Four months before the call that nearly ended it, Nick Muscari's company was the one getting praised at every weekly meeting. Great gross margin. Strong cash flow. The favorite little side company. Then the parent distributor collapsed, the assets went to a competitor, and Factory Cleaning Equipment was set to be liquidated.

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Kyler Nixon sits down with Nick Muscari to walk through a company takeback, front to end. Nick had 48 hours to decide whether to try buying the business, one phone call to the original founder, and two weeks to close the deal in cash. The reopening took about 45 minutes. Nobody missed a paycheck.

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This one covers what it actually takes to save a business on a deadline, why a profitable company can still end up on the chopping block, and what Nick is building now that the ropes are off.

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👤 Guest Bio

Nick Muscari leads Factory Cleaning Equipment, a floor-cleaning equipment dealer and service company with locations in Aurora, Illinois and the Carolinas. He started in the distribution industry at Jon-Don in 2008 in customer service, worked his way into sales and sales management, and later joined Factory Cleaning Equipment to build its sales team. In May 2025, he helped the original founder buy the company back and relaunch it as Factory Cleaning Equipment, LLC.

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📌 What We Cover

• How Factory Cleaning Equipment went from being the praised, high-margin division to days away from liquidation
• The 48-hour window to decide on the buyback, and the dinner six months earlier that made the founder pick up the phone
• Closing the deal in cash inside two weeks, reopening under a new name with about 48 jobs saved
• Rebuilding a field sales team in 2020 while everyone else went inside, showing up with a mask on instead of cold calling from a desk
• Why a locally based industry makes national expansion the wrong play, and the decision to drop 11 locations and refocus on Chicagoland and the Carolinas
• Promoting a driver and a service technician into territory managers, and why the next leaders were already on the route
• Where Nick is placing his next bet: autonomous floor-cleaning equipment

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🔗 Resources Mentioned

• Factory Cleaning Equipment
• Extreme Ownership by Jocko Willink and Leif Babin