Buy, Grow & Sell a Local Business for 8 Figures

Bradley Roofner and Logan Brown made their childhood dreams come true.

No, they didn’t fly to the moon, roam with dinosaurs, or run off with the circus. 

They bought a small landscaping business, improved it, expanded it, and sold it to the industry’s most prestigious acquirer, BrightView, for a solid eight figures — all within three and a half years before the age of 30.  

Perhaps that’s not what most kids dream of, and of course, it’s unlikely Bradley and Logan couched their boyhood businessman fantasies in those exact terms. 

Still, the pair harnessed remarkable energy, passion, and scrappy entrepreneurial spirit to achieve a successful acquisition, transformation, and sale that would leave their younger selves in awe and stands as an inspiration for countless would-be acquirers today.    

Bradley and Logan Meet and Immediately Form a Partnership

Bradley and Logan met in their first two weeks of college. The two, both Texas born and bred, were pledging the same Christian fraternity at the University of Texas, Austin, when they met at a dinner. 

It was “deal!” at first sight. 

They left that same dinner table with a firm handshake and a commitment to a 50/50 partnership in their first business venture. They were both highly motivated young men with strong overlapping values who saw in one another the chance to build a partnership like those famously forged by their investment idol Warren Buffet. 

Both Logan and Bradley were entrepreneurial from a young age. Their fathers had taught them about stocks and encouraged them to choose companies to invest in throughout their childhoods. Both had started their own businesses in high school: Logan, a pick-up/drop-off car wash service, and Bradley, a small catering business. 

With their adolescent experiences behind them, the pair hit the ground running and quickly set to work on their first joint venture selling branded golf hats with elastic band tee-holders to various companies holding events at Austin area golf courses.

The business never took off, but Bradley and Logan remained undaunted. As they progressed through their junior and senior years, they got their Series 65 licenses and started up their own hedge fund. 

From Fledgling Hedge Fund to Business Acquisition 

After graduating, the pair continued to try and expand their fund.

“Everybody is interested in talking to student entrepreneurs. So that really helped us to meet people and to grow our network.”

Still, growth was slow. Though many potential investors were impressed with the young grads and willing to contribute something to the fund, they struggled to secure larger investments with their limited track record. 

Driven as ever, Bradley and Logan shifted gears and sought a strategic investor to put a significant stake in their fund and lend them more credibility. Eventually, they found their backer and, with this newfound legitimacy, grew their fund from $175,000 to $1 million under management. 

They pursued a strategy of long-only value investing in small-cap markets. As time went on, they focused further and further down the market cap scale to the smallest businesses listed publicly “to where [their] capital could actually be a meaningful stake in those businesses.” 

“And then we found out that there’s several opportunities, several publicly traded equities that probably shouldn’t exist in the public markets.”

Bradley and Logan saw in these micro-cap stocks the opportunity to become more active in their investments, to take larger stakes, and to influence management. They then followed this strategic logic to what seemed like its natural conclusion: they would buy a small, private business in its entirety. 

Up to this point, Bradley and Logan had spent their lives  seeking a suitable outlet for their entrepreneurial spirits, and this, they thought, could really be it. Buying a small business outright “didn’t feel like a massive pivot at the time.”

Bradley and Logan Start Their Search and Pound Pavement 

Initially, Bradley and Logan considered doing both: continuing to run their fund and raising separate money to buy a small company.

But before long, they had liquidated the fund, raised more money, taken on debt, and made the decision to “put it all in one basket.” 

The only question remaining was, which basket? 

At first, the two simply drove around town looking for businesses that caught their eye. They pitched baristas and tow truck operators, at times struggling to even speak with the business owner. 

Despite being up to their knees in the creek, “turning over rocks, trying to find deals locally,” Bradley and Logan’s grassroots efforts failed to get them upstream on deal flow.  

Their main criteria were simple: the business had to be in Austin, be valued at a low multiple of EBITDA, and be a “boring business, something unloved.” 

“We were just kind of enamored with the difference in multiple, having control, being able to grow the business. That was kind of our North Star that led us into the market.” 

Towards the end of 2016, the pair curtailed their door-to-door approach in favor of seeking out businesses that were actually listed for sale, where “the seller’s already contemplated selling, he’s got a number in mind, a lot of that work’s already been done.”

Bradley and Logan’s coarse, unpolished search strategy did give them a unique advantage. 

“It certainly allowed us to have some freedom and say, ‘OK, we’re gonna buy something and it’s gonna be imperfect, and then we’re gonna try and really make something out of it through our hard work and our effort. We’re not just looking for the perfect business to buy.”

They wanted something as unsophisticated as their search process, something without pomp that they could professionalize themselves  and onto which they could bring to bear their unique edge. 

They found it at the end of 2016 when a broker approached them with WLE Landscaping. 

Buying a Landscaping Business and Setting Out a Vision

Bradley and Logan decided that this was exactly the business they had been searching for. Within six months, they closed on it for $5.5 million. 

The business had about 60 employees, with six managers. It was doing $7-8 million in revenue and $2 million in EBITDA, most of which was project-based. 

Initially, Bradley and Logan’s vision consisted of growing recurring revenue; expanding and improving the management layer and professionalizing the company structure; expanding their portfolio of high-quality customers by taking advantage of the wave of new development in Austin; and building more substantial facilities. 

At the time of purchase, the business operated out of the back of an insurance office and a nearby backyard. 

(For other stories of acquiring landscaping businesses, see How to Buy Landscaping Businesses and Building a Blue Collar Empire.)

Facing an Immediate Cash Crunch and Seeking Breathing Room

As Bradley and Logan set out to implement their vision, they were immediately met with trouble in their cash conversion cycle.  

Most of their revenue came from direct-to-developer work for HOAs, and they initially perceived this business to be more reliable than it really was.

Even with the extra cash they had brought on board, new development projects weren’t getting off the ground quickly enough, and they had to pull on their line of credit to bridge gaps. 

Meanwhile, the duo started aggressively bidding on projects to grow the construction side of the business to generate more revenue, but this only compounded the issue. 

“We were aggressively growing a bad cash flow business to try and solve a cash flow problem.”

Stressed and stretched to the limits of their expertise, Bradley and Logan learned the hard way that cash flow, rather than growth, would be their most difficult initial challenge. 

“That’s just not what we were expecting going in. I think you have to be malleable and flexible and adapt and learn how to address the problems that come up, when they come up.”

The vicious cycle continued, and every time Bradley and Logan managed to sell more projects and get past their most recent crunch, the problem would return. 

“That became hard because it felt like we couldn’t truly celebrate our wins. We would get to a point where we wouldn’t really trust our results.”

Fresh Air and Exponential Growth 

Though Bradley and Logan continued to be harangued by cash flow struggles, they forged ahead, growing the business relentlessly. 

Maintenance contracts, in which they would provide landscaping service to a client on a regular, ongoing basis, had much better margins and cash flow than one-off construction project jobs, so the pair endeavored to make it a much more significant portion of the business. 

The fundamental takeaway from their early days in the business was this: not all revenue is created equal. There is good revenue and bad revenue.

“We took a project-based business and transformed it. But that process is very much like surgery, there’s a lot of pain involved, in this case with no anesthesia, where you’re experiencing every single painful part of the operation.”

While they never felt comfortable completely shuttering their construction side, they cut out residential and focused it exclusively on larger projects. 

“Every year it seemed like we were culling off bad revenue.”

In their first year, their revenue from construction jumped from $8 to $16 million, and maintenance revenue from $1 to $2 million. In their second year, they leaped again, bringing construction revenues to twenty-something million. By the end of 2019, their third year, maintenance revenues had grown 100% consecutively to reach $8 million. 

“That’s when we had really fully climbed out and we could breathe a little bit.”

Professionalization, Productization, and Responsiveness 

To bring about this rapid growth, Bradley and Logan implemented a comprehensive strategy of professionalization, productization, and responsiveness. 

“I think we initially started winning business on responsiveness. That ultimately became one of our core values in the business. We wanted the people that worked at WLE to think about their jobs as more of an emergency response unit, like an EMS provider, than a landscaper.”

They made a commitment to customers to have a proposal to them in 24 hours when competitors might take weeks. 

They professionalized WLE across the board, building new facilities, designing a new logo, buying new uniforms, and cultivating a “professional, put together, organized, prepared” culture.

Bradley and Logan saw that the market was hungry for quality and sophistication and positioned WLE to provide it. 

As part of their efforts to improve efficiency, they narrowed down their services to cater specifically to their ideal clients, large commercial customers, and HOAs. 

“We engineered maintenance to help fund the growth.”

In doing so, they developed a uniform, productized version of their maintenance services.

“That blueprint is really brilliant for thinking about how to create a ton of value. Because the more that you can productize your service, the more repeatable and easier it is to deliver, and the more valuable it will be to acquire one day.”

Bradley and Logan transformed their maintenance service into a standard product. They got all their clients on identical, uniform contracts and trained their employees to specialize within that specific band.

Overinvesting in Sales to Outcompete the Competition

With a specialized product to sell, Bradley and Logan were ready to launch an aggressive sales campaign. When they bought the business, there hadn’t been any sales arm at all. 

“We needed to get to a point where we understood our ideal customer really well before we were ready to launch the sales spree.”

While, at first, sales were slow, the parallel project of productization gave Bradley and Logan a cleaned-up product to offer and a clear image of the ideal customer for whom it was suited. 

They began giving sales staff personalized lists of potential customers, each with priority targets with big bonuses attached, aside from the existing commission structure. 

The sales team was now highly incentivized and had a well-defined product, specific priority targets, and an area of business growing at a breakneck pace. 

Bradley and Logan went further.

They ran rigorous training for the sales team and invested in client-specific materials for each proposal, such as leather bound binders with the names of each board member of an HOA, detailed maps and digital renders of developments, potential maintenance plans, and company histories. 

These highly polished deliverables made them stand out amongst the competition.

“That got us in the room almost every time with the big customers, because that caught on. People want that person pitching to them.”

While initially Bradley and Logan had envisioned themselves growing inorganically through acquisition, they found that the organic growth they could achieve by overinvesting in sales was far cheaper and more effective. 

“On our original model that we built, before we acquired the company, we said that we were going to acquire $1 million in EBITDA every year, for like 5 years or something. And we said we were gonna grow 10%. We ended up acquiring zero and growing 100%.”

Selling the Business to the Industry’s Premier Acquirer

In early 2020, after three and a half years of strong growth, Bradley and Logan were approached by BrightView, a large, publicly traded landscaping corporation known to seek growth through acquisition. 

BrightView was already present in Austin and wanted to expand south into the part of town where WLE was having so much success. 

Having faced so many hurdles along the journey already, Bradley and Logan approached the initial conversation cautiously. It turned out to be a very informal get-to-know-you breakfast which set the pair at ease and got them to think seriously about selling. 

The offer was excellent, and they liked BrightView.

“We thought it fit really well with what we set out to do, which was grow a great, healthy business and, if the opportunity ever came along to get acquired, then that would really help our story… The opportunity coming to us, and how serendipitous it all felt, I think was a big piece of it.”

On top of that, this was early to mid-2020, when Covid introduced a huge amount of uncertainty into the economy. 

Faced with economic turbulence and an appealing, even flattering, offer from the industry’s premier acquirer, Bradley and Logan took the deal and sold WLE for a solid eight figures in the $20-$30 million range — a dream come true.