Alex Holley took 100 coffees in 3 months and walked out with $800K SDE

The Setup Deal flow in a single mid-size metro is a trickle, not a flood. That is the core problem Alex Holley solved in Louisville. Rather than wait on brokered listings or scroll BizBuySell, he treated search like outbound sales: one meeting per day, every day, for about three months. Roughly 100 conversations with bankers, CPAs, wealth managers, business owners, and anyone who might know an owner ready to exit. The meetings were not thinly veiled pitches. They were relationship builds, most leading nowhere directly, a few leading to referrals, one leading to a closed deal. The business he landed is unusual in that it is really two businesses under one roof: B-Dry Systems of Louisville, a basement waterproofing franchise, and Ram Jack Louisville, a foundation repair franchise. Same crews, same trucks, same phones, two distinct problem sets for the homeowner. When a house has water in the basement, the two most common root causes are drainage and foundation movement. Owning both brands lets one inspection solve the whole problem instead of punting half the job to a competitor. The Deal Public numbers on the combined business: about $4.5M in annual revenue, roughly 20% margins, SDE north of $800K. Purchase price and financing structure are not disclosed in the source episode, but the size and profile fit a standard self-funded SBA 7(a) profile. Two franchise licenses transfer with the deal, which means a franchisor approval step on both sides in addition to the normal diligence lift. The relevant structural fact is that Holley did not find this deal through a broker. He found it through the 97th or 98th handshake of a disciplined, daily calendar. The seller was not shopping the business broadly. The referral came because Holley had been in enough rooms that someone thought of him when the owner started to hint about stepping back. Operating Moves The dual-franchise structure creates a specific operating advantage that a first-time operator should exploit immediately. The cost of a truck roll and an inspection is fixed. The revenue per truck roll goes up meaningfully when the inspector can quote both waterproofing and foundation work off the same visit. Attach rate becomes the KPI that matters more than raw lead count. Every inbound call that turns into an inspection should be scored on whether the cross-brand opportunity was identified, quoted, and won. The second move is franchise leverage. Both B-Dry and Ram Jack come with national brand recognition, warranties that homeowners trust, and marketing co-op dollars. A new operator should lean into that rather than try to build an independent identity. The franchises already ran the SEO, the PPC templates, the warranty language. Pull the levers the franchisor gives you before inventing new ones. Operating Lessons - Treat local search as outbound sales. One meeting per day is not aspirational; it is the floor. A hundred conversations in a quarter is achievable and statistically likely to produce at least one seriously qualified seller. - Your networking list is wider than you think....