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Acquiring Minds
Buying Small to Build for the Long Term ($300k SDE)
Deal story
Brendan Duebner, an army vet and self-funded searcher, bought IT Total Care, a tiny Bay Area MSP with ~$1.15M revenue and ~$300K SDE, via a creative seller-financed stock deal. His vision is deliberately modest—building a 20-40 person 'tribe' he'll run for decades—and the business grew 25% in revenue and ~40% EBITDA in his first nine months.
Deal facts
Industry
IT / Managed Service Provider (MSP)
Business
Managed service provider serving local SMBs
Location
Foster City, California (Bay Area)
Revenue
~$1.15M (down from peak ~$1.4-1.5M)
SDE / EBITDA
~$150K EBITDA / ~$300K SDE
Multiple
~2x SDE / ~4x adjusted EBITDA
Deal size
~$615K (incl. ~$100K assumed lease liabilities; ~$175K cash left in business)
Acquisition model
Self-Funded
Outcome
Closed March 2025; first ~9 months revenue up 25%, EBITDA up ~40%; targeting 25% growth in 2026
People
Will Smithhost
Host of Acquiring Minds podcast
Brendan Duebnerguest
Army vet, self-funded searcher, owner of IT Total Care MSP
Tony Morarosother
Founder/seller of IT Total Care, built it over 20 years
Josh Medowother
Self-funded searcher and former army officer; Brendan interned for him
Topics
Excerpts · 332 segments · ~1:23:40 long
Short excerpts only — hear the full conversation on the publisher's site.
03:42 Background, army, and discovering ETA12:29 Cold calling as a sourcing strategy17:14 Finding and analyzing IT Total Care23:55 Long-termism and tribe philosophy38:37 Working in the business pre-close48:52 Deal structure and seller note55:51 First-year results and EOS1:12:21 MSP strategy: local vs offshore
Check out oberly-risk.com that's O B E R L E D hyphen risk.com link in the notes. Okay, Brendan, well tell us about the business that you found and how, how that, how you first found it and then tell us about the business.
The business I found is called IT Total Care. I actually had been, I had cold emailed the, the owner for a while, but when I actually, when I finally cold called him and got him on the phone and did my little spiel, he, he, his first response was, have you been emailing me? And I was like, actually, actually I have, you know, he's like, wow, you know, I respect, I respect the hustle, you know.
Yeah.
And he started asking me some questions. I kind of, you know, we were going back and forth and he's like, hey, why don't you come in? Like, why don't we get lunch and let's just go from there.
But the business itself started by a guy named Tony Moraros, who was a former kind of IT engineer in various big tech roles who decided to go off on his own one day. And the business started actually as Tony the computer guy, just kind of going off doing odd jobs. And I think he did that on his own for a few years and then slowly started hiring and building and over his 20 year career built it…
And the business had been growing kind of consistently from when he was Tony the computer guy to really up until Covid and then in Covid, you know, Tony at that point was in his mid to late 60s.
And, and I think, I think it was just enough where, you know, he moved to his, his vacation home in Tahoe full time and, and that the business just started really like slowly shrinking essentially because there's no, there's no new labels being at, there's no sales and marketing effort. It was just the, they had their current clients and the clients were slowly churning over time.
So by the time I talked to Tony, the business had been slowly shrinking, maybe like on average 5% of revenue for three or four years. And Tony was very much, he was already one foot out of the business, but you could tell one, he really loved the IT part of it and he really cared about his team. They'd been with him for a long time.
I think the average employee tenure was like seven to eight years when I had gotten to them. And so it was just a small business that had been, been around kind of hobbling along.
How big was it? Can you give us some numbers on total revenue?
Yeah, so the business I think peaked at around, I think it's somewhere between 1.4, 1.5 million of revenue. And then by the end of 2024, I think it was like 1.15 somewhere like that. And the team was I think at its peak, roughly 10 people. And then when I got there it was a team of Tony +4.
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