Chris Williams Bought a $3M Bookkeeping Firm With an SBA Loan After Walking Away From Traditional Search

The Setup Chris Williams took the scenic route to ownership. Two years as a New York investment banker. Five-plus years at TPG buying real estate businesses. Then Stanford GSB, where he joined the search fund cohort planning to raise a traditional fund, find a target, and run it with a formal board. The traditional path didn't close. Deals fell apart, targets weren't right, or the math didn't work. Rather than force it, Chris stayed open to other structures. He pivoted to self-funded with SBA financing, accepting the personal guarantee in exchange for speed, flexibility, and a wider target pool. The Deal The target was System Six Strategic Bookkeeping & Analysis, a fully remote bookkeeping and financial back-office firm based loosely out of the Tahoe region. - Revenue: $3M - EBITDA: $1M (35-40% margin) - Clients: ~150 - Churn: 10-20% annually - Team: fully remote, distributed Financing came via SBA 7(a) with a personal guarantee. Close: July 2021. One detail worth flagging. Chris's first outreach to the seller went nowhere. He kept the relationship warm and circled back months later. That second conversation is the one that built trust and got a deal to the table. Search is a pipeline game, not a single-shot game. First 100 Days Chris didn't come in swinging at operations. The priorities were boring on purpose: - Update systems, workflows, and tech stack. The firm had been run on legacy tooling; modernizing the back-end unlocked capacity without adding headcount. - Allocate 50% of his own time to sales. A bookkeeping firm losing 10-20% of clients annually needs a growth engine or it bleeds out quietly. - Stabilize the team. A fully remote services business lives or dies on retention of the people who actually do the work. - Plan a Q2 sales hire so Chris could step off the bag and push into vertical expansion. Operating Moves The move that stands out: Chris shifted billing cadence from monthly retainers to weekly billing. For a services firm with recurring labor cost, that compresses the cash conversion cycle meaningfully. Payroll runs every two weeks; if you collect every week instead of every month, working capital stops being a constraint on growth. Second move: he leaned on informal investor-mentors instead of a traditional search fund board. No quarterly formal meetings, but real phone calls with operators who'd done it before. For a first-time CEO, that relationship density mattered more than formal governance. Operating Lessons - Don't marry the search model. Traditional, self-funded, independent sponsor, they all get to ownership. Rigidity on structure costs deals. - Re-approach dead leads. A no in month one is not a no in month eight. Sellers' circumstances move; yours should too. - Remote services firms are systems businesses. If the workflow tooling is old, that's a lever, not a risk. - Weekly billing beats monthly for labor-heavy services. Working capital freed up this way funds growth without dilution. - Founder-CEO sales time is non-negotiable in year one. You cannot delegate understanding of why customers...