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Hello SMB Deal Hunters!

📣 Quick Announcement: I’m investing in the acquisition of a government-contracted landscaping company and opening it to a few accredited SMB Deal Hunter investors to join me. Learn more about this fully passive opportunity.

Now onto regular business…I’m excited to share 5 new businesses for sale worth checking out in this Market Watch issue. Each was handpicked from hundreds of fresh listings, with our quick take on why it stands out. First up:

🔎 Looking for deals in your area? We can source them for you.

Today’s issue is sponsored by SMB Deal Hunter Pro, our accelerator that helps business buyers find, finance, and acquire a million-dollar cash-flowing business in 6–12 months.

COMMUNITY WINS

Here’s what one SMB Deal Hunter Pro member shared this past week:

💡 Justin didn't do this alone.

We helped him source this opportunity and worked with him 1:1 to catch red flags and structure a winning offer. Next, we’re helping him secure financing and navigate due diligence and negotiations.

We're now in the 60-day window after Tax Day. Right now, thousands of business owners are staring at their returns and doing the retirement math for the first time. Every year, this stretch produces a wave of new listings from owners who are finally ready to sell.

The best deals won't sit on the market long.

So if you've been waiting for the right time to make a move....

NEW DEALS

These deals span the country. For custom-sourced deals in your area, click here.

1/ Kitchen Equipment Repair and Service Company

📍 Location: Texas
💰 Asking Price: $3,500,000
💼 EBITDA: $665,000
📊 Revenue: $3,800,000
📅 Established: 1982

💭 My 2 Cents: Restaurants and other facilities with commercial kitchens need their equipment serviced on a regular schedule, and once you're the contracted vendor, switching carries real risk because downtime means lost revenue. Many of these relationships stretch back 30 years, which tells me the retention here is driven by the work itself, not a sales team. Plus, the company runs in-house fabrication that most competitors don't offer, giving them tighter control over product quality and better margins on repairs. The management team plans to stay post-close, so a buyer isn't walking into a transition headache. That said, I'd want to understand what the equipment replacement schedule looks like, how revenue breaks down between recurring contracts and one-time equipment sales, and whether the "low-tech operations" the seller highlights as upside actually reflects years of deferred investment (because there's a difference between "room to modernize" and "neglected infrastructure"). At 5.26x, the seller knows what auto-renewing contracts are worth, but the real question is whether digitizing the back office can push margins higher without disrupting the relationships that drive everything.

2/ Non-Medical Home Care Agency

📍 Location: Colorado
💰 Asking Price: $5,500,000
💼 EBITDA: $1,276,968
📊 Revenue: $4,352,972
📅 Established: 2004

💭 My 2 Cents: Most non-medical agencies on the market are sub-$500K EBITDA mom-and-pops. This one is meaningfully larger and has a diversified payor mix. The company provides daily living support for seniors funded through Medicaid waivers, long-term care insurance, and private-pay families. Twenty-two years in the market means the referral network took real time to build, and the seller describes the operation as turnkey with experienced caregivers and administrative staff handling the day-to-day. I'd want to verify the caregiver turnover rate (the industry average runs near 75% annually), how revenue splits between private-pay and government-funded clients, and what referral relationships the agency holds with hospital discharge planners or senior living communities. The business is growing quickly, so I’d also want to know if that’s from rate increases, new clients, or expanding hours with existing ones, because each tells a very different story about sustainability. A buyer should budget for higher-than-expected labor costs from day one, because retaining caregivers almost always requires paying above what the prior owner was willing to.

3/ School Bus and Non-Emergency Medical Transportation Company

📍 Location: New Jersey
💰 Asking Price: $1,500,000
💼 EBITDA: $500,000
📊 Revenue: $1,400,000
📅 Established: 2012

💭 My 2 Cents: School districts don't gamble on who's transporting their most vulnerable students, and Medicare and Medicaid patient transport adds a second revenue stream. NEMT is the service that gets Medicaid and Medicare patients to recurring appointments like dialysis, chemotherapy, and specialist visits when they can't drive themselves, and it's billed directly to government programs rather than sold customer by customer. That dual contract model is what makes this 15-year-old company more interesting than a typical small fleet operation. School bus routes renew on predictable cycles, while the medical side taps into federal and state programs that are only expanding as the population ages. I'd want to verify the fleet age and condition across all vehicles (because capital expenditure timing changes the real return on this deal), how the school contracts are structured around exclusivity and renewal windows, and what the Medicaid reimbursement rate trajectory looks like in New Jersey. Worth noting, the seller requires $1 million proof of funds and won't accept third-party financing, so the deal structure narrows the buyer pool, which could also mean less competition for the right buyer.

MEMBER SPOTLIGHT

How many of you have spent years watching your clients build the businesses you actually want?

You see the numbers. You learn how they did it. And you start thinking you could do it too. But the years go by and you're still on the other side of the desk.

Nielson spent 15 years in commercial banking watching every kind of business owner up close. He saw enough to know he didn't want startup risk. He wanted to buy something that already worked.

He found a deal through a friend of a friend. A commercial landscaping business in Los Angeles with 17 employees and mostly government contracts running 4-6 years. But structuring a $2M+ acquisition on his own was a different story.

That's when he joined SMB Deal Hunter Pro. With our team behind him, he got the seller to finance 60% himself. Put 20% down at close, another 20% at 90 days, and the seller carried the rest on a 3-year schedule. No SBA loan. No bank.

The negotiation took 12 months. He and the seller walked away from each other twice. He spent over 100 hours sitting in the truck with the seller before they ever signed.

He quit banking. His wife, a behavior specialist, quit healthcare. They went all in together.

5 months in, he's at the yard by 6am every morning learning the business inside out before he ever considers stepping back.

4/ Multi-Location Licensed Childcare Provider

📍 Location: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
💰 Asking Price: $1,900,000
💼 EBITDA: $463,975
📊 Revenue: $1,300,000
📅 Established: 2009

💭 My 2 Cents: The Keystone STARS 4 rating is what makes this childcare provider worth a closer look. It's the highest quality designation Pennsylvania awards, and earning it takes years of documented compliance, staff credentialing, and benchmarks most operators never complete. That rating unlocks higher reimbursement rates from state-funded early education programs, which creates a revenue floor that doesn't depend entirely on private-pay enrollment. This company operates multiple locations serving infants through school-age children, with after-school and summer programs tied to local elementary schools, and that creates natural stickiness because parents don't switch childcare providers casually. The staffing question is the one I'd press hardest on. I'd want to know how the team is structured across locations, what turnover has looked like, and how hard it is to recruit qualified early childhood educators right now (because staffing is the constraint that kills growth in this industry before demand ever does). I'd also want to understand how enrollment has trended post-pandemic and whether any single funding source carries a disproportionate share. Anyone starting from zero would need two to three years just to earn the rating this business already holds.

5/ Full-Service Commercial and Residential Landscape Company

📍 Location: Missouri
💰 Asking Price: $2,185,000
💼 EBITDA: $650,000
📊 Revenue: $2,980,000
📅 Established: N/A

💭 My 2 Cents: 80% of revenue from recurring service agreements is an unusually high number for a landscape company. That tells me the commercial contract base, which accounts for roughly two-thirds of revenue, is doing the heavy lifting through monthly billing cycles and multi-year relationships rather than one-off residential jobs. The company serves over 400 active clients across a four-county region with a mix of maintenance, hardscaping, irrigation, lighting, and snow removal. One detail that matters is the seasonal labor force returns year after year, which solves what is typically the hardest staffing problem in outdoor services. Growth potential sits in higher-margin specialty work like irrigation, drainage, and lighting, which the seller says remain underutilized. I'd want to dig into whether the snow removal revenue actually smooths out the winter dip or creates its own liability headaches, and how concentrated the commercial book is across a handful of large contracts. The sale includes three owned properties valued at nearly $700,000, so a buyer should back those out when evaluating the effective multiple on the operating business. The real estate also helps on the financing side, since including it in an SBA 7(a) loan extends the blended loan term beyond the standard 10 years for a business-only acquisition, which lowers monthly debt service and improves cash flow in the early years of ownership.

COMMUNITY PERKS

Ready to buy and operate a $1M+ business? Partner with my team and get expert support at every step.

Want to invest passively in SMB acquisitions? Get access to investment opportunities.

Get a personal introduction to my preferred SBA 7(a) lender, non-SBA lenders, Quality of Earnings providers, or legal counsel

Raising capital for your deal? I’ll connect you with investors from the SMB Deal Hunter Community.

Interested in selling your business? I’ll help you connect with buyers from the SMB Deal Hunter Community.

RECENT PODCAST EPISODE

Ryan Sullivan spent 30 years in corporate. Survived seven rounds of layoffs in telecom. Lived through the largest housing crash in U.S. history at James Hardie, the country's biggest siding manufacturer. Then got fired twice.

Today, he owns 6 cash-flowing businesses he never plans to sell. Around 250 employees. $6 million average deal size.

In December 2021, he and his partner Greg formed North Park Group. The plan was to hold for 40 years, never flip. Five months later, they closed their first deal. Greg moved to Wichita and slept on a mattress on the floor for a year while they figured out how to run it.

Now, new operators in the portfolio take the personal guarantee on their own deal, then get equity in every other company. Investors get distributions twice a year. Ryan is 52. He wants to hold until he's 85.

When we asked about the hardest part, he didn't mention financing or diligence. He said running a business is way harder than buying one, and doing it alone is crazy.

And for our audio-only listeners, jump in and listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts!

THAT’S A WRAP

See you tomorrow!

P.S. I'd love your feedback. Tap the poll below or reply to this email.

Disclaimer

This publication is a newsletter only and the information provided herein is the opinion of our editors and writers only. Any transaction or opportunity of any kind is provided for information only; SMB Deal Hunter does not verify nor confirm information. SMB Deal Hunter is not making any offer to readers to participate in any transaction or opportunity described herein.

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