Buying a Business Is a Permanent Decision. Make It With a Disciplined Process.

Martin spent twenty-three years inside a Fortune 500 logistics business, fifteen of those in operations leadership across four regions. By his early fifties he had a corporate seat he could no longer see himself sitting in for another decade, two children mid-college, a paid-off house in University Park, and a brokerage account that was the result of fifteen years of RSU vesting and a clean equity-comp window during a 2023 spin-off. Net of his college-funding obligation and his post-acquisition working-capital reserve, Martin had roughly three million in deployable liquid net worth, large enough to cover an SBA equity injection on a four-to-five-million-dollar deal plus a meaningful working-capital reserve, small enough to keep SBA 7(a) “credit elsewhere” tests clean. He had read every search-fund book and every operator-acquisition memoir on the shelf. He had spent eighteen months looking at retail listing platforms on his own and had concluded, correctly, that the targets he could actually source from a public listing were either overpriced, structurally broken, or both. Martin called CGK on a Thursday afternoon after a referral from a Dallas-area private wealth advisor who had worked with CGK on a prior transaction.

The first call was forty-six minutes. A senior CGK principal walked Martin through what the ‘Micro Private Equity Program’ actually does, what a defensible mandate looks like, and what kinds of industries his capital, his operating background, and his geographic preferences could realistically reach. Residential plumbing and drain services in the Dallas / Plano corridor came up in the second twenty minutes. The industry has recurring service-agreement revenue, sticky customer relationships, an aging-owner demographic in the seller pool, a relatively predictable working-capital cycle, and a labor model that respects an operations background like Martin’s. Martin scheduled the intake conversation for the following Tuesday.

The intake ran seventy-eight minutes. The mandate that came out of it was specific: residential and light-commercial plumbing in the North Dallas / Plano corridor, revenue band of five to ten million, SDE band of nine hundred thousand to one-point-six, recurring service-agreement base of at least twenty-five percent, a non-owner technician bench of at least twenty W-2 staff, customer concentration with no single account over twelve percent of revenue, and a clean enough financial picture to support an SBA 7(a) underwriting. Capital structure plan: SBA 7(a) senior debt on the cap stack ceiling, Martin’s equity sized to the SBA equity-injection requirement, a seller note for the remainder, and a working-capital line of credit from the same SBA 7(a) lender to fund the post-close cash cycle. CGK started sourcing the next day.

Sourcing ran on both channels. CGK had two active sell-side engagements in adjacent industries (one HVAC, one electrical) but no active sell-side engagement in residential plumbing that fit Martin’s band. The off-market channel surfaced four targets in the first eight weeks: one too small, one a single-owner book without a real bench, one with a customer-concentration problem the owner did not initially disclose, and one (the eventual target) running a residential and light-commercial book at six-point-eight million in revenue, one-point-four in SDE, a thirty-two-person W-2 bench, eleven trucks, and a recurring service-agreement base that ran forty-one percent of revenue. The owner was sixty-three, in good health, and had been thinking about a sale for eighteen months without having engaged a broker. The senior CGK principal made the approach on a Wednesday. The seller agreed to a confidential conversation on the following Monday. Confidentiality terms with the seller were agreed two weeks later, and the CIM and the CGK valuation read landed in Martin’s inbox the same week.

The CGK valuation read, anchored by Greg Knox (CFA charterholder), showed Martin the band the asking price actually deserved given the recurring service-agreement base premium, the bench depth, the customer-concentration profile (cleanly diversified, no single account over seven percent), and the trailing twelve months. Martin’s LOI came in at the middle of the band, cleanly defensible, with an exclusivity period that gave him ninety days to complete financial diligence and the SBA-required third-party business valuation, and an escrow holdback keyed to specific service-agreement renewal milestones in the first eighteen months. The seller broker pushed back on the escrow structure. CGK held the line, explained the SBA-side underwriting logic, and showed the seller broker comparable structures from three closed transactions in the same industry. The LOI was countersigned ten days after submission. Diligence ran fifty-two days. The buyer-side financial diligence surfaced one SDE add-back the seller had taken too aggressively (a personal vehicle expense run through the company) and one that had been understated (a non-recurring legal expense from a since-resolved partnership matter). Net of the two adjustments, the SDE bridge held, and the SBA-required third-party business valuation came in inside the LOI band. Wire hit on a Tuesday at 11:38 a.m., ten months and four days from Martin’s first call to CGK. Martin spent the next ninety days running customer notification calls, employee retention conversations, and the working-capital settlement with the seller’s CFO. The bench stayed intact. The seller stayed on for a six-month transition consulting role at one day per week. The recurring service-agreement base renewed at ninety-three percent through the first eighteen months.

“I had read every book on buying a business. What I needed was a real principal who had actually closed transactions in the band I was targeting and could tell me which targets were real.”

Elena and Joon-Ho met at a top-five MBA program in 2022 and launched the search fund in early 2024 with a healthcare services thesis. Elena had spent five years pre-MBA in healthcare consulting at a Big Three firm, two of those embedded with a behavioral health platform on a buy-side diligence engagement. Joon-Ho had spent six years pre-MBA in healthcare investment banking, working on roll-up transactions in dental and dermatology. The fund’s twelve HNW LPs had committed combined acquisition equity of fourteen million dollars and operating capital of five hundred and twenty-five thousand for the search itself. The mandate, at launch, was a healthcare services platform with three to six million in EBITDA, a Southeast US footprint, a regulated industry with high payer-mix discipline, and a clinical founder willing to roll meaningful equity forward into the new HoldCo.

Elena and Joon-Ho had been on CGK’s institutional-buyer distribution list for eleven months when the Nashville opportunity surfaced. Their acquisition criteria on the distribution list were specific: Southeast US outpatient behavioral health, three to five outpatient locations, fifteen to twenty-five million in revenue, three-and-a-half to five million in EBITDA, in-network commercial payer mix of at least sixty percent, a clinical founder willing to roll at least ten percent forward, and a regulatory profile clean enough to pass a senior-lender behavioral health underwriting. They had walked away from three prior targets they had sourced independently (one with a payer-mix problem, one with a clinical-founder dependency they could not see a way around, one with an acquisition entity structure that would not have qualified for the senior debt they needed). CGK did not run a parallel buy-side search for Elena and Joon-Ho. The firm’s role for the search-fund profile is to maintain the distribution-list relationship and reach out when a real sell-side engagement matches the buyer’s defined criteria.

The Nashville sell-side engagement came in through CGK’s healthcare services pipeline. A clinical founder of a four-location Nashville / Franklin / Murfreesboro outpatient behavioral health practice (eighteen-and-a-half million in revenue, four-point-one million in EBITDA, sixty-two W-2 clinical and support staff, seventy-one percent in-network commercial payer mix) retained CGK on the sell-side after a referral from his accountant. The seller was fifty-eight, two years out from his ideal exit horizon, and willing to roll twelve percent forward into the HoldCo with a three-year clinical-leadership commitment. CGK built the CIM, mapped the qualified buyer universe (search funders with healthcare services theses, behavioral health platform consolidators with geographic gaps in the Southeast, regional PE platforms with adjacent-industry consolidation activity), and reached out to roughly forty qualified buyers on the distribution list. Elena and Joon-Ho’s team responded within three days, signed the seller-side NDA, and received the CIM that same week.

Elena and Joon-Ho ran their own diligence prep on the CIM with their LP-side advisors. Two other search-fund teams and one behavioral health platform consolidator submitted competing LOIs in the process. Elena and Joon-Ho’s LOI came in at the middle of the defensible band, with an exclusivity period of seventy-five days, an escrow holdback of twelve percent over twenty-four months keyed to the SUD license renewal, payer-mix retention, and senior clinician retention, and a rollover equity slice for the clinical founder of twelve percent with governance protections written into the HoldCo operating agreement. The seller chose Elena and Joon-Ho’s LOI over the competing search-fund LOI and the platform consolidator LOI because the rollover-equity terms, the clinical-leadership continuity commitment, and the post-close operating model best matched what the seller wanted for the practice he had built. The seller, not CGK, made the selection. Diligence ran seventy-nine days, the longest of any composite on this page, because the regulated industry required a parallel commercial diligence, clinical-credentialing audit, payer-contract review, and SUD compliance audit on top of the standard financial and QofE workstreams. The CGK sell-side coordinator sequenced the workstreams on the seller’s side so the seller would not lose the deal to diligence drag.

One renegotiation came up around a small payer-mix concentration finding mid-diligence. Both sides signed off in three days. Wire hit on a Friday at 2:14 p.m., roughly seven months from Elena and Joon-Ho’s CIM receipt. The clinical founder stayed in his named clinical-leadership role under the new HoldCo structure with the rolled equity slice in place. Elena moved into the operating CEO seat on day one. Joon-Ho moved into the CFO seat. The eight LPs from the original commit who had asked for board seats got two of them. The remaining four came on as preferred investors without governance.

“We had been on the CGK distribution list for almost a year with our acquisition criteria. The Nashville process came to us because the criteria matched. We won the LOI because the seller wanted what we were proposing on rollover, clinical continuity, and post-close operating model.”

Austin runs corporate development at a Charlotte-headquartered PE-backed home services platform that has done fourteen tuck-in acquisitions in the past four years across the Southeast and Mid-Atlantic. The platform is sponsored by an upper-middle-market PE fund with an explicit consolidation thesis in the residential HVAC, plumbing, and electrical trades. By mid-2026 the platform had a defined geographic gap in the Louisville and Lexington corridors, and the sponsor had agreed at the most recent quarterly board to expand the delayed-draw acquisition facility specifically to support tuck-ins in that band.

Austin’s platform had been on CGK’s institutional-buyer distribution list for two years when the Louisville opportunity surfaced. The platform’s acquisition criteria on the distribution list were specific: combined residential HVAC and plumbing operators in defined geographic gaps (Louisville, Lexington, and a handful of Mid-Atlantic markets), ten to fifteen million in revenue, one-point-eight to two-point-five million in EBITDA, a recurring maintenance-agreement base of at least thirty-five percent, a clean enough financial picture to fit into the platform’s integrated accounting system within ninety days post-close, and an owner-operator willing to stay through a six-month transition. CGK was not running a parallel off-market buy-side search for Austin’s platform. The firm’s role for the PE-backed-platform profile is to maintain the distribution-list relationship and reach out when a real sell-side engagement matches the geographic-gap thesis.

The Louisville sell-side engagement came in through CGK’s home services pipeline. The owner-operator of a Louisville / Jeffersontown / St. Matthews combined HVAC and plumbing operator (eleven-point-six million in revenue, two-point-one million in EBITDA, fifty-four W-2 employees, nineteen trucks, forty-four percent recurring maintenance-agreement base) retained CGK on the sell-side. He was fifty-seven, had owned the firm for twenty-two years (acquired it from the original founder in 2004), and was actively looking at a sale within twelve months. He had previously been called directly by two PE-backed consolidators and walked away from both because the structure and the post-close operating model did not respect what he had built. CGK’s sell-side approach, the structured competitive process, and the seller-side NDA framework were specifically what gave the owner-operator the confidence to engage on a sale to a consolidator at all. CGK built the CIM, mapped the qualified buyer universe (combined-trade PE-backed platforms with geographic gaps in the Louisville and Lexington corridors, regional independents looking to expand, strategic acquirers), and reached out to roughly twenty-five qualified buyers on the distribution list. Austin’s platform recognized the Louisville opportunity as a direct geographic-gap fit within twenty-four hours of the outreach, signed the seller-side NDA, and received the CIM the same week.

Austin’s team ran their standardized platform diligence prep on the CIM. The platform’s standardized diligence framework allowed the team to compress the LOI prep cycle meaningfully. Three other PE-backed platforms and one regional independent submitted competing LOIs in the process. Austin’s LOI came in at the upper-middle of the defensible band (the platform’s strategic premium reflected the geographic-gap thesis), with an exclusivity period of sixty days, an escrow holdback of ten percent over twelve months keyed to maintenance-agreement renewal milestones, and a rollover equity slice of eight percent for the selling owner-operator into the platform HoldCo. The seller chose Austin’s LOI over the three competing platform LOIs and the regional independent LOI because the platform’s operating model (combined-trade branding that retains the local brand, comp-step protections for the technician bench, a regional manager seat for the selling owner-operator, and an integration cadence that runs ninety days rather than thirty) best matched what the seller wanted for the firm he had built. Diligence ran thirty-nine days, the shortest of any composite on this page, because Austin’s platform had a standardized diligence framework that mapped cleanly onto the CGK sell-side diligence sequencing. The QofE engagement, the commercial diligence, and the IT and cyber diligence ran in parallel rather than in sequence. The platform’s senior debt facility had pre-committed underwriting capacity for tuck-ins in this band, which removed one of the slowest workstreams from the critical path.

The closing coordination ran through the platform’s existing integration playbook, with CGK’s sell-side coordinator holding the calendar against the seller-side parties (seller counsel, seller’s accountant, escrow agent, lease landlord). Customer notification was handled jointly by the selling owner-operator and the platform’s regional marketing team. The technician bench stayed intact at the existing comp structure with the platform’s comp-step protections layered on. The integrated accounting system migration was scheduled for day sixty-one post-close. Wire hit on a Thursday at 9:51 a.m., roughly four months from Austin’s CIM receipt. The selling owner-operator stayed in a regional-manager seat for the first eighteen months and chose to extend at the end of that window. Austin’s platform has since reached back out to CGK to confirm continued interest in additional Louisville and Lexington tuck-ins through the distribution list.

“My platform had been on the CGK distribution list for two years with our geographic-gap criteria. The Louisville opportunity came to us because the criteria matched. Our standardized diligence framework and the CGK sell-side coordinator’s sequencing meant the diligence workstreams ran in parallel without dropping anything. Four months, CIM receipt to wire.”