Cassi Niekamp bought a 38-year-old fence shop with no tracking and doubled output in 60 days

The Setup Cassi Niekamp came out of sales roles at a digital marketing startup and a small business consulting firm. Farm upbringing, analytical wiring, self-described sustainer rather than creator. A crisis of meaning pushed her toward acquisition entrepreneurship instead of climbing another corporate ladder. Bowden Fence was 38 years old when she found it. A 70-year-old owner in Columbus, Ohio, ready to exit. Eight employees, nearly half of them the owner's family. Revenue of $750K to $850K, 15% net margin, roughly $180K to $250K in annual profit before owner comp. Revenue history looked like rolling hills, not a staircase. 80% of the business was installation, 20% was design. The catch: the seller had never put formal tracking in place. No sale conversion rate. No clean split between commercial and residential. No scorecard. Just P&L statements and the owner's estimates. The Deal - Price: $1.2 million, SBA-financed - Included: operating business plus two acres of commercial property - Closed: June 2021 Cassi validated the underlying demand the only way she could given the data vacuum. She did Google research on fencing demand in the metro, consulted an attorney, and leaned on the P&L the seller did have. The real estate being in the deal mattered. It anchored the SBA collateral and removed landlord risk on day one. First 100 Days She walked in knowing nothing about fence installation and said so out loud. Her opening move was posture, not process: ask more questions than anyone else in the room, park the ownership ego. Concrete changes in the first stretch: - Switched the crew from a five-day week to four ten-hour days. Workers had historically been logging only 25 to 35 hours across five days. The compressed schedule gave them a buffer for weather delays and a real day off. - Introduced weekly team meetings. None had existed before. - Made production goals public. Numbers on the wall, shared with the whole crew. - Roughly 80% of employees responded positively to the new rhythm. She flagged one regret out loud: the staff should have met her earlier in the process. Surprise ownership on closing day is a friction tax she paid unnecessarily. Operating Lessons - Buy the real estate when it is part of the deal. Two acres of commercial dirt in Columbus is a balance sheet asset that outlasts any operational wobble. - You can run a shop without knowing the trade if you respect the people who do. Cassi's line was "I want to be the person asking the most questions and checking my ego at the door." - Family-heavy crews are a transition risk. When half the team is related to the seller, the seller's exit is their exit option too. Meet them before close. - Shortened, denser work weeks can unlock capacity in trades shops where the five-day schedule was mostly theater. The crew was already not hitting 40. Formalizing that reality bought goodwill. - A business with no tracking is not broken, it is just opaque. The...