Jake Bittner Bought Qlarion for $600K, Sold for $35M a Decade Later

The Setup Jake Bittner spent a decade in enterprise software sales (MicroStrategy, Business Objects, SAP) before he ever looked at buying a company. That was deliberate. His father had taken entrepreneurial swings that did not land, and Jake internalized a specific lesson: operators are not risk lovers, they are risk mitigators. So he stacked the deck first. Yale engineering degree. Ten years selling enterprise BI platforms to large accounts. A personal cash cushion north of $600K. A network inside the exact vendor ecosystem he would later resell. In 2011 he partnered with Adam Roy, a consulting operator who would run delivery and contracts. Their target was Qlarion, a tiny government data analytics shop being carved out of a larger Accenture deal. Seven people total. Two admins, five billable. Unprofitable. Nobody was fighting them for it. The Deal Purchase price landed around $600K-$700K. Financing was the quiet story: 100% seller financing at 10-12% interest. No bank. No SBA. No outside equity. The seller wanted the carve-out off the books and was willing to let the buyers earn into it. That structure mattered. Bittner and Roy kept their personal reserves intact rather than writing a down-payment check, which gave them working-capital runway to survive the first couple of years when the business was still bleeding. Operating Moves Years one through three were grim. Qlarion operated as a staff augmentation shop, placing cleared technical consultants at federal and state agencies. Gross margins sat at 20-30%. Customer retention was 54%. They won new logos and lost existing ones in parallel. They dealt with security clearance losses, contract breaches, even fraud attempts from staff. Adam stayed billable the whole time to keep utilization up. The pivot started as a data question: which customers actually made money, and why? The answer was the City of Boston and a handful of similar accounts where Qlarion was not placing bodies but building multi-year analytics programs. Those engagements ran at 60% gross margins, locked in 3-7 year terms, carried $500K-$1M annual value, and produced happier staff and happier buyers. So they rewrote the company. New positioning: Qlarion builds large-scale government analytics programs. Not staff aug. The filter for new work became explicit: - Minimum $500K-$1M annual contract value - 3-7 year engagement window - Multiple work streams inside one customer org - Program ownership, not seat-filling They imported SaaS-style discipline into a services shop. Dollar retention. Net retention. A 90% logo retention target. They borrowed the Hedgehog frame from Jim Collins to codify what they would and would not chase. Saying no got easier. Decisions got pushed down. The founders stopped being the bottleneck. Where They Are Now By 2021 Qlarion was doing $20M+ in revenue and $3.1M in EBITDA. Flagship engagements included Virginia's opioid data sharing platform and a 15-year NIH relationship that had already renewed once and would renew again for another five years. They sold to a strategic backed by an independent sponsor at 11x EBITDA, roughly $35M headline. Structure: $17-18M cash at close, $12M earnout,...