That is most of it. The rest is detail, and the detail is negotiable.
I am one buyer looking for one company, so I would rather tell you what I am drawn to than publish a fence. If your business is close to any of this, or if you think I have written the list wrong, the right move is a phone call rather than a judgement about whether you qualify.
SHAPE
Established, profitable, recurring or repeat revenue.
WHERE
Detroit 75mi · Annapolis 30mi · Tampa 50mi, flexible.
STRUCTURE
SBA 7(a) primary. Seller note welcome.
TIMELINE
No artificial deadline. The first one has to be right.
The ones I read twice about are the ones that were here in 2008, or in 2020, and are still here. Somebody made hard calls with their own money on the line. I would rather buy from that person than from a company having its best year ever.
Contracts, routes, standing orders, or thirty years of people picking up the phone and asking for you by name — it does not matter to me which. What I like is a company where, if the doors did not open one Friday, somebody’s Monday would go wrong. That is a real place in people’s lives and it takes decades to build.
Maintenance, inspection, distribution, route service. Nobody writes articles about this work and it will be needed just the same in ten years. That suits me. It means the company that runs it best wins, and running something well is a thing a person can actually affect.
When people have been somewhere fifteen or twenty years it is usually because the work is steady and the owner treated them properly. You cannot fake that, and you cannot buy it back once it is gone. It is the first thing I would want to protect.
The pricing lives in your memory, the schedule lives in a spreadsheet, and it all works because you are there. I do not read that as something wrong. It is what a company built by one person looks like, and getting it out of that person’s head without losing what they knew is the work I have done for eleven years.
Retirement, health, a partner buyout, or having simply done it long enough — there is no reason I would think less of. What I hope for is that the decision is genuinely yours, and not one somebody talked you into.
I live in Metro Detroit, and I have family reasons to be near Annapolis and Tampa. Those three are where I can be present quickly and often, which matters more in the first year than almost anything else.
For the right company I would travel further than this, and I would move.
Detroit 75 miAnnapolis 30 miTampa · St. Pete 50 mi
Every company has one: the thing everybody knows should be better and nobody has had a free week to fix. That is the part of the job I actually want. I would not buy a company in order to leave it exactly as I found it.
You rarely get complete information, and waiting for it is a decision of its own. I make the call with what is in front of me, write down why, and change course early when I turn out to be wrong. What I will not do is hand your people a decision they cannot get an explanation for.
I do not try to win the argument about how something ought to be done. I build the thing, put it in front of the person who does the job, and let it make the case. If it does not help them, that is useful, and I would rather have it in week two than in year two.
I am not going to stand in front of your people and promise that nothing changes. It would not be true and they would know it. What I would be changing is the part of the day a computer should be doing. What I would be protecting is the part that needed a person.
There is no fund behind me, no committee to consult, and nobody to hand it to when it gets difficult. That cuts both ways: decisions come slower in the first year, and there is nobody above me who can decide differently later.
Nobody behind me needs an exit in five years, so I am not building toward one. The plan is to own one good business for a long time and leave it larger and steadier than I found it. That is also why I can be patient with your timeline.
Not requirements — the kinds of companies whose problems I already understand. Essential and recurring services. Distribution and wholesale. Specialty trades and the contractors who serve them. Maintenance, testing and inspection on a schedule. Route-based service. Niche manufacturing with a real customer list. Business-to-business work that renews.
What those have in common is not an industry. It is that the company keeps a promise to somebody on a regular basis, and keeping it well is an operational problem rather than a fashionable one.
If your business is not on that list, call anyway. The companies I would most like to find are the ones I did not know to write down.
SBA 7(a) is the likely path and I am open on how the rest is built. A seller note is welcome where it makes the deal work better for both of us.
I will not lead with a number. When I give you one it arrives with the arithmetic behind it, so you can see which line drove it and argue with that line rather than with me.
If you are already weighing an offer, I am glad to tell you honestly whether I think it is a good one.
Call regardless. A page like this is written to be scanned, and scanning loses things. If it is not a fit I will tell you on the first call rather than three weeks later, and if I know somebody who is a better buyer for your company than I am, I will tell you that too.
If you’re years away from selling, that’s the normal case. Book it anyway.