Bolivian Tech PM Buys $436K Seattle Plant Service to Fit Motherhood

The Setup Ana Lia Barragan grew up in Bolivia, studied international management in Germany on full scholarship, earned a master's in the US, and built a tech career at broadcasters, Amazon, and a rocket company in Seattle, leading data science teams and working as a product manager. Two young kids later, the corporate ladder stopped fitting. She wanted schedule control, professional ambition, and a job that did not belong to a performance review cycle. In January 2025 she joined the New Majority Capital Beta Accelerator. In February she quit her corporate job. During the program she fired out 5 LOIs and got 3 countersigns. By July 2025 she had closed on Kelly Green, a Seattle commercial indoor-plant service founded in 1997, serving 30 customers across 61 locations. The Deal - Purchase price: $436,000, roughly 2.35x SDE - SBA loan: $387,000 (about 90%) - Personal equity: $43,600 - Seller note: $21,800 (5%) - TTM revenue: $385,000 (2024) - SDE: $185,000 - Gross margin: 48% - Recurring revenue at claim: 90%. Actual: 70%. - Employees: zero. Owner and husband ran every route. The seller note was the clever part. The seller wanted a clean retirement, not paper. Ana Lia offered asking price plus 5%, and structured that 5% premium as the seller note. Framed as gravy on top of the number the seller already wanted, the note became a yes instead of a fight. First 100 Days She inherited a business where the previous owner was the product. Every customer relationship, every route, every plant-care judgment call lived in one head. Day one she was in a van watering plants. She and her husband started building custom AI software to track operations and prep the business for its first real hire. She priced the tooling not as a moonshot but as the prerequisite for ever being off a route. Then a customer representing 20% of revenue left after their internal leadership changed. A single account loss of that size at month four would sink most searchers. She back-filled it and then some. Operating Moves - Bought a small competitor with free cash flow, adding $2,500 in monthly recurring revenue - Lifted recurring revenue ratio from the real 70% to roughly 85% by leaning into contracted accounts and letting transactional work drift - Grew top-line 6% above acquisition baseline even after the 20% customer loss - Began shifting from owner-delivered service to documented routes a future tech could run Operating Lessons - Ask for invoices in diligence. Sellers guard them because they feel personal, but invoices are the only honest read on recurring revenue. A 90% claim turned into 70% reality here, and that gap was visible in the invoice pile all along. - Size the deal to your alternative. Ana Lia deliberately capped her SDE target near $300K so the debt would not trap her. If the business broke, she could walk back into a PM role. That ceiling was a feature, not a compromise. - Use the seller note to buy...