After studying the space for a couple years, I finally closed on my first acquisition at the end of August. A successful apartment turnover service, providing contracted rate services to over 100 large apartment complexes in my area. I had to get a Nevada contractor's license for painting, and we also provide carpet cleaning and janitorial service. 15 W2 employees. A true mom and pop business, with every. Single. Thing. Done by hand. Hand written work orders, hand written scheduling, hand written daily P and L's to monitor performance. $2.8M in annual revenue, aboutredactedSDE, bought for 1.45M. Squeaky clean financials as proven by my accountant. I put 1/3 down and the seller is carrying the rest at 7% for ten years. Yes, there is an actual fax machine. The transition has been pretty damn challenging. None of the employees quit (golden handcuffs andredactedyear tenures), and it's a great business with a strong team and really well established recurring work with agreed upon prices. Very tough and cost conscious industry. I was told by my deal accountant and the seller that they were turning their receivables over in about a month. We all did not take into account the new entity setup with the payment portals these large corporations require a lot of details, insurance, verifications etc and we were WAY off on the working capital which was going to be needed. It's been nearly two months, the payroll alone is 41K biweekly and I have been forced to float the business on cash flow using my HELOC.... We are finally over the hump and checks are starting to roll in, but if they didn't, feeding this business would bankrupt me in about another 5-6 weeks. I have about 300k in invoices outstanding, but only 30k actually received back in the door so far. It's been pretty tough walking a fine line as the previous owners wife and two daughters are still involved in the business and have been helping set up and re attach my new entity to the payment portals. We hit a huge snag and delay transitioning from Quickbooks desktop to online. A lot of the technical issues to me don't seem to have been that challenging or difficult to overcome, and I've gotten fairly uncomfortable not feeling like I have full insight into the apparently large process of getting us set up as a credentialed vendor and ultimately, paid. I could honestly use some advice on how to deal with previous owners family in your business still, as they do have a ton of proprietary knowledge which I need. Both daughters are moving forward currently and doing my billing and collections. I was so badly deluged with administrative problems since the start I didn't really get much time learning the actual trades with the previous owner. Good thing the bar is fairly low with apartment complexes and the field teams themselves are very self sufficient. I am implementing Jobber to bring the company into the 21st century (no software was in place). There was zero packaging up of the business for sale for me, at all. No SOPs, no instructions on how to do things, just everything was stored in the owners and employees heads so I spent a time of time trying to figure out how he was at least pricing / estimating. Been a wild ride but I'm finally doing it!