Adam Vandermyde: "Try Before You Buy" Acquisition to an 8-Figure Exit

In small-business acquisitions, the leap from a comfortable corporate salary to personally guaranteeing a multi-million-dollar SBA loan is often the hardest hurdle to clear. For Adam Vandermyde, a former private equity executive with a family of six, that hurdle seemed insurmountable. He repeatedly turned down the opportunity to buy a highly profitable construction and distribution business.

Then, the sellers made him an offer he couldn’t refuse: "Move here, become our CEO, buy just 5% of the business now, and kick the tires. If you like it, you can buy the rest later."

This unique "try before you buy" arrangement allowed Vandermyde to de-risk the acquisition, learn a new industry, and eventually secure 100% ownership. Five years later, he orchestrated a stunning turnaround from a near-fatal operational disaster, transforming the business model and exiting for a life-changing amount.

Vandermyde’s background was steeped in corporate strategy and private equity. After earning his MBA, he worked in strategy consulting before transitioning to a PE-backed portfolio company, where he rose to COO and led corporate development. He knew how to buy and integrate businesses for other people, using their money.

The idea of doing it for himself, using his own capital and taking on personal debt, was terrifying.

When his brother-in-law, a business broker, presented him with an off-market opportunity to buy Petro West, a company headquartered in St. George, Utah, Vandermyde said no. He said no three or four times. He was 41 years old, living comfortably in Dallas, Texas, with four children (including a son entering his senior year of high school). Furthermore, it was early 2020 — the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. The uncertainty was too high.

Petro West operated in a highly specialized, unglamorous niche: gas station infrastructure. If you pump gas into your car, Petro West installed and maintained everything from the underground tanks to the piping and the pumps themselves.

The business was founded 25 years earlier by two partners who identified primarily as salesmen. They had built a robust, cash-flowing business but lacked the operational processes to scale it further. They were ready to retire but were highly secretive about the sale, refusing to take the business to a broad market.

They liked Vandermyde’s corporate background and his respectful interaction with their team. Desperate for a successor, they proposed the "try before you buy" idea. Vandermyde would purchase a 5% stake for roughly $250,000, move his family to Utah, and take over as CEO at a significantly reduced salary compared to his PE job. If he added value and liked the business, they would honor the previously negotiated 3x EBITDA valuation when he was ready to buy the remaining 95%.

Vandermyde accepted.

After six months as CEO, Vandermyde was convinced. He loved the business’s potential and the lack of sophisticated competition in the Intermountain West. Because the sellers had worked alongside him and trusted him, they agreed to finance 50% of the purchase price.

The final deal to acquire the remaining 95% of the business was structured beautifully:

Vandermyde owned roughly 80% of the equity, allocating the remaining 20% to strategic partners, including his new COO/CFO. Crucially, he kept his partners' equity at 19% to ensure he absorbed 100% of the personal guarantee risk required by the SBA.

Shortly after closing, disaster struck.

During the construction of a new fueling station in California, severe supply chain shortages forced Petro West to substitute the standard rigid piping for a flexible, approved alternative. While functionally safe, the flexible piping created microscopic dips that failed California's hyper-strict environmental slope tests.

The solution was catastrophic: they had to rip up the concrete and replace the piping at their own expense.

"We lost a million dollars of EBITDA that year," Vandermyde revealed in an appearance on the Acquiring Minds Podcast. "Five times my CFO came to me and said, 'We got two weeks of cash left.'"

To survive, Vandermyde had to inject more personal capital, extend lines of credit, and work with the bank to slash the seller note payments in half for six months. Despite the financial hemorrhage, he refused to cut corners or leave the client with a flawed site, preserving the company's reputation.

Surviving the California disaster forced Vandermyde to re-evaluate the entire business model. He realized that while construction drove top-line revenue, it was inherently risky and volatile. The real value lay in the recurring, high-margin service work.

He inverted the company's identity. Instead of being a construction company that occasionally fixed broken pumps, Petro West became a premier service and maintenance company that also built gas stations.

Vandermyde implemented sweeping operational changes:

Under his leadership, the highly profitable service division grew by nearly 50%. The business became a cash-generating machine.

By 2022, private equity money was flooding into the infrastructure space, seeking to build national, coast-to-coast platforms. Petro West was the dominant player in the Intermountain West — the missing puzzle piece for any East Coast or West Coast consolidator.

Realizing that his geographic footprint made Petro West a highly coveted strategic asset, Vandermyde hired an investment banker to run a formal sale process.

In late 2022, just five years after initially moving to Utah, Vandermyde sold Petro West to Nwestco, a private equity-backed strategic acquirer, for an 8-figure price.

Vandermyde walked away with a life-changing sum. He rolled $1 million into the new parent company and stayed on as Regional Director.

For a man who initially said no to the deal out of fear of the unknown, the journey validated his ultimate philosophy: "Entrepreneurs aren't risk-takers; they are risk mitigators." If it can be argued that try-before-you-buy arrangements are rare, doing right by customers during a crisis has been key to Adam Vandermyde’s business success.