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Welcome to The Main Street Minute, your shortcut to small business buying and scaling. Today’s case study:
Inside today’s story:
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Meet Erika.
Erika spent her early career in cost management for a military contractor. Her husband Kevin was active duty Navy for years, before shifting to aviation maintenance. Their life followed the military rhythm: deployments, cross-country moves, a young family to raise, and a steady but constrictive paycheck.
Their business buying spark came from Erika’s dad. As Erika put it, “He loves to browse listings and dream.” One time, he showed her a local bar listed for $68,000. “Relatively speaking, I didn’t know businesses sold for that little,” Erika said. “We could buy that.” That specific listing didn’t go anywhere, but the idea took hold.
In May 2025, with Kevin’s active duty contract ending in December, they sold a rental property in Washington to free up acquisition capital and joined the Contrarian Academy. On March 17, 2026, they closed on a profitable scratch-and-dent appliance store that’s been operated out of the same Central Valley, California, building since 1968.
Here’s how they did it.
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For most of their search, the LaCortes weren’t thinking about appliance stores.
Their original focus was wedding rentals, something that played to Kevin’s woodworking skills and Erika’s project management background.
They looked at virtually every wedding rental business they could find. But the businesses were either too fragile to sustain or priced well above what the numbers justified. They expanded their search into pool routes, service businesses, you name it. Nothing really stuck.
In November 2025, on something close to a whim, Erika searched for businesses in their own small town. She had almost never searched locally. Not much gets listed there. But a business came up that she recognized immediately. She had driven past it hundreds of times.
An appliance store. Founded in 1968 by a seller who was now 82, still running it, and not interested in just shutting it down. He wanted young buyers who would keep the business going. The LaCortes wanted something established with real profit. Within a week, they met the seller and toured the store. By the second visit, the seller was asking if they were ready to make an offer.
“I never, ever, ever would have evaluated an appliance store,” Erika said. “But it was in the location I wanted, it checked off many of the items in our deal box, and it ended up being exactly what we needed.”
Here, the seller wasn’t necessarily looking for the highest bidder. He was looking for buyers who would take care of something he had spent his life building, and do it fast.
Early in their conversations, the seller was guarded with his financials. He was eager to sell, but wasn’t opening the books until he knew the buyers were serious.
“We absolutely want the building with the business,” Erika told him. “We just don’t know if we can afford it on the financials you’ve provided so far.”
He brought them back in and laid it out. Mid six-figures for the business. Full seller financing on the building at 4%, balloon payment in five years.
They dug deeper into the financials. At least $1 million in annual sales, every recent year, on zero advertising, with paper invoices and no digital infrastructure.
The core of the model is scratch-and-dent appliances: cosmetically damaged returns from big-box stores, bought in manufacturer lots at steep discounts and resold at 40-50% margins.
Everything held up.
Buying a business as a military family is its own kind of obstacle course.
Kevin’s active duty contract ended late December 2025. The purchase agreement was being finalized that same month. Nothing was final yet, and in the meantime, they still lived on base, still needed income, and had three kids and a complete life transition in motion.
Kevin took a temporary DoW contractor job on base to maintain their housing while the deal closed. Erika ran the search full-time. Everything had to work in sequence, and somehow it did. “Things aligned timing-wise,” she said. “Things were able to go the way we needed them to go.”
Our community and tools helped them move faster than they would have otherwise. By the time the appliance store came up, Erika had gotten sharp at evaluating deals quickly.
“I’d leverage the Contrarian Academy, hit up the Slack, find the answer, and immediately know: ‘we’re moving forward on this,’ or ‘we’re walking away from that,’” she said.
They closed on March 17th.
Erika knew going in that the business was old school. She didn’t fully know what that meant until she was inside it…
They’ve moved quickly to address these issues, launching direct deposits, moving their QuickBooks to the cloud, and bringing on a new industry-specific software tool.
There’s a six-week implementation lag on that last one. “We want it done now,” she told us. “The urgency is yesterday. But not everything can move as fast as you’d like.”
Erika had expected to find her deal fast. It took two years.
“I thought I was going to be that kind of person: ‘I don’t need to evaluate 50 businesses.’ ‘I’m going to evaluate the one and be done in a year.’ Of course, it’s not true. It takes time.”
What the extra time gave her, though, was repetition. Each deal she looked at added something: sharper eyes on financials, more fluency with brokers, more confidence with sellers. “Every single time we knew a little bit more, and went in with greater confidence.”
The emotional side was harder to prepare for. She described “hitting a wall” repeatedly, certain she was done. Then a new listing email would drop, and she’d be back at the spreadsheets. “You’re like, ‘I’m done. I’m never going to do this again.’ And then you get one email, and you’re off to the races.”
But through all that repetition, when the appliance store finally appeared, she knew exactly what to look for and how to take action.
Erika and Kevin aren’t trying to reinvent the wheel yet.
The business has run itself for nearly 60 years on word of mouth and community goodwill. The near-term focuses include learning, not disrupting, getting the back office digital, and keeping talent around. Then grow.
“It feels very natural,” Erika said. “None of us are stressed in a way that we’re like, ‘This is too much.’ It’s more so the daily challenges of: and another thing, and another thing. But I like this better than a W-2.”
For her and her husband, this wasn’t about finding the perfect business. It was about finding the right one, in the right place, at the right time.
And it looks like they did.
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The information contained here is educational, may not be typical, and does not guarantee returns. Background, education, effort, and application will affect your experience and the profitability of any business. Individual results may vary.
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