Chris Munn Bought an $800K Tampa Cleaning Company and Ran It From Los Angeles

The Setup Chris Munn came into small-business acquisition the long way. Before the search he had built a 30-unit multifamily portfolio, most of it managed across state lines. That experience mattered more than it sounds. Running apartments in cities he did not live in taught him how to hire operators, write systems, and resist the urge to touch the thing every day. When he pivoted to buying an operating business, 'remote by default' was already in his bones. He spent roughly nine months in serious search mode. The process was less about finding the perfect company and more about building reps: modeling deals he would never close, rehearsing diligence questions, sitting with financials until the fear dropped out. By the time a real deal surfaced, the muscle was there. The Deal The target was a Tampa Bay commercial cleaning company priced around $800,000. Recurring contract revenue, recession-resistant demand, an owner who was already hands-off, and a sitting general manager. From a remote-operator filter, it checked every box. Chris closed as COVID hit, which is a sentence that reads worse than it played out: commercial cleaning became one of the few services customers actively wanted more of, and the transition benefited from a GM who already ran the day-to-day. Financing involved SBA, though Chris' larger point on capital is philosophical rather than structural. After one close he stopped pacing his deals to lender comfort. 'We are going to move at the pace I want to move. If a bank wants to work with that, great.' The search reps had shifted the power dynamic. First 100 Days The post-close plan was stabilize, not sprint. COVID removed any temptation to run a classic 100-day playbook of pricing moves and org redesign. Chris leaned on the inherited GM, kept the client base calm, and used the remote distance as a forcing function against micromanagement. His framing: being 2,500 miles away creates a better business environment because you cannot default to presence as management. Operating Lessons - Buy bigger than the spreadsheet says you can afford. Within three months Chris had concluded the business was too small to carry the management layer he actually needed. Smaller deals do not generate the margin dollars to hire a real number two, which means the owner is the number two by default. - Key-employee risk is the risk. Losing a GM or a lead supervisor in a services business can take three to four months to backfill, and personality fit with the rest of the team is not something diligence surfaces. Protect and overpay the irreplaceable. - Reps compress fear. Nine months of modeling deals he did not buy was not wasted time. It was the training that let him underwrite and close the one he did buy without flinching. - Organic growth beats acquisitive growth when you can get it. His framing: organic is clean, acquisition is fast but messy. Most operators discover this after the second integration; he had the self-awareness to say it out loud...