Jason Budd Buys a 45-Year-Old Manufacturing ERP Software Company

The Setup Jason Budd spent ten years inside corporate manufacturing, working on business systems and ERP implementations from the buyer's side of the desk. An engineering degree, a decade of operator reps, and a mentor who slid him an acquisition podcast episode reframed what the next ten years could look like. Instead of climbing another rung, he started searching for a company where his exact skillset, manufacturing plus enterprise software, was the unlock. His filter was tight on purpose. He wanted a business whose product he could understand on day one, whose customers he could talk to without a translator, and whose technical debt he could actually price. That narrowed the funnel fast, and it made the eventual fit unmistakable when it showed up. The Deal Jason found Metasystems through a business brokerage after attending a buyer seminar in Columbus, Ohio. The target: a 45-year-old manufacturing ERP software company with a loyal installed base, legacy codebase, and a retiring founder-era team. Deal size landed in the $1M-$3M range. Capital stack: - 80% SBA 7(a) loan - 10% seller note - 10% buyer equity That 10% seller paper does two things at once: it clears the SBA equity-injection math and it keeps the seller economically interested through transition. Jason treated it as alignment, not just financing. He ran the deal like a project manager running his own deal. Lender, broker, attorney (a former CFO, chosen specifically for operating fluency over pure legal posture), and seller all got nudged by him personally when momentum slipped. He kept a backup pipeline of other targets warm until the wire actually hit, on the theory that optionality is the only real negotiating leverage a first-time buyer has. First 100 Days The single highest-leverage asset Jason inherited was not the codebase. It was a retiring long-tenured employee who agreed to stay through handoff and actively coach him on the culture, the customer quirks, and the undocumented wiring of the business. In a 45-year-old software company, that person is the documentation. Concrete early moves: - Sat through product demos as a new user to map real capability versus sales-sheet capability - Audited employee comp history, tenure, turnover, and satisfaction before touching org design - Mapped customer relationships by revenue concentration and tenure, not just logo count - Kept the retiring champion in a paid advisory seat to transfer tribal knowledge on demand Operating Lessons - Most sellers are first-time sellers. Most buyers are first-time buyers. Saying that out loud early lowered the temperature on every hard conversation in diligence. - In small business, people are the business. Employee diligence belongs in the same tier as QoE, not as a soft HR checkbox. - Hire the attorney who has operated. A former CFO working as counsel reads a working capital peg differently than a pure deal lawyer. -