New Deals: A pool service company with manager, pawn shop with growing demand, and 3 other finds...

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NEW DEALS

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📍 Location: Florida
💰 Asking Price: $4,250,000
💼 EBITDA: $791,575
📊 Revenue: $2,132,513
📅 Established: 1996

💭 My 2 Cents: Most garden centers in this country make their whole year's revenue in about ten weeks of spring. Florida gets a second window on top of that one: fall planting opens in September and closes in February, and it is the stronger of the two, so a store here sells into two seasons where a northern one sells into one. This one sells entirely at retail, and the ground it operates on is included rather than leased. Three full-time and six part-time staff run the place alongside the owner, and the doors are open seven days a week. The store spends under $5,000 a year on advertising. Customers arrive mostly on word of mouth built over 30 years. That said, I'd want to know whether the plants are grown on those parcels or bought in finished, because a grower and a reseller are different businesses with different margins. Plant shrink, meaning what dies before it sells, is the next number I'd pull. Then what share of the year's revenue comes in during the fall window against the spring one. Strip the $1.5 million of real estate back out of the price and the operating business is changing hands at roughly 3.5x its earnings, which is a different deal from the one the headline multiple describes.

📍 Location: New York
💰 Asking Price: $1,450,000
💼 EBITDA: $414,893
📊 Revenue: $1,993,169
📅 Established: 2016

💭 My 2 Cents: There are about 10.7 million residential pools in America, and roughly 60 to 65% of the owners pay somebody else to look after them, a share that has been climbing as the chemistry got fussier and the equipment got more complicated. In the New York market that work runs 26 to 36 weeks a year, and the company that closed a pool in October is the one that knows what was drained and where every plug went, so the spring opening goes back to whoever did the fall closing almost by default. This company has run maintenance, openings, closings and repairs since 2016, with sixteen people on the books and a manager already running the crew. The couple who own it left a competitor to build this one from nothing, they are retiring out of it now, and they are willing to finance part of the sale themselves. I'd want the count of accounts that closed last fall and came back this spring, since that ratio is the only real retention number in this trade. Then the split between scheduled maintenance, which is contracted and repeats, and repair work, which only happens when something breaks. Then what the business spends to keep the lights on through the months when nothing is coming in. Route density is what makes this trade pay: 25 to 40 stops a tech-day is the benchmark, and a technician running 35 earns roughly double one running 18 on the same wage, so growth here starts with filling in the streets these trucks already drive.

📍 Location: North Carolina
💰 Asking Price: $849,000
💼 EBITDA: $405,687
📊 Revenue: $600,525
📅 Established: 2002

💭 My 2 Cents: Most people assume a pawn shop makes its money keeping what you leave behind. About 85% of borrowers come back and redeem, so this is really a lending business whose collateral happens to be resellable, and the counter out front is what becomes of the other 15%. Its customer is someone who needs a few hundred dollars before rent is due, and there are more of them each year: savings have thinned, the average pawn loan at one national chain has climbed from about $160 in 2022 to $231, and gold at record prices means the same bracelet supports a bigger loan. The largest publicly traded pawn chain in the country, FirstCash, just cleared $1 billion in a quarter with US same-store balances up 19%. North Carolina caps pawn interest at 2% a month against 10% in Louisiana, so the lending side earns less here and more of the profit comes off the sales floor. This shop has traded almost entirely on word of mouth and repeat customers since 2002, with particular depth in lending against jewelry, and the building itself is on the table to buy later. I'd want the split between interest and fee income on one side and resale margin on the other. Then how much capital sits out in active pawns at any one time, because that is working capital a buyer funds and it appears nowhere in the inventory figure. Then what rent the seller plans to charge once he becomes the landlord, since there is no rent line in these earnings today. The beauty of this model is that the two halves lean against each other: people pawn more when money is tight and buy more secondhand when it loosens.

📍 Location: Ohio
💰 Asking Price: $6,500,000
💼 EBITDA: $1,289,359
📊 Revenue: $4,141,706
📅 Established: 2018

💭 My 2 Cents: Compressed air is the one utility a factory has to manufacture for itself. It gets made on site, and when the piping fails the packaging line stops, which is why this work gets bought on a maintenance contract. This company designs and installs compressed air, nitrogen and closed-loop cooling piping across the Midwest, then services what it installed. Eighteen people are on W-2 with no subcontractors at all, which is rare in a piping trade, and the book spreads across food and beverage, medical, chemical and plastics work with no single customer reaching 15% of revenue. It also sells the compressors as an authorized distributor and runs a parts channel on top, out of a 20,000 square foot building the seller owns and is keeping outside the price. I'd want the revenue split across installation, equipment, maintenance and parts, because only two of those four repeat. The attach rate between maintenance contracts and systems installed is the next thing I'd pull. Then the distributor agreement for the compressors (including its term and territory), since that authorization is what makes the parts channel possible. The customer list runs to e-commerce logistics and electric vehicle manufacturing, industries still putting up plants, and every plant they build needs air piped through it before a single line can run.

📍 Location: New York
💰 Asking Price: $1,827,000
💼 EBITDA: $522,000
📊 Revenue: $4,150,000
📅 Established: ~40 years ago

💭 My 2 Cents: Custom packaging is drawn around one specific object. The die is cut to that part and the foam is milled to its shape, and moving to another supplier usually means paying for new tooling regardless of who owns the old, because the dies have to run on different machines. On the medical device side it goes further: ISO 11607 governs packaging for sterilized devices, so changing the material or the supplier means re-running integrity, strength and microbial barrier testing and explaining it to the regulator. Roughly 95% of production here is custom order work across medical device, retail display and industrial customers, built up over nearly four decades. The equipment comes with the sale, the team, including the machine operators, is staying on, and the whole operation fits inside about 5,000 square feet. I'd want the revenue split across those three customer types, because they reorder on completely different rhythms: a device in continuous production comes back on a schedule, while a retail display program runs and ends. Then the reorder pattern by customer over the last few years. Then how many shifts the floor runs. $4,150,000 out of 5,000 square feet is a dense floor, so if it is still running one shift, the cheapest growth here is hours on equipment that is already paid for.