I found out that the income of the business was significantly higher than I'd anticipated because the seller and his wife took their salaries out of what was reported to me as cash flow. This was a benefit to doing business with honest people with confusing books.

The biggest surprise benefit has been how much just organizing and focusing on certain processes can improve bottom line performance and share growth. In my business just adding a CRM system is making my sales staff much more productive and it's making my efforts to oversee them more productive. Adding a chat feature on my websites like Broadly improves customer engagement so that fewer leads fall through the cracks. I didn't expect these low hanging fruits to create the amount of value they did so quickly.

Negotiated acquiring the operating company, but ended up buying the holding company (for the same price of course) because the holding company had a high paid in capital which was partially used to repurchase the shares of the outgoing shareholder (the seller) that was basically a tax free withdrawal for the seller and partially stayed in the business for future share repurchases that will be tax free withdrawal for the new shareholders. The closing balance sheet also was much better than the initially set new acquiring company balance sheet.