We recently connected with Ethan M Sera and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Ethan M, thanks for joining us today. We’d love to hear from you about what you think Corporate America gets wrong in your industry and why it matters.

Personally, I feel like Corporate America in general relies so heavily on automated impersonal systems that almost demonize human interaction and “human normalcy”, like having flexibility on policies for example.

I run a hotel in SE Asia, and the idea that I can just give my staff the flexibility to tell a guest that they can check out 5-10 minutes late without worrying that some sort of “digital overlord” is going to charge their credit card an extra fee which would then take hours of time on a customer service hotline to reverse…seems a bit foreign as a concept to them.

Ethan M, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

I am originally from Ireland (born to Irish/German and Russian/Kazakh parents), however I lost my parents not long into my life on this Earth.

So I became the adopted grandson into a Japanese business family from Toronto, Canada, however I never was involved with the family business (food wholesale and distribution) and chose to pursue a medical and engineering degree.

At the age of 23 however, I went on business vacation to SE Asia to hear an opportunity to get into importing cars and trucks to Cambodia since I had a “tuner shop” (shop that modifies cars) in the U.S. at the time.

I then moved to Cambodia permanently a year later after seeing an open market in comparison to a very “closed system” that the U.S. business landscape offered.

Originally I started business in Cambodia importing vehicles, but then transitioned into wholesale coffee, customer home building, furniture production, and now eventually ending up in hospitality.

To be frank, every opportunity I ended up in is something that found me. I found that if I pushed for an opportunity, the harder it became to find anything, so I went with the chaotic flow of the wild open market landscape at the time.

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I wouldn’t say I have a “most proud” moment in terms of what I “did” necessarily, but following my desire to exit the system of corporate western business culture is by far the best thing I ever did for myself that I encourage anyone who wants to do the same, to do exactly that.

It can be scary to leave the secure way of life that is being presented to you, but it is worth every minute of waking life that you have to spend that time doing what you love and what you’re passionate about, even if it’s just being passionate about leaving “the matrix”.

What I mean by this, is that the whole idea of your life being pre-planned and heavily influenced by the country you are born into need not be your only reality if you so choose.

You can be the change you desire, and opportunities will come to you if you’re willing to take them.

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Let’s talk M&A – we’d love to hear your about your experience with buying businesses.

Let’s share this story, because it’s literally a process I am completing as we speak.

So after being in the furniture manufacturing business for roughly 12 years, my wife of 13 years decided she found someone else and I was no longer a consideration as husband and father.

After a less than amicable divorce, I found myself on my own with very little money, property, opportunities, etc., not to mention fearing for my immediate safety at times.

I suppose it wouldn’t have been so bad if I had I at least something to work with in order to build a new pathway for myself, but my circumstances were so dire that I was barely able to pay for food and rent, and I mean…literally paying for food and a place to sleep at night. Things were tough.

I found myself bouncing from place to place, doing odd jobs to make ends meet, scavenging old scooters from the trash and repairing them so I had transportation to get around on, and eventually found myself staying at a local hostel as a volunteer worker.

It was a huge change from the organised way of business life I was used to. Now instead of having a world where everything was pre-planned, neat and tidy and in it’s place, the new norm included cats sleeping in the liquor cabinet, wild birds hanging out in the bar (not the girl type of bird, although there were plenty of those), and on that note, plenty of incredibly diverse people I never expected to find myself crossing paths with.

Subsequently over the next 2 years I then had the chance to work between 3 different hotels and resorts+, and during that time was able to work almost every position you could think of, mostly because staff positions are very flexible, at least in the places I worked in.

Sometimes I was the accountant, sometimes I was working the bar, sometimes I was sitting at the reception desk, sometimes I was fixing the swimming pool pump…you get the idea.

Fast forward to last month, and the previous owner of the building I was staying in (as a guest/resident, not a staff member) decided to skip out of town and do a runner, owing close to the order of $26,000 (according to the landlord and other creditors I spoke to).

Since he had racked up all this debt, it meant that all the of housekeeping, kitchen, bar, management and reception staff hadn’t been paid their salaries, along with the landlord, subcontractors and basically everyone related to the business.

Personally, since I had grown rather fond of the staff since I had moved to this location, and not having an idea of what kind of project I wanted to find myself into next, I decided to try something out of the ordinary.

I reached out to the landlord and told them that I would take over the building as an interim manager until he found a new tenant, and then I’d hand it over to them.

Long long long story short, the landlord handed the business over to me and told me he’d only be okay with the deal if I took over the entire site, mostly because he lives 7 hours away from the city that this complex is situated in, and also because I am one of the very few expatriates here in SE Asia with many years of business experience in both Asia and “the west”.

And when I say he handed over the business to me, it was pretty much just that. No deposit, nothing upfront, and a very short term 1 year contract with an option to renew into a 5 year deal at the end…so while you can say I technically bought this business, it was done so purely on “human capital” and the acquisition process was anything but orthodox.

Regardless of how it all happened however, I am the owner of a new hotel and am stepping into this new phase of entrepreneurial life at this very moment and I am more than happy with how things have turned out as of now.

We often hear about learning lessons – but just as important is unlearning lessons. Have you ever had to unlearn a lesson?

Things are never the way they are.

Quick backstory, although I was adopted at the age of 6, my new parents divorced almost immediately afterwards and I ended up in the care of an elderly woman for a couple of years.

Fast forward a couple of decades and she was now in her 90s, I am just getting out of engineering school and I get word she’s recovering from a broken hip and needs a caretaker. So in a sweet form of justice (or so it felt), I now found myself able to return to the same house I had been taken into as a little orphaned child, only now I was the full time caretaker and a fully fledged educated young man or whatever you’d want to call me at the time.

Whatever you want to call it, it seemed perfect at the time not just in terms of a needs based circumstance, but also in a kind beautiful “come full circle” kind of way too.

However, it wasn’t without its challenges.

For example, I couldn’t really have a conventional job (since I needed to have the freedom to tend to her if she needed immediate attention) but at the same time there was a lot of down time where there wasn’t much to do, and on top of that, we were both living off of her pension which only covered food and utilities so although things were comfortable, they were also incredibly stagnant and boring most of the time (turns out 95 year old women don’t often have the best hearing or stamina to keep up a long conversation).

So I figured it would be a good idea to open my own mobile food stand in the parking lot of a nearby market (of which there were several dozen stands already) so I could bring a unique recipe and food type to the figurative table in the community, partially because I don’t mind being the smiling happy guy wearing a goofy outfit and chatting with everyone (problem of boredom now solved), and also of course because it offered the flexibility to work my own hours on the fly (income situation also solved).

It was perfect…or so I thought. Famous last words right?

Turns out, after 9 months of every imaginable runaround and delay that human kind could experience, I was eventually denied my food handler’s permit and subsequently unable to finally open my perfect dream cart.

Not only that, to add more salt into the already open wound caused by the dagger of bureaucratic inefficiency…I had since run almost completely out of money and was unable to remain as the caretaker for my dearest “grandma” and ultimately had turn care of her over to the state while I went off and found another source of income to support myself.

You can imagine that this left an incredibly bitter taste in my mouth for anything related to business related regulations, laws, policies, bureaucrats, etc. and for quite some time I was of the mindset that the little guy could never win if “big brother” had anything to say about it, and there really was no hope for anyone trying to do anything on their own terms.

It was actually this set of circumstances that sealed the fate in me deciding to permanently expatriate from the U.S. and led me to start exploring the world in earnest, searching for a new nest so to speak.

However, I wasn’t expecting to start any kind of business or even strive to make any kind of wealth in a meaningful way if I am being honest, because I had such an animosity towards building stability and long term wealth by undertaking a business endeavor at this point.

But surprise surprise, the East ain’t like the West…it’s a lot more business friendly.

And 15 years into my journey here, I have found myself as an automotive importer, motorcycle dealer, custom home designer, coffee and tea wholesaler, political activist, technical columnist for a mechanical journal, free range chicken farmer, and now the owner of a newly opened hostel/hotel.

Safe to say, not all countries are built the same, and some actually like their creative entrepreneurs.

So my words of encouragement to those who might be a bit DIS-couraged due to stagnancy and lack of forward progress in your own creative life…don’t fall into the trap of feeling like the entire world is against you, only the world you find yourself in at the present moment.

Sometimes the grass really IS greener on the other side. :)