale. My most recent was NYP Corp, a $30 million specialty manufacturer where I now sit on the board. Across manufacturing, education technology, and ecommerce, I've closed over $100 million in transactions.
None of it happened the way it's supposed to. I didn't come from banking. I don't have a degree. Nobody handed me capital. I walked uninvited into a business school class on Entrepreneurship Through Acquisition and decided that was going to be my life. Then I spent five years failing to close a single deal before any of it worked.
Today I teach business acquisitions to MBA candidates and write The Ownership Class, a free weekly newsletter where I break down everything I know about buying businesses — real deals, real numbers, and the failures that built everything you see on this page. I do most of it from a different city each month, because the whole point of owning a business is not being chained to one.
Thank you for taking the time to read this.
Living in a different city each month across:
Track Record
Companies I've bought
& deals I've closed.
Including the ones that didn't work out.
You just saw the deals. Want the playbook behind them?
How I found them, funded them, and what I'd do differently.
You just saw the deals.
Want the playbook behind them?
How I found them, funded them,
and what I'd do differently.
Keynotes & Podcast
I teach what I do.
Most people don't know you can buy an existing business using other people's capital, install a team to run it, and oversee it from wherever you want to live. I didn't either, until I walked into a classroom I wasn't supposed to be in.
Now I keynote on ownership, access, and building wealth outside the traditional playbook.
Podcast Appearances
16 podcasts, 200,000+ combined listeners.
Keynotes
Ceiling
The Book
Paper Ceiling
Buying Companies Without College, Cash, or Clout
Paper Ceiling is the memoir of how I went from foster care and homelessness to buying multimillion-dollar companies — without a degree, without capital, and without invitation.
This is not a how-to book. This the story of what can happen when you have none of those things and you enter the room anyway.
From the Introduction
… and my journey is not an inspirational anecdote. It is evidence — lived, deal-by-deal proof that the single most powerful wealth-building mechanism in American capitalism is being withheld from the people who need it most, by barriers that do not survive contact with someone willing to ignore them.
The ceiling is paper. I tore through it. The question this book forces is whether it stays open — or whether it seals shut behind me. With $5 trillion in boomer-owned businesses set to change hands, the value of a college degree dissolving, and employment in freefall as AI rewrites all the rules — this question is no longer personal.
It is the economic question of the next decade.
Represented by Tanya McKinnon, McKinnon Literary.
Skip the Startup. Buy a Business.
Work from Anywhere.
You've seen the deals.
You've read the story.
Now get the playbook.
Join 10,000+ learning how to own businesses — free every week.
