How a Banker Bought a 40-Year-Old Business and Survived the J-Curve with Joseph Cruz
About this episode
Joseph Cruz shares his experience of acquiring a sewer and water distributor and the challenges faced during ownership.
In this episode of the M&A Launchpad Podcast, hosts Casey Minshew and Ben Suttles sit down with Joseph Cruz, who left a decade-long career in leveraged finance and investment banking at Fifth Third to acquire a sewer and water distributor in the Chicagoland area. Joseph walks through how he found the business on BizBuySell, structured the deal with an SBA loan, seller note, and a side-letter earnout, and what he's learned in less than two years of ownership — from underestimating seasonal cash flow to building toward a broader infrastructure platform. The conversation is a candid, ground-level look at self-funded search: what it actually takes to structure an SBA deal, why buyers should expect a post-close “J-curve,” and how a search that started industry-agnostic ended up in a defensible, unglamorous niche. In this episode, we discuss: Making the leap from Fifth Third's leveraged finance group to a self-funded search, and finding the deal on BizBuySell after starting industry-agnostic How the deal was structured: a $536,000 purchase price, a $550,000 SBA loan, a seller note, a holdback, and an off-books earnout tied to the general manager's retirement Real lessons from year…
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