Widening the Search Box to $300K SDE Landed Jesse a Mosquito Joe Franchise Resale

The Setup Jesse Sunquist spent roughly a year as a full-time self-funded searcher before landing his first deal. He had a wife, kids, and a hard constraint most searchers underestimate: he could not relocate. That single constraint knocks out most of the country's deal flow before the search even starts. His initial target profile looked like every other self-funded searcher's spreadsheet. Real EBITDA, real team, real price. The kind of business the bank likes and the broker emails to 200 other buyers. After twelve months of letters, LOIs, and dry holes, he had nothing closed and a family watching the runway. The Deal The pivot was simple and unglamorous. Sunquist dropped his SDE floor down to the $300K range and started looking at smaller businesses, including franchise resales. That shift opened a category most searchers skip: existing franchisees with an operating territory, a brand, a playbook, and a customer base, who want out. The deal he closed was a Mosquito Joe franchise resale in New Jersey. Mosquito spraying is a seasonal, recurring, route-density business. Customers sign up for a season of treatments, technicians run routes, and the franchise system handles the brand, the marketing templates, and the operating manual. You are buying a book of recurring customers and a trained crew, not inventing a business. Franchise resales sit in a weird corner of the market. Brokers often undercover them because the deal size is small and the franchisor has approval rights over the buyer. That friction scares off casual searchers, which is exactly why the deals are there. Operating Moves A $300K SDE business does not carry a layer of management. The buyer is the operator, period. Sunquist stepped in as owner-operator with the franchise system sitting above him as a quasi-corporate layer providing tech stack, brand marketing, and a peer network of other franchisees running the same playbook. The operating reality of a seasonal pest business: - Revenue concentrates in a short spring-through-fall window. Cash management in the off-season is the job. - Technician retention beats technician hiring every time. Route familiarity compounds. - Customer renewals are the scoreboard. Every churned customer has to be replaced with a new one at full acquisition cost. - Route density inside the territory is the real margin lever. Two stops a mile apart print money; two stops fifteen minutes apart bleed it. Where They Are Now Shortly after closing, Sunquist started exploring programmatic acquisition: buying additional Mosquito Joe territories inside the same franchise system and stacking them under one operating entity. The thesis is that the second territory is easier than the first. Same brand, same software, same training pipeline, same seasonal rhythm. You are adding revenue on top of an operating backbone that already exists. Another guest, Neil Finneran, acquired a separate Mosquito Joe resale in a similar window, and the two shared notes on territorial expansion. The franchise-rollup-within-a-system play is quietly becoming a real archetype.