Thanks for having me.
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
I'm Going to use it. We have a lot of ground to cover today, so let's dive right in. Some background on you to begin please. Brendan.
Sure. Yeah. So, born and raised, San Francisco Bay area. I went to college on an army scholarship, did ROTC in college, graduated commissioned, was a field artillery officer on active duty for a bit out of Fort Bragg. But I've always been entrepreneurial.
I started my first company in high school. I had a side hustle in the army until I got deployed. After the army I went straight to business school and even during my mba I started another company.
When I was in the army I also started nonprofit that, that still exists. So always been entrepreneurial. But when I was matriculating to business school, I heard about this weird thing called eta.
And instantly when I heard about it I was like, well I, this is interesting. I had to learn more about this. So really spent the two years of my MBA program just diving into search.
I did a couple of in semester internships with traditional searchers. I did my summer internship with actually one of your former guests, Josh Medow, who's a self funded searcher, another army guy who acquired a business. And that summer internship was really transformational for me in terms of I sat next to Josh all summer and just really saw what the day to day looks like and of doing a self…
And it gave me the confidence to do self funded. Otherwise I thought I need to do traditional. I didn't even know what banking was when I showed up to business school.
I thought a banker was like the person at Wells Fargo that gives you your money. I had no concept of anything but did that.
So Brendan, wait, what was it that you saw working at Josh's elbow that gave you confidence? Be more specific.
I think it was two things. One was Josh was very gracious to really coach me and he had a couple other interns through what his search process, process look like in incredible depth. So just understand like, okay, like this is how I try to find a business, this is how do I put a deal together, all that kind of stuff.
But then probably even more important was just seeing what the day to day of what running a small business actually looked like. And I was, for me, I never had a real job outside of the army and summer jobs. So just seeing what that looked like and understanding this is not that different from, you know, leading people in the military. Like this is, this is something I can do.
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