A note to the owner
If you’ve spent twenty or thirty years building this, the question you probably care about most isn’t the number. It’s what happens on the Monday after closing.
I’m buying one company to run, not adding one to a portfolio. I’m not planning to merge it into something else, move it, or take it apart for the pieces.
The people are a large part of what I’d be paying for. A crew that knows the routes, the equipment, and which customer calls at 4:45 on a Friday took years to assemble and can’t be replaced with a hiring plan. I want the team to stay, and I want whoever runs day-to-day operations to keep running it.
I’d expect to spend the first several months learning how the company actually works before changing much of anything. Where I do invest, it’s usually in the unglamorous parts — scheduling, dispatch, quoting, billing — because that’s where my background is useful and where growth in a service business tends to come from.
On transition: some owners want to hand over the keys in thirty days and go fishing, others want to stay involved for a year. Both can work, and I’d rather build the deal around what you want than around a template.
Michael-Paul HartIndianapolis, Indiana