CPA Buys a 3-Person Electrical Shop in Bend to Engineer a Life, Not a Return

The Setup Dan Drake is a CPA. He and his wife, raised in the Midwest and working in Seattle, decided they wanted to raise their kids in Bend, Oregon. That single decision shaped every subsequent choice in the search. Bend is a small market. The universe of sellable businesses inside a tight geographic radius is thin, and the price-quality curve gets ugly fast once you refuse to relocate for the deal. Most searchers optimize on size or returns, then negotiate geography. Drake inverted it. Geography was fixed. Size, industry, and deal quality were the variables he was willing to flex on. The Deal Drake bought Industrial Applied Electric (IAE), a 3-person electrical contractor in Bend generating approximately $140K in seller's discretionary earnings. By search-community standards this is a micro deal. It is below the threshold where an SBA 7(a) loan makes economic sense for most acquirers after debt service, and the owner-operator salary absorbs most of the cash flow. The tradeoff was explicit. A $140K SDE electrical shop in Bend buys him: - A job he controls - A place in the Central Oregon business community - Optionality to grow into a larger platform over time - Schedule flexibility during the years his kids are small What it does not buy him is immediate wealth creation. Drake appears to have accepted that trade deliberately. Operating Moves With only three employees, the operating lever is almost entirely Drake himself. The typical playbook at this size: - Owner plugs into estimating and customer communication to free the lead electrician for billable hours - Systematize scheduling and invoicing so cash conversion tightens - Introduce basic financial hygiene (job costing, AR aging, gross margin per job type) that a CPA can install in weeks - Pick one customer segment to concentrate on (industrial service work, commercial tenant improvements, or residential service) rather than take every call The CPA background is the unfair advantage here. Most sub-$200K SDE trades shops are run on memory and a shoebox of invoices. Imposing a real chart of accounts, weekly cash flow, and margin visibility on a business this size usually surfaces five to ten points of hidden gross margin within a year. Operating Lessons - If geography is a hard constraint, accept that the deal will be smaller and lower-quality than what a mobile searcher can buy. Price that into your underwriting and your emotional expectations before you start looking. - A lifestyle acquisition still has to cash-flow. At $140K SDE with three employees, there is no margin for a bad first year. The owner needs to be in the business, not on top of it, for at least the first 12 months. - CPAs have a structural edge in trades micro-deals. The seller usually cannot tell you gross margin by job type. You can, by week three. - Community embeddedness is a real asset in small markets. In Bend, the plumber, the GC, and the commercial broker all know each other. Referral flow compounds faster than ads....