How They Bought a Profitable, 45-Year-Old Window Distribution Business

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Meet Anthony and Alex.

Anthony is a software engineer. Alex is a CPA-turned-MBA who spent years in management consulting and corporate strategy. They met a few years ago in a mastermind group focused on buying hotels, and together with a couple of partners, they did exactly that.

The hotel, as they told us, was a great learning experience and gave them both a ton of confidence. But it also taught them a hard lesson about cash flow. A hotel is what they call the "asset-heavy, cash-flow-light" side of the business barbell.

"We realized that the hotel was not providing a lot of cash flow for us," Anthony said. They needed the other side of the barbell: an asset-light, cash-flow-heavy business that could replace their W-2 income and fund future deals.

So, they quit their jobs, joined the Contrarian Academy, and went all in on that thesis.

That said, they were calculated about it. Anthony kept doing software consulting on the side, and his wife was working full-time along the way. Alex and his wife built a 24-month reserve, cut discretionary spending, and supplemented with income from her small business, hotel consulting gigs, and a long-term rental.

After reviewing hundreds of businesses, and using an SBA loan, they recently acquired a 45-year-old window and door distribution company in San Diego. The business does “high-single-digit millions” in revenue with “15-20% margins”, has a lean team of just four employees, and virtually no inventory on hand.

Here's how they found it, why they bought it, and what they're doing now.

THE SEARCH

One of the first lessons this duo learned was about timelines.

"It really does take longer than most people think," Anthony said. "We both went in optimistically thinking that we were gonna be business owners in 6 months, 9 months at the tail end, and it was double that."

Anthony and Alex ran searches through listing sites. They launched off-market email campaigns across the US and throughout Southern California. They submitted 20+ LOIs. They ran multiple deals by our deal advisors to stress-test assumptions.

Alex's CPA background proved unexpectedly critical. More than once, they walked away from deals that didn't hold up under scrutiny.

In the Academy, "A lot of the bright-eyed bushy-tailed optimism that we go in with gets shot down," Anthony said. "And that's what you need. We needed people who were not as biased as we were to bring us down to earth."

At one point, Anthony cold-called a brokerage, not about a specific deal, just to introduce himself and build a relationship.

A week later, that broker brought them a new opportunity. They were the first to see it, the first to submit an LOI, and the first to talk to the seller.

That deal ended up closing.

THE BUSINESS

Their deal box had tightened over the course of the search. They wanted a business in Southern California with $500K to $1.5M in SDE, ideally in the real estate ecosystem, and ideally without licensing requirements that would prevent them from operating it.

This window and door distribution company checked every box. It doesn't technically install anything, so no contractor's license is needed. Everything is made to order, and the manufacturers ship directly to the customer.

"That was the aha moment for Alex and me," Anthony said. The business "one, doesn't hold inventory" and "two, doesn't (in most cases) actually touch the product."

They do have a warehouse, and occasionally they'll hold product for customers who aren't ready to receive it yet, say, if a permit gets delayed. But the business is essentially a specialized sales, estimation, and service team for a handful of premium manufacturers.

The natural question: if they don't touch the product, what makes the business defensible?

Two things, they told us.

The framework here: when evaluating "middleman" businesses, ask yourself if the suppliers depend on the distributor for sales capabilities, and whether the supplier relationships are exclusive or hard to replicate. If both answers are yes, the moat may be deeper than it looks.

Their customer base also falls into the higher-end residential segment, which they see as a strategic advantage: "The higher end, the more upscale, the more we can sell based on value, not necessarily on price. If you’re competing against Home Depot, inevitably you’re gonna be competing against price, and you're never gonna scale."

THE PARTNERSHIP

Anthony and Alex didn't stumble into their roles. They designed them based on complementary strengths and geography.

Anthony, living 15 to 20 minutes from the business in San Diego, is focused on day-to-day leadership. That means managing the team, building relationships with customers and vendors, running the warehouse, and bringing in hands-on technology and process improvements. "I'm much more of a boots-on-the-ground sort of operator," he said.

Alex, based in LA, is the remote strategist. He's handling back-office functions like accounting, legal, and finance, plus digital marketing and long-term growth strategy, including scouting potential expansion into LA or Orange County.

Alex brought years of M&A and strategy experience from his post-MBA consulting career, but he's the first to acknowledge that corporate know-how doesn't automatically translate to small business ownership.

"A lot of the framing that I had or the knowledge that I had was in a corporate Fortune 100, Fortune 500 setting," he said. That's where the Contrarian Academy filled the gap, he says, with advisors and tools built specifically for small business acquisitions.

THE TRANSITION

The duo’s transition strategy leaned heavily on our Owner's Launchpad playbook inside the Contrarian Academy.

But rather than try to absorb it all at once, they used Claude to distill it into a checklist of actionable tasks broken down by week, then imported everything into ClickUp, Anthony told us.

The seller is staying on for about a month, and he claims to have been working only 5 to 10 hours a week. Of course, a lot of institutional knowledge lives in his head, so the priority is extracting as much as possible and documenting SOPs.

By week four, the goal is to run the business independently, with the seller available only for backup. One structural advantage they identified: the seller owns the building, and his wife's business operates out of the other half. That means the seller will be physically nearby well beyond the formal transition period, potentially available for questions as they come up.

WHAT’S NEXT

Anthony and Alex see growth opportunities on two fronts: sales and marketing.

On the sales side, the current team of three salespeople is performing well, but all their business is inbound. Anthony plans to work with the existing sales leader to build an outbound function from scratch.

On the marketing side, the business has a solid website and decent SEO, but no other digital marketing. Alex is digging in and working with the company's existing marketing agency to figure out which levers to pull.

Longer term, they're weighing geographic expansion. The San Diego playbook could be replicated in LA or Orange County, especially given the roughly 12,000 structures unfortunately destroyed or damaged in the recent Malibu fires. Permits are starting to get approved, and over the next 3 to 5 years, Anthony and Alex see a major opportunity to serve high-end residential rebuilds.

"Because our model is lightweight, we can quickly spin up another showroom in LA," Anthony said, "and hire one or two salespeople there and get off to the races.”

Their goal: 8-figure revenue within a year or two, either through organic growth of roughly 10% per year or through a second acquisition of a similar business.

"We're not necessarily committed to buying another business," Alex said. "But certainly it's within our toolbox, and we're going to be considering it very seriously."

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