New Deals: An absentee-run liquor store, dental lab with day-to-day management, and 3 other finds...

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NEW DEALS

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📍 Location: California
💰 Asking Price: $2,800,000
💼 EBITDA: $1,089,038
📊 Revenue: $4,202,705
📅 Established: n/a

💭 My 2 Cents: A California liquor store comes with something most retail businesses never own: the license itself. The state allows one off-sale general license per 2,500 residents in a county and will not let one cross county lines, so the only way into a built-out county is to buy an existing license, and they change hands at anywhere from $70,000 to well past $400,000. This store is 100% employee operated and absentee owned, its gross sales have held flat for three straight years, and the building is leased rather than included. That said, I'd want the sales split across spirits, wine and beer, since the share of American drinkers who reach for liquor is up 12 points since 2016 while beer is down 7, and this store's mix decides which side of that it sits on. The lease matters more here than in most deals, because the license is issued to the address rather than to the owner: moving it means a premises-to-premises transfer, a conditional use permit and a new location that clears the distance rules on schools, parks and churches. And I'd want inventory turns by category, since a store should turn its shelves eight to twelve times a year and $800,000 of stock against sales this size works out closer to four. Worth noting: that inventory sits outside the asking price, so what a buyer funds on day one is closer to $3.6 million.

📍 Location: California
💰 Asking Price: $1,600,000
💼 EBITDA: $555,000
📊 Revenue: $2,500,000
📅 Established: 2005

💭 My 2 Cents: A dentist does not make the crown. The impression goes out to a dental lab, where a technician mills or prints the tooth, and the lab bills the practice rather than the patient. That makes a lab's customer a standing account that reorders week after week with nobody selling anything. This company has run since 2005 with 20 people in 4,900 square feet it owns, and the owner has already handed day-to-day management to one of them and is open to staying two years to transition. It is pre-approved for an SBA loan at 10% down, with seller financing available. The case mix is where I'd start, since a chairside mill tops out at about three units, so single crowns are the part of this book a practice could take in house while dentures, long bridges and implant work have to come to a lab. What share of the cases this lab makes in-house comes next, since a lab that brokers work overseas is a middleman rather than a manufacturer. Then the remake rate, by technician and by account, since a remake costs the dentist a second appointment and that is what decides whether the account stays. The work itself is forecast to grow about 6.5% a year through 2035 on an aging population and more cosmetic work, while the number of technicians doing it falls 6%, so 20 trained people is the part of this deal that gets harder to replace every year.

📍 Location: Florida Gulf Coast
💰 Asking Price: $1,600,000
💼 EBITDA: $436,000
📊 Revenue: $1,089,840
📅 Established: 2013

💭 My 2 Cents: A vacation rental has to be cleaned between every single stay, so a condo booked 40 weekends a year is one account that bills 40 times. This company has worked the Florida Gulf Coast since 2013, cleaning condos and houses for property management companies and individual owners on standing turnover schedules, and it runs out of a home office with no facility to pay for. The owner is retiring, so what a buyer takes over is the schedule and the people on it. The first thing to check is that payroll: 19 full-time people against revenue this size is about $57,000 of billings each, so a good part of the roster is probably seasonal or part time. Next is the split between the management companies and the individual owners, since Airbnb now folds the cleaning fee into the nightly price a guest sees and about 40% of listings have dropped the fee altogether, which squeezes what an individual owner will pay. Then I'd want the unit list and how tightly the addresses cluster, because a crew that walks between two buildings turns more units in a day than one driving twenty minutes between them. The bigger opportunity here is not more condos, it is a bigger share of each one. A full-service manager on a beach market keeps 25 to 30% of what a unit earns, and the turnover work this company already does is part of what that fee covers.

📍 Location: Nebraska
💰 Asking Price: $1,400,000
💼 EBITDA: $517,760
📊 Revenue: $3,726,204
📅 Established: 1984

💭 My 2 Cents: Every hospital, warehouse and factory floor runs on barcode scanners and label printers, and most buy that gear from a national reseller that takes the order over the phone and ships it. This company is the only local player in its market and works the other way round: somebody drives out, watches how the work actually moves, specs the devices around it, delivers them, trains the staff, and comes back when one breaks. It has run since 1984 with five people, with $305,000 of equipment included. The first thing I'd dig into is the gross profit split between hardware resale and service work, since reselling a box earns a single-digit margin and servicing it earns several times that. Then how much of the profit comes from the manufacturers rather than customers, since Zebra and Honeywell set a reseller's cost by what tier it holds and review that tier every year, so part of these earnings is a status that has to be re-earned. Then the count of devices this company has in the field still under a support agreement, and how old they are, since that fleet is what reorders. What retires that fleet may not be wear. Walmart has been pushing RFID tagging deeper into its supplier base since 2020, category by category, and a customer that switches from barcode to RFID replaces everything at once, with the call going to whoever installed the last one.

📍 Location: New York
💰 Asking Price: $2,999,000
💼 EBITDA: $1,390,000
📊 Revenue: $5,590,507
📅 Established: 20+ years ago

💭 My 2 Cents: Every independent restaurant in a dense city needs produce on the doorstep before service, and the wholesale market they all buy from does its business in the middle of the night. Most kitchens use a national broadliner for the bulk of the order and somebody like this for produce, where selection beats convenience. This company has made that run for two decades, five days a week, to 86 restaurant accounts built one at a time with nothing spent on marketing. The trucks are owned outright, and the owner will stay up to 12 months and introduce every purchasing contact. The supplier terms are where I'd start, since federal law puts unpaid produce into a trust for the growers that ranks ahead of the bank, so what this company owes sits in front of any acquisition loan. I'd also want the gap between paying the market and getting paid. Produce is due 10 days after delivery unless both sides put a longer term in writing, and 30 days is the ceiling, because past that this company loses the same trust claim against its restaurants that its growers hold against it. And the account list, with how long each restaurant has been ordering. Ultimately, a restaurant can defer almost every bill it has, but produce is the one that has to arrive tomorrow morning whether the week was good or not.