Traditional Search Into Interior Plants: One City to Eight Branches in Six Years

The Setup Edward McDonnell trained as a mechanical engineer at UVA, designed body structures at Honda (including the Acura MDX), then picked up an MBA at Darden in 2016. He chose the traditional search fund model for three concrete reasons: limited personal capital, access to investor mentorship, and funded runway to actually travel the country on diligence. He moved his pregnant wife and young daughter from Chapel Hill to Seattle to take over a business he had never worked in, managing 80 people after never formally managing anyone. The Deal Botanical Designs was a Seattle interior plantscaping company: plants, living walls, green roofs, and exterior plazas for Class A office towers and hotels in the downtown core. The numbers at close (April 2018): - Revenue: ~$11M - EBITDA: ~$2M (roughly 18-20% margins) - Employees: 80 - Recurring revenue: 75%+ - Customer concentration: largest client at 5% of sales, rest under 1% Structure was a hybrid proprietary-brokered deal at the traditional search fund multiple band (mid-4x to 6x EBITDA). Founder had built a strong culture, so day-one transition friction was minimal. First 100 Days McDonnell did not try to be the smartest person in the room. He deferred to existing managers, kept the MBA credentials quiet, and worked from the assumption that the operators who had built the business knew things he did not. Early moves focused on plumbing, not strategy: - Stood up a CRM (information was trapped in people's heads and paper) - Digitized back office - Hired an EOS implementer at roughly $4-8K per quarter - Built the Vision Traction Organizer to force written alignment - Recruited Nick Moreno (Marine Corps background, prior searcher) as COO Operating Moves The core strategic decision was what NOT to do. Plenty of adjacent services were available: lawn care, tree work, garden centers, residential. McDonnell rejected all of them. His phrase: 'two inches wide and two miles deep.' Every dollar of growth would come from the same niche (interior commercial plant services in urban cores) in new geographies, not from line extension in Seattle. The rollup cadence: - 2020: bolt-on in Denver - 2021: 40+ year-old incumbent in the Twin Cities - Post-exit under PE: Florida, Georgia, and additional branches Deal flow came from industry conferences and direct relationships with retiring owners, not bankers. McDonnell stayed in the field, traveling to lead branch teams in person rather than managing from a Seattle headquarters. He called himself the 'Chief Repetition Officer.' EOS gave him the scaffolding to push the same vision from exec team to L10s to full-company all-hands, in the same language, on repeat. Where They Are Now Pre-exit (4.5 years as searcher-CEO): - 1 branch to 3 branches (WA, CO, MN) - 80 to ~150 employees - Exit to a PE buyer at a valuation that cleared the 35% IRR threshold for full 25% carry to the searcher Post-exit (2 additional years as PE-backed CEO, same seat): - 3 branches to 8 - 3 states to 5 (added FL, GA) -...