Brian Seeling: Buying a Tampa Commercial Kitchen Repair Shop for $1.64M

The Setup

Brian Seeling spent 15 years in IT services. He co-founded an MSP and grew it to $5.5M over seven years, then did 18 months as an exec at a software startup. Four kids, Northern Virginia, no M&A experience, and a thesis that the next chapter belonged in the trades rather than another SaaS deck.

He landed on PGM Service via BizBuySell. Founded in 2008, PGM services the 'hot side' of commercial kitchens (ranges, ovens, fryers, not refrigeration) across the Tampa metro. At diligence it was doing $2.6M in revenue and just over $500K in SDE, with 4,000+ mom-and-pop restaurant accounts plus a handful of franchise logos. The seller was a 40-year industry technician who still ran emergency calls himself and trained every senior tech. A single GM/office manager held the back office together.

The Deal

- Purchase price: $1.64M (asking was $1.8M) - Multiple: ~3.3x SDE - SBA (Pioneer Capital Advisory): ~$1.25M (75%) - Seller note: ~$164K (10%) - Equity partners including Capital Pad: ~$246K (15%) - Working capital financed: $100K - Total equity deployed by Brian plus the Capital Pad investor: ~$350K

LOI to close took 11 months. QoE surfaced a 20-25% revenue discrepancy and the deal broke. Brian used the downtime to attend SMBootcamp. The seller came back to the table during the bootcamp and they closed shortly after. The industry switch and the discrepancy pushed the equity check higher than a clean deal would have needed.

First 100 Days

Brian resisted the urge to rip out the commission model or rotate the GM. Instead he went after the professional scaffolding the business lacked:

- Migrated everyone to Office 365 with real email addresses - Installed a modern phone system with IVR and extensions, killing the star-67 manual forwarding that had routed emergency calls to the owner's house at 7 PM - Rolled out mobile device management across the field - Standardized communications so the business 'looked like a $30M company' to franchise buyers

Change management was the actual work. He walked the GM through each change slowly, framed everything as 'fewer 7 PM calls at home,' and let the seller (who stayed on in a training role) see the upgrades land before pushing the next one.

Operating Moves

He kept what was working. The commission structure (base 10% below market, monthly targets at $30K and $35K with tiered commissions) is rare in commercial service and it was filtering for A-player techs. He left it alone.

Growth came from three vectors:

1. Preferred Membership Program. Launched summer 2023 as the preventive maintenance wrapper. One, two, or four visits a year with priority dispatch and labor/parts discounts. PM had been 5% of revenue under the prior owner. It is now materially higher and each PM visit surfaces additional repair tickets from the same 4,000-account base. 2.