Andrew Stordeur Bought a $700K EBITDA Cedar Furniture Maker With Almost No Money Down

The Setup All Things Cedar is a 25-year-old outdoor furniture manufacturer based in Calgary, Alberta. By the time Andrew Stordeur came across it, the business had a long operating history, a defined product category (cedar outdoor furniture), and clean cash flow of roughly $700,000 in EBITDA. That is the profile most North American searchers dream about: established, profitable, niche, and too small for PE to care about. Andrew is Canadian, which turns out to matter a lot for how this deal got done. Most of the US search community defaults to SBA 7(a) as the financing primitive. SBA does not exist north of the border. Canadian acquirers have to assemble the capital stack the hard way: seller paper, commercial bank debt, and whatever personal equity they can scrape together. The Deal The headline is that Andrew bought a $700K EBITDA business with almost none of his own money in. The structure that made it work: - Roughly 35% of the purchase price carried by the seller as a note. - The balance financed by Canadian commercial banks. - Minimal buyer equity check. - No SBA, no personal guarantee structure like the US equivalent. The seller note is the load-bearing piece. In Canadian acquisition lending, banks want to see skin in the game and subordinated capital behind them. A 35% seller note does both jobs at once. It signals seller confidence in the continuing business, it sits below the bank in the stack, and it fills the gap that would otherwise need to come from the buyer's personal balance sheet or outside equity. This is a playbook US searchers underuse even when they have access to SBA. A motivated seller financing a third of the price can replace a chunk of the SBA equity injection and dramatically lower the buyer's at-risk capital. Operating Moves The episode focuses more on deal mechanics than a detailed 100-day plan, but the relevant operator context is clear: - Inherited a 25-year-old brand with established distribution and product. - Stepped into an owner-operator seat at a young age with limited acquisition capital. - Took on meaningful debt service from day one, so cash discipline had to be real. The business is a physical-product manufacturer, which means working capital (raw cedar, WIP, finished inventory) is a live issue every season. Outdoor furniture is seasonal. Sell-through compresses into spring and summer, but you build inventory through winter. Any operator walking in has to model the cash cycle carefully or the bank covenant becomes a problem before the product cycle does. Operating Lessons - Seller financing is not a fallback. Treat it as a primary tool. A 30-40% seller note changes the buyer's required equity and often tilts bank underwriting in your favor. - Non-US operators should stop benchmarking against SBA terms. Canadian and other commonwealth banks will lend against cash flow if the seller stays in the stack. The game is different, not worse. - Age of business is a underwriting asset. A 25-year operating history de-risks the...