On a humid Tuesday morning in October 2024, Patricia Wells unlocked the back door of a 9,000-square-foot warehouse in an industrial park outside Durham, North Carolina, and walked into a business she had owned for exactly twelve hours.

Twenty-eight people worked at Wellspring Commercial Cleaning. Most of them had been there longer than Wells had been out of graduate school. The oldest employee, a route supervisor named Marcus, had started in 1998 — the year Wells graduated college. On the wall above the dispatch desk was a hand-lettered sign from 2003 that read “Answer every call by the third ring.” The coffee maker was older than that.

She was not a founder. She was not a first-generation builder. She had not scribbled Wellspring onto a napkin at a coffee shop. She had bought a forty-year-old company from a man who had built it, and now she was responsible for thirty families’ paychecks, a customer roster of 47 commercial accounts, a truck fleet that needed tires, and the answer to a question she would be asked a hundred times in the next ninety days: “Who are you, exactly?”

Wells is 42. A former operations director at a mid-size B2B services firm, she spent fourteen months searching for a business to buy. She evaluated roughly 80 companies. She signed four letters of intent. She closed one.

This is how she did it — and why more women should be looking at this path.

Why Buy Instead of Build?

The startup mythology in America is loud. The acquisition path is quiet. And the numbers don’t favor the loud one.

Roughly 20% of new businesses fail in the first year, and 50% fail within five, per long-running Bureau of Labor Statistics data. For every TechCrunch profile of a founder raising a seed round, there are thousands of founders maxing out credit cards to keep the lights on in a business that has no operating history, no customers, and no cash flow.

The businesses Wells was looking at were different. They had 20, 30, 40-year track records. They had customers. They had profit. They had problems, sure — but problems that could be diagnosed from three years of financial statements, not problems that would materialize unpredictably in year two of a startup’s life.

“The math was not complicated. I could spend five years trying to build a $2M business from zero, or I could spend $1.6M to buy one that already does $2M. One of those paths is speculation. The other is underwriting.” — Patricia Wells

Small business acquisitions are overwhelmingly financed through the SBA 7(a) program, which can fund up to $5M at terms most startup founders would weep for: 10-year amortization, rates in the high single digits, 80–90% loan-to-value. The SBA guarantee means lenders will underwrite deals they’d never touch on the open market.

And yet the demographics of who actually uses this path are stark. Stanford and IESE’s long-running research on entrepreneurship through acquisition — the ETA field — has consistently found that roughly 8–10% of search fund principals are women. In the broader small-business acquisition market, the number is better but still lopsided. Most people buying businesses are men, often men in their 30s or 40s who learned about the path through elite MBA programs or private equity networks.

Wells did not learn about it that way. She learned about it because her uncle sold his HVAC distribution company in 2019 and her aunt ran the numbers at the kitchen table afterward.

Wells started her search in August 2023 with a one-page thesis: she wanted a services business with recurring revenue, 20+ W-2 employees, at least ten years of operating history, EBITDA between $350K and $600K, and a seller who wanted continuity more than the highest bidder.

She sourced deals four ways.

BizBuySell — the largest public marketplace for small business listings — was her first stop. She set alerts for commercial services businesses in North Carolina, South Carolina, and Virginia. Most of what she saw was overpriced, underdocumented, or both.

Broker networks came next. She joined the International Business Brokers Association member directory and contacted 22 brokers who specialized in the Southeast. Three became serious partners. Most never returned her calls.

Direct outreach. She built a list of 140 commercial services businesses in the Triangle area, cross-referenced owner ages from LinkedIn and public records, and sent handwritten letters to 60 of them. Eleven responded. Three became real conversations.

ETA-style search. She spent time on SearchFunder and in the broader searcher community, learning the vocabulary and the diligence playbooks that traditional ETA candidates use. She was not running a funded search. But she was reading everything the funded searchers read.

Of the ~80 businesses she evaluated in detail — meaning she requested financials, held at least one call with the owner or broker, and did preliminary underwriting — she rejected 76 for specific reasons:

She signed LOIs on four businesses. Two died in diligence. One seller got cold feet. One closed.

“The search is a full-time job that pays nothing for a year. If you’re not prepared for that, you will not finish. The women I know who quit the search quit because nobody told them how long it takes.” — Patricia Wells

The Deal That Clicked

Wellspring Commercial Cleaning was founded in 1994 by a man named Hal Brennan, who was 68 when Wells met him. He had two adult children, neither interested in the business. He had been approached by a regional consolidator twice and found the experience distasteful — the consolidator wanted to strip overhead, cut benefits, and flip the business in five years.

Brennan wanted continuity. He wanted his route supervisors to still have jobs in 2030. He wanted Marcus — the 1998 hire — treated with respect.

Wells’s thesis was not a vulture thesis. She wasn’t going to gut the company. She had spent nine years managing operations teams of 40–120 people at her prior employer. She wanted to grow Wellspring, not shrink it.

Their first meeting ran four hours. Brennan asked her what she’d do with the company in the first year. Wells told him honestly: almost nothing structural. Observe. Learn routes. Meet customers. Do not change the coffee maker.

He laughed. “Everybody else told me what they’d do different,” he told her later. “You told me what you’d leave alone.”

The business did $2.1M in trailing-twelve-month revenue at LOI, with $420K in seller’s discretionary earnings — roughly $370K in true EBITDA after a normalized owner salary. Wells and Brennan agreed on a $1.6M purchase price, a 3.8x EBITDA multiple — reasonable for a profitable, decades-old services business in the Southeast.

Patricia reviewing deal documents during due diligence
Ninety days of diligence, three outside firms, and a 2021 wage-and-hour claim that nearly killed the deal in week ten.

Due Diligence

Diligence ran ninety days. It was uncomfortable work.

Wells hired a quality-of-earnings firm (roughly $18K), a commercial attorney ($12K), and an environmental consultant ($4K) to review the warehouse lease. She personally reviewed three years of customer invoices, line by line, to validate revenue concentration.

The concentration picture was acceptable but thin. The largest customer was 14% of revenue — a regional hospital system that had been with Wellspring since 2006. The top five customers were 41% combined. Not great, not disqualifying.

Employee turnover was remarkably low for the industry: 18% annualized versus a sector average north of 50%. That number sold her on the culture.

Equipment was the issue. Wellspring’s 14-vehicle fleet included four trucks with odometers past 180,000 miles. The floor-scrubbing equipment was serviceable but aging. Wells built a $65K post-close capex line into her operating plan.

The thing that nearly killed the deal surfaced in week ten: an unresolved 2021 wage-and-hour claim from a former employee, which Brennan had disclosed verbally but not in writing. It was small — $22K in potential exposure — but the lender flagged it and required a specific indemnification in the purchase agreement, plus $50K held in escrow for 18 months. Brennan balked. Wells nearly walked. They negotiated to $35K in escrow for 12 months and closed.

“Every deal has a moment where it almost dies. If yours doesn’t, you probably aren’t looking hard enough.” — Patricia Wells

Financing Structure

The capital stack came together over the spring of 2024:

The seller note on standby was critical. SBA rules require the buyer to have at least 10% equity in the deal, but up to half of that can come from a seller note if the seller agrees to full standby — meaning no payments to the seller for the first two years. Brennan agreed. That single concession made the deal financeable.

Wells evaluated three SBA-preferred lenders before choosing one. She used broker networks, her banker at her personal credit union, and Lendesca to benchmark how different acquisition-focused SBA lenders treated service-business deals — which banks actually funded cleaning and facilities companies, which applied conservative haircuts to owner’s discretionary earnings, and which would flex on the seller-note standby terms. Not every preferred lender underwrites acquisitions the same way, and the wrong lender can add 60 days and $40K in frustration to a deal that should close smoothly.

The personal guarantee was the hardest moment. Wells signed a document making her personally liable for $1.28M. Her house was not collateralized, but her future earnings effectively were. She read the document three times before she signed it.

For women navigating SBA financing specifically, the dynamics are worth understanding in depth — our guide on SBA loans through a gender lens walks through how underwriting and personal guarantee norms play out differently depending on who’s across the table. And if you’ve been told no on an SBA application before, the loan denial playbook is the diagnostic framework.

Handshake between seller and buyer at business handover
Continuity, not rupture. Wells’s first-90-days plan kept every inherited employee — and the coffee maker.

The First 90 Days

Wells’s first-90-days plan was disciplined and unglamorous.

Week 1: Ride with every route supervisor. Learn customer names. Do not make any changes.

Weeks 2–4: One-on-one meetings with all 28 employees. Fifteen-minute conversations. No agenda except listening.

Month 2: Meet the top 15 customers in person. Introduce herself. Thank them. Ask what was working and what wasn’t.

Month 3: Launch two small operational changes — a digital time-tracking system that replaced paper sheets, and a quarterly safety training cadence. Both suggested by employees.

She kept the coffee maker.

What changed slowly was pricing discipline. Brennan had not raised prices on legacy accounts in seven years. Wells, with the supervisors’ input, built a rolling 3% annual escalator into new contracts and renegotiated terms on the three most under-priced legacy accounts. One balked. Two accepted. The third — the one who balked — came back nine months later.

Eighteen months post-close, Wellspring is on pace for $2.65M in revenue, with EBITDA running near $590K — a 40% increase. Headcount has grown to 33. Turnover is holding at 21%.

What Women Buyers Face Specifically

The acquisition path has an underdiscussed dimension: bias in the seller’s decision, not just the lender’s.

Research on search fund demographics from the Stanford Graduate School of Business has consistently shown that women represent only 8–10% of search fund principals. The pipeline is small at the top and it narrows further as deals progress.

Wells experienced the bias in specific, repeatable ways:

Wells was not Brennan’s first call. She was his ninth. Seven of the first eight candidates were men. The one woman before her — Brennan told her later — had been dismissed by his broker as “probably not serious” without Brennan ever meeting her.

Imposter syndrome is the other variable. Wells had run operations teams larger than Wellspring’s entire headcount. She had a master’s degree. She had spent a year preparing for this specific moment. And she still, she said, had a recurring 3 AM thought during diligence: am I sure I can do this?

The women who finish the search, she said, are the ones who learn to treat that thought as weather — something you notice and keep walking through.

Building the credit and banking relationships that give a woman buyer leverage at the table starts long before the search — our guide on how to build business credit is structured around the timelines that matter for future acquisition financing. And for buyers who find traditional SBA lenders aren’t a fit for their deal profile, the CDFI guide maps alternative lenders with acquisition-financing capacity.

What She’d Tell Another Woman Considering Acquisition

A short list, delivered without sentiment:

Eighteen Months Later

Wells still uses the coffee maker.

She has hired two people since close — a dispatcher and a sales coordinator. She has kept every single employee she inherited. Marcus, the 1998 hire, was promoted to operations manager in month fourteen and now has a profit-sharing stake in the business.

The sign on the wall still says “Answer every call by the third ring.”

Wells has started mentoring two other women running searches in North Carolina. One is targeting veterinary practices. The other is looking at residential HVAC. She tells them what Brennan told her: “You told me what you’d leave alone.” That sentence, she said, is half the job.

You can read more founder stories about women at every stage of the capital journey — some building, some buying, some scaling — but the common thread is the one Wells keeps coming back to.

“Ownership is not a personality trait. It’s a decision you make with numbers in front of you. More women should make it.” — Patricia Wells

Wellspring Commercial Cleaning is based in the Raleigh-Durham region of North Carolina. Patricia Wells is a composite founder profile created to illustrate real acquisition-financing pathways and challenges faced by women buyers. All financial figures, timelines, and deal structures are representative of real-world SBA-financed small business acquisitions.

Additional resources: SBA 7(a) Loan Program · BizBuySell · International Business Brokers Association · SCORE Mentorship · SearchFunder Community · Stanford GSB ETA Research