I bought a business with an SBA loan. Now what?

You closed. The wire went through, the seller shook your hand, and on Monday morning twelve people looked at you to see what happens next. If you bought with an SBA loan, the bank account also started a countdown. Debt service comes out every month whether the phones ring or not.

Here is what the first 90 days actually look like inside a trades or service business, and what to do in each stretch. This is written for the person who bought an established shop from a retiring owner. If that is you, the good news is the problems arrive in a predictable order.

Weeks 1 to 2: do less than you want to

The urge is to fix things. Resist it for two weeks.

The crew is deciding about you. Every change you make in week one gets read as a verdict on how they have been doing it. A new owner who shows up with a new app, a new schedule and a new pricebook in the first ten days tells the senior tech that his fifteen years do not count. He may not quit that week. He will start looking.

What to do instead:

• Ride along. One full day with each crew, or as many as you can. Ask how the job actually runs. Write down what you hear, not what you think.
• Sit with the dispatcher for a morning. Watch how the day gets built. Ask what breaks.
• Meet the bookkeeper, in person if you can. Ask for the last twelve months of P&L, the AR aging, and the bank balance. You will not understand all of it yet. That is fine.
• Say the same thing to everyone: nothing changes this month. Then mean it.

What to leave alone: pricing, software, the schedule, the truck assignments, who reports to whom. All of it can wait.

Weeks 2 to 8: write down what the seller knows

The seller's transition period is the most valuable asset you bought, and it has an expiry date. Most agreements give you 30 to 90 days. In practice the seller's attention fades around week six. Whatever is still in the seller's memory after that is gone.

Most of what makes the business work is not in the CRM. It is in the seller's memory: which customers pay late, which vendor gives a handshake discount, what the pricebook really is versus what is on the invoices, which inspections are due in March, who to call when the truck breaks down on a Sunday.

Spend these weeks getting it out of memory and onto paper. Concretely:

1. Record the knowledge sessions. Two hours, twice a week, with the seller. Record them with permission. Ask about customers, vendors, pricing, the calendar, the crew, and the ten jobs that make the money.
2. Build the pricebook with margins. One list: every job type, what it costs you, what you charge, the margin. Most sellers price from memory and it works because they know the business. You do not yet.
3. Write the top-20 customer profiles. Who they are, what they buy, how they pay, what they hate.
4. Build a compliance and recurring-service calendar. Licenses, inspections, insurance renewals, seasonal work.
5. Write the "how we do it here" one-pagers. Ten processes, one page each, in the words of the person who does them.

You can do this yourself if you have the hours. You probably do not. This is the work our Knowledge and Handoff line does in three to five weeks, and it is the one thing we would not put off.

Weeks 4 to 12: get the numbers where you can see them

Around month two the debt service starts to feel real. This is when new owners want to know, for the first time, whether the business actually makes money on each job. Most cannot answer.

The first win is almost always job costing. One landscaping buyer we know put clock-in and clock-out on each property in month two and found that a third of his customers were negative margin. He had inherited them from a seller who liked them. He raised prices on half and let the rest go, and the business made more money doing less work.

You do not need a finance hire for this. You need:

• One dashboard that reads from your field software and QuickBooks. Revenue by week. Margin by job type. Cash after debt service.
• Job costing by tech, by job type, by customer. Flag the accounts that lose money.
• A cash view: AR aging, payroll runway, what the bank takes out and when.
• Collections that run on their own. Invoice on job close. Reminder at 15 days. Card on file for the residential work.

If the bank wants a monthly report, build it once off the dashboard so it does not eat your evenings. That is the Cash and Numbers line, and it is usually the second thing worth paying for.

Month 2 onward: the phones

Something else happens around month two. The phone gets quieter than it should. Part of it is normal: some customers were loyal to the seller, not the business. Part of it is that nobody is catching what comes in after five.

A large share of HVAC and plumbing calls come in after hours. Most callers who reach voicemail try the next shop within a couple of minutes. You are paying for those leads with your marketing budget and then giving them away.

The fix is not complicated. A missed-call text-back. Voicemail and email turned into tickets someone owns. A morning routine for who calls back. An after-hours service if your volume justifies it. And a communication plan for the accounts that matter, so they hear about the ownership change from you and not from a rumor.

This is the fastest line to ship, two to four weeks, and it often pays for itself in the first month. See Customers and Phones.

Month 3 and after: now you can touch the field

By month three the crew has had three payrolls with you. They have watched you ride along and not change anything stupid. Now you can talk about how the day runs.

This is where software rollouts usually go wrong. The owner buys ServiceTitan or Housecall Pro, watches an onboarding video, and announces that everyone is on the app Monday. Techs read that as a move that helps the owner and costs them. Some walk. You can require a process. You cannot require buy-in.

Do it the other way around. Watch how a job actually runs, on a ride-along. Design the mobile workflow to match. Let the senior tech try it first and change what he does not like. Then roll it out, with training recorded so the next hire gets the same thing.

And be honest about the platform. ServiceTitan is the right answer for a twenty-truck shop and overkill for a five-truck one. Some shops are better off with what they have, cleaned up. Anyone who sells you the platform is not the person to ask. That is the Crew and Field line, and it is the one where an outside builder earns the fee or loses the crew.

What to do about all of this

If you have the hours, do it in this order: knowledge, numbers, phones, field. If you do not have the hours, which is most buyers, the Year-One Pass is exactly this sequence with a price on it.

Either way, the rule is the same. Understand before you build. Fit the business, do not reshape it. Build with the crew, not at them. The seller ran this shop for twenty years on memory and it worked. Your job is to make it run on systems, so it keeps working when it is not you standing there.