David Riggs holds one belief that shapes nearly everything his company does. Small business is the backbone of America, he says, and it is being hollowed out. What worries him is not the product. It is the machinery underneath it: the finances, the delivery of the work and the leadership, which can come apart in companies customers still like.
Riggs is the founder and CEO of Karteria, a Denver holding company built around that problem. Karteria acquires small businesses with products customers love and operations that are falling apart, then fixes them. The stated purpose is plain. Karteria exists to keep those businesses alive and healthy.
The company is particular about what it buys. It looks for businesses with strong product-market fit and broken operations, companies Riggs describes as profitable on paper and chaotic in practice. It typically buys them at valuations under $1 million. The low price is part of the model, because the value is created after the deal closes, when Karteria rebuilds the finances, the delivery and the leadership of the business it just bought.
To fix operations, Karteria uses a framework it calls the Revenue Bowtie. The goal of the rebuilding is a leadership team that can run the company without Riggs. He says that in every company the aim is to make himself unnecessary. His reasoning fits in a sentence. “A business that runs without its owner is a business that survives its owner,” he says.
His management style is built to make that possible. “Default trust, revoked by behavior,” Riggs says. When something goes wrong, he gives direct feedback first and gets curious second. “I show up to solve problems, not own them.”
Riggs says he does not come to the work as an outsider. Before Karteria, he built Pneuma, a marketing business, from zero to $3 million in annual recurring revenue in 36 months, and sold it before he turned 28. The growth, by his own account, is not the lesson. The lesson is what happened underneath it. “I was the CEO who lost operational discipline while revenue grew,” he says. “I know exactly where it breaks because it broke on me.”
He leaned on sales while everything downstream cracked, learned how to fix it, and then turned the experience into a repeatable playbook. It also shapes his view of the owners he buys from. “Small business owners do not need another buyer looking for arbitrage,” Riggs says. “They need someone who has been inside the mess and knows the way out.”
Karteria’s portfolio today holds roughly $9 million in combined revenue across healthcare, construction, marketing, accounting and consumer businesses. The firm also runs a consulting line and holds ten real estate units. Those numbers are small next to the target Riggs has set. Karteria’s north star is $100 million in portfolio revenue.
He is careful about how he describes that number. The measure behind it, he says, is companies saved and jobs kept. The goal is $100 million in portfolio revenue, one turnaround at a time, “not because bigger is better, but because every company stabilized is a set of jobs kept and a town that keeps its business.” The test he names is simple: whether the businesses stay open and the people stay employed.
Away from the portfolio, Riggs puts time into the people who are starting out. He mentors three to four first-time founders a month, every month, all of it informal, and keeps his calendar open to anyone starting a business or leaving a job to start one. He guest lectures on acquisitions and marketing at his alma mater, Wabash College, through its Center for Innovation, Business & Entrepreneurship, and teaches a marketing class at Lutheran High School in Parker, Colorado, a few times a semester. In July 2026 he was appointed to the Finance and Audit Committee of USA Weightlifting for a two-year term, where his job is to ask hard questions about the financials and make sure the CEO can explain the results.
He also tests himself physically. In May 2026 he ran the Grand Canyon rim-to-rim-to-rim, an ultra-distance effort.
Plenty of people say small business matters. Fewer take on the slow work of keeping specific ones running. Karteria’s bet is that a company with a product people like and a broken back office is worth more repaired than sold for parts, and that a team can be built to carry it after the owner steps back. Whether that model reaches $100 million is an open question. What Riggs has defined is the way he wants it judged: the doors stay open, and the jobs stay put.
