Software has near-zero marginal cost and no expiry date. Food inventory has both. Moving from one world into the other was a genuinely useful, occasionally humbling lesson in what "operations" actually means.
Margin feels different when it's physical
In software, a bad month means slower growth. In a physical food business, a bad month can mean spoiled inventory, a missed payment to a supplier, or a cash flow gap that doesn't resolve itself by waiting. The margin for error is real and immediate in a way that's easy to underestimate from the outside.
Diligence on a deal like this means going well beyond a financial model. Normalized income statements and cash flow projections matter, but so does understanding container import timelines, supplier relationships that took years to build, and a staff who already know things about the business that aren't written down anywhere.
The financing reality
Financing a physical acquisition looks nothing like funding a software product. Asset-based lending, vendor financing structures, and instruments like a HELOC become genuinely relevant tools, not theoretical ones. Understanding how a lender actually evaluates a business with real inventory and equipment, rather than recurring software revenue, is its own education.
What carries over from software, and what doesn't
Some instincts transfer well: build a clean financial model, know your numbers cold, don't assume anything you haven't verified yourself. Others don't transfer at all: a software bug can be patched at 2am with no one noticing. A spoiled shipment of physical product is just gone.
Why this connects back to the software side
Owning a real, physical, regulated business changed how the software gets built, too. Compliance tools built only from the outside, without ever having lived through customs paperwork or a Prior Notice filing personally, tend to miss the details that actually matter to the person using them under pressure.