Andrew Kurzrok Bought a 44-Year-Old Ductwork Shop to Stop Traveling 200 Days a Year

The Setup Andrew Kurzrok had run a 600-person business and an 1,800-person business as a general manager at Amphenol, a Fortune 500 interconnect manufacturer. Before that he spent six years as a research scientist at Department of Energy national labs, then earned his MBA at Yale under search fund professor A.J. Wasserstein. The corporate trajectory was working. The travel schedule was not. After his first child arrived, the 200 days a year on airplanes stopped being an acceptable price. He wanted a business he could drive to and sleep at home every night. That meant a 1.5-hour radius from Northern Virginia and a self-funded search built around one constraint: geography. The Deal Hopewell Sheet Metal Manufacturing has fabricated custom commercial ductwork in Hagerstown, Maryland since 1981. Twenty-one or twenty-two employees. Mid-six-figure SDE. The customers are architects and engineers who need custom HVAC ductwork for commercial buildings, the kind of work that does not automate well and does not ship economically across long distances. Two natural moats: customization and freight. Getting in the door took persistence. Email went nowhere. Cold calls converted at roughly 50% to meetings. Andrew called the receptionist several times, left a voicemail, and the seller's wife pushed the owner to call him back. The owner was retirement age and ready to transition. Deal structure reflected the cyclicality of commercial construction: - Approximately 25% equity down, well above the 10% SBA minimum - Roughly 75% SBA debt - Working capital rolled into the term loan - Separate line of credit for operational flexibility - Equity funded by proceeds from Amphenol stock options He explicitly chose not to optimize for IRR. The mandate was cash flow and a long-term hold, with a bigger equity cushion so a construction downturn would not break the business. First 100 Days Four months in, the playbook is deliberately boring. Crawl, walk, run. Retain the employees. Retain the customers. Learn the fabrication floor before changing anything on it. No hero moves, no imported corporate playbook dropped on a 44-year-old shop. Andrew commutes 75 minutes each way to keep the promise he made to himself about sleeping at home. Operating Lessons - Size equity to the industry's downside, not the lender's floor. Commercial construction is cyclical; a 25% injection in a cyclical business is not over-capitalization, it is insurance. - Split working capital from the term loan with a dedicated line of credit. A shop that quotes custom jobs needs flex, not a fixed draw. - Cold calling beats email for owner-operator deals. Andrew's 50% meeting conversion on calls contrasted with dead-letter email outreach. The receptionist is a gatekeeper and an ally. - Use the spouse. In owner-operator businesses, the seller's partner often has more leverage on the transition decision than the seller does. - Geography is a legitimate filter. Narrowing to a 1.5-hour radius shrinks deal flow but raises match quality on the life you actually want to live. - Natural moats beat clever moats. Shipping economics and customization keep national competitors out of...