Joe Win buys Surgical Specialties with 90% seller note and no personal guarantee

The Setup Joe Win spent seven to eight years as a medical device sales rep in Georgia, hitting six figures as a top performer. College football taught him to grind. Sales taught him the rooms. He was already walking into operating theaters across the state, standing next to surgeons, seeing which equipment worked and which broke. The ladder above him topped out at another manager role with a territory that could get cut at any executive's whim. He decided to build his own ladder instead. He looked at real estate first. A mentor walked him through units. The math kept coming up thin. More doors meant more headaches for margins that did not justify leaving a high-paying sales job. That same mentor, who had owned a franchise years earlier, introduced Joe to a business broker. The broker handed him Buying Then Building. Joe read it, interviewed with Chelsea at Acquisition Lab, and joined cohort 56 in March 2025. The Deal Joe had actually stumbled onto the business eleven months before he closed it. In January 2025, before he knew what an SBA 7(a) loan was, he spoke to the owner of a small Atlanta company that designed and built operating room setups: surgical lights, OR tables, booms, the equipment Joe had been selling into for years. The conversation fizzled when the brokerage changed hands. He revisited it a month later. The business has three revenue streams. Capital equipment sales to hospitals, averaging around $75,000 per unit. Installation on larger OR buildouts. And service, the in-house recurring revenue engine that keeps the lights on between project wins. 2025 revenue was $2 million. SDE ran around $600,000. Joe bought it for roughly 2.2x SDE. The capital structure is where this gets interesting. The seller carried approximately 90% of the purchase price on a note. Ten-year amortization to match what an SBA loan looks like, but at a lower rate, with no personal guarantee. Joe also walked away with $150,000 in working capital included in the deal. The negotiating position did not come from Joe alone. The upstream supplier, whose equipment this business resells and services, wanted Joe to be the buyer. They advocated for him with the seller. When the supplier on whom your top-line depends is telling the seller "this is our guy," the seller's alternatives get narrower. Joe used that. First 100 Days He closed January 21, 2026. Weeks in, his bank closed the business account without warning. He could not submit payroll. He could not receive incoming customer payments. For a service business where technicians expect a check on Friday, that is a five-alarm fire in the first month of ownership. Joe got through it. The lesson he repeats: post-close liquidity is not optional. The working capital cushion negotiated into the purchase agreement is what bought him the runway to solve a banking problem without missing payroll. Operating Moves The customer overlap was immediate. Joe's W-2 territory had been the state of Georgia. Surgical Specialties' customer list mirrored it....