Carlo Santelli bought a $13M fastener manufacturer with no cash, no PG, and no equity partners
A former PE associate stacked sale-leaseback and asset-based lending to close a $3.5M EBITDA deal and walk away with a fee at the table.
The Setup
Carlo Santelli came into search with an unusual toolkit. Ivy League degree, investment banking on Wall Street, then a stint in private equity. He had seen how institutional buyers structure deals and decided that the same playbook (asset-based lending, sale-leaseback, creative senior debt) was available to an individual operator willing to do the work. What he did not have was a war chest. So he built a thesis around businesses where the balance sheet could finance its own purchase.
Triem Industries fit the thesis. A decades-old industrial fasteners manufacturer (screws, nuts, bolts) with $13M in revenue and $3.5M in EBITDA. Real machines, real receivables, real inventory, and real estate the seller owned alongside the operating business. Those hard assets were the unlock.
The Deal
Headline structure: $0 of Carlo's own cash, no personal guarantee, no outside equity investors, and a fee paid to the buyer at closing.
The mechanics:
- Sale-leaseback on the real estate. The seller owned the building. Carlo arranged for a real estate investor to buy it at close and lease it back to the operating company on a long-term lease. That pulled a large chunk of purchase price off the operating company's books and into a separate financing stack. - Asset-based lending against receivables, inventory, and equipment. An ABL facility funded the balance of the purchase price. ABL lenders underwrite collateral, not the buyer's net worth, which is how Carlo sidestepped a personal guarantee. -
A free VantageOS account unlocks the complete case study, plus the other cases in the Almanac and the Knowledge Library. No credit card.