Brett Kennedy doubled a $250K SDE Atlanta moving company through a housing downturn

The Setup Brett Kennedy closed on Atlanta Furniture Taxi in March 2022, a local moving company generating roughly $250K in seller discretionary earnings. Moving is the kind of small-business category searchers often overlook: asset-light on paper, labor-heavy in reality, and tightly coupled to one of the most cyclical macro inputs in the economy (residential real estate turnover). He bought near the top of a housing cycle that would invert on him within months. The Deal Small SDE, local trade business, Atlanta metro. The profile fits the self-funded searcher playbook: a price point reachable through SBA plus seller paper, a business small enough that the owner wore every hat, and a category where operational upside comes from systems the prior owner never built. Kennedy stepped into the cab himself when crews were short in the early months, which is both the honest reality of a $250K SDE trade business and the exact trap that prevents it from scaling. First 100 Days The first stretch was survival mode. Within months of closing, mortgage rates ripped from roughly 3% to 7%+, housing transactions collapsed, and moving demand went with them. Kennedy has described the period as a "bloody knife fight," language that reads as hyperbole only if you have not personally made payroll in a demand shock. The operational pivot was straightforward in concept and punishing in execution: stop being the backup driver, hire an operations manager, and build enough process that the business runs when the owner is not in the yard. Operating Moves - Hired a dedicated operations manager to own day-to-day dispatch, crew scheduling, and customer flow. - Pulled himself out of the truck permanently. Owner-as-floater is a tax on every strategic hour. - Built the organizational scaffolding (roles, handoffs, accountability) that a founder-run shop typically lacks. - Kept the business cash-flowing through a housing down-cycle that pushed weaker competitors out of the market, setting up share gains on the recovery. - By year two, signed an LOI on a second, larger acquisition to compound on the installed ops layer. Operating Lessons - If your business is levered to mortgage rates, underwrite the rate-shock scenario before close. Moving, roofing, flooring, and any trade keyed to home turnover moves with the 30-year, not with your forecast. - The owner-in-the-truck reflex kills the owner-above-the-truck job. Hire the ops manager earlier than feels comfortable; the first 90 days of overhead buy the next 18 months of leverage. - Doubling revenue during a category recession is a share-taking story, not a demand story. The moat is showing up reliably while competitors cut crews and miss jobs. - A second acquisition is the natural compounding move once the operations layer exists. Bolt a weaker-run competitor onto your dispatch, branding, and crew pipeline, and the synergies are real rather than spreadsheet theater. - The psychological tax is not optional. Kennedy's language ("lonely," "merciless," feels like ten years in two) is the unglamorous half of self-funded search that most deal memos never account for. **Where They Are...