Living 1-2 hrs from acquisition

I worked briefly with a searcher who successfully acquired a business outside of his home country (acquisition was in the UK, searcher lived in continental Europe). He spends the work week in the UK. I believe the ideal scenario is committing to living within a workable commute and be present in the business for at least a year, especially if the owner is going to stay on in an operational role. Technically, you can run the business remotely, sure, but there are issues are employee morale, your presence, and above all, being able to pick up on the subtleties of the business that will be hard to perceive from afar

Some of the other respondents have hit upon the risk of remote ownership and relying on the former owner to look after your investment. Those are important points, but since that's already covered I'll take another angle...

There's not a lot to go on in the description, so I'll make the assumption that "service business" means the company is people-heavy and those employees' labor is the primary product. If that is an accurate assumption then I highly recommend you find a way to spend at least 50% of your time local to the business. Unless this is a massive enterprise with layers of management and a history of remote shareholders the employees will care greatly about your character, your vision for the company, your ability to make or keep the company a great place to work, and whether you are interested in them as people. A good portion of the answers to their questions is only demonstrated by your physical presence and face-to-face interactions. We hear and read stories about distant owners collecting mailbox money and spending their days as a capital allocators aggregating businesses for multiple arbitrage. No doubt some of those stories are accurate, but my experience thus far operating a small business and observing the other operators who are part of my new peer group of home services business owners is that small company teams want a relationship with the owner in order to feel confident about their employment choice.

All that said, for the last 18 months my wife and I have I've owned a business 200 miles from our house. We chose not to relocate immediately in order to let our youngest graduate from his high school and wind down some of our community commitments. We leased a townhome near the business and spend ~50% of our time there, with periods of up to 2 weeks away from the business. It's a 50-person plumbing company with several capable managers. Financial results are strong and employee turnover is low during our ownership. When we are on-site we are all-in. I get to the shop early in the morning to talk to the team before they dispatch to jobs and every two weeks we have an all-hands session which I've only missed once. That level of face-to-face engagement seems to be enough and I never felt that I had this much freedom of my schedule in my previous W-2 roles, so it works me too. We are in the process of building a house near the business and will relocate full-time this year. The fact is, we really enjoy these 50 people and want to spend more time with them. I hope you find the same with the team you inherit with your acquisition.