Christiana Lougan buys a 5-employee, $300K SDE pool service business in LA

The Setup Christiana Lougan spent seven years inside home services startups before buying one herself. After consulting in New York, she joined Zocdoc on the strategy ops team, then took a ticket to Berlin for Homebell, a big-ticket home services lead platform growing fast in Germany. She moved back to open the Phoenix office, hired a team of 20, and watched the parent company file for bankruptcy nine months in. She landed at Handy Technologies, built partnerships with Wayfair, Walmart, Costco, and Crate & Barrel, stayed through the Angie acquisition, and eventually ran a performance marketing channel. Seven years in, she stopped. She took real time off. She heard the phrase "boring business" at a coworking-space talk, found Cody Sanchez and Buy Then Build, and went full-time on search in January 2024. Her criteria were specific. Home services, because she knew the space. A clearly articulable value-add thesis, not a vague "this can be optimized." Within a few hours of Los Angeles. Small enough that she could keep 70% ownership after any outside capital. The Deal RD Pool Spas and Fountains is a 40-plus year old pool service in Southern California. $675K revenue, roughly $300K SDE after Lougan added back the cost of a technician she would need to hire to replace the owner's billable hours. Five people total: four technicians on routes plus the owner, Robert, who held the California contractor's license and still ran high-ticket repair work. Lougan first saw the listing in February 2024. She liked it but wasn't ready to offer. The broker called. The seller liked her, there was an asking-price offer on the table, limited window. She submitted an LOI as an exercise. Six offers came in, two of them from other pool companies. She won on chemistry. Robert picked her because they clicked and he could see her running the business the way he had. Purchase price landed around $920K. Structure: 10% buyer cash, 85% SBA, 5% seller rollover equity. The structural wrinkle matters. Robert operated as a sole proprietor. You cannot do a partial buyout of a sole prop, and several banks told Lougan flatly that a license-holder seller on partial equity wasn't SBA-eligible. It is, post-2023 rule change. To thread it, Robert created an LLC as a condition of sale, assigned the business assets into it, and Lougan bought 95% of that LLC. Functionally asset-like (the 40-year sole-prop liability tail stays with him), legally an equity sale that preserves the contractor's license. Operating Moves Lougan did the opposite of the "change nothing for 90 days" advice every pool operator gave her. She took the j-curve all at once. Week two: rolled out route management software on top of what had been a pen-and-paper business, with pool-level profitability tracking for the first time in 40 years. Week three onward: turned over all four original technicians. Robert knew some of them needed to go but lacked a hiring funnel to replace them. Lougan built one. Her structural edge: commercial work pays enough per...