New deals: semi-absentee liquor stores, a manager-run dumpster fleet, and 3 other finds...

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NEW DEALS

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📍 Location: Kentucky
💰 Asking Price: 1,700,000
💼 EBITDA: $445,000
📊 Revenue: $1,850,000
📅 Established: 2021

💭 My 2 Cents: Liquor is one of the few kinds of retail that hold up when the economy turns, because when money gets tight, people trade the bar for the bottle rather than quit the habit. During the 2008 recession, store spirits volume rose while bar and restaurant sales fell, and alcohol demand has long shown little tie to the broader economic cycle. This Kentucky package pairs two stores that sit within 1.5 miles of each other, and since they've coexisted under one owner, whatever cannibalization exists is already baked into the numbers. Day to day the owner is hands-off, with a standing management team running both. I'd want to know how much of the sales mix is liquor itself (profit drivers) versus the lottery, cigarette, and cash-machine commissions (low margin traffic drivers), how much inventory comes with the sale (and how much of that is dead stock), and the age and condition of the walk-in coolers, since refrigeration is the quiet capex drain in this category. I’d also dig into whether the county has hit its liquor store quota, since that's the difference between a license that's a true moat and one that's just a permit. What makes the downside easier to stomach is that the real estate comes with the deal, so a buyer would own both buildings and not worry about lease negotiations and rent escalations.

📍 Location: Missouri
💰 Asking Price: $1,275,000
💼 EBITDA: $467,734
📊 Revenue: $2,736,133
📅 Established: N/A

💭 My 2 Cents: Every renovation, demolition, and cleanout has to put its debris somewhere, and the country throws off around 600 million tons of construction and demolition waste a year, more than twice its household trash. Almost all of it leaves the site in a roll-off box, which is the demand this Missouri company feeds for repeat commercial contractors, restoration firms, and homeowners. Day to day, a general manager runs it, freeing the owner to work on sales and growth rather than dispatch. The operation owns 195 dumpsters across 8 trucks, run out of 3 storage yards by a crew of 13. Repeat contractor accounts are the engine here, since a builder who trusts a hauler to show up on time keeps calling rather than reshopping every job, and the residential and restoration work rides on top of that base. I'd want to understand how the revenue splits between those recurring commercial accounts and one-off residential cleanouts, what share of the fleet is out earning versus sitting idle on any given day, and how exposed the numbers are to rising landfill tipping fees a hauler cannot always reprice overnight. Container demand follows building and cleanout activity rather than any brand, so it keeps turning as long as something somewhere is going up or coming down. The upside for a buyer is the junk-removal service the seller has teed up, since it runs on the same trucks, yards, and dispatch the business already operates.

📍 Location: New York
💰 Asking Price: $4,250,000
💼 EBITDA: $900,000
📊 Revenue: $7,000,000
📅 Established: N/A

💭 My 2 Cents: Facilities never stop burning through the unglamorous supplies, the soap, can liners, disinfectant, and paper towels that get used up and reordered on a schedule, which makes janitorial and sanitation one of the stickier lines in commercial buying. It is a market north of $40 billion, with North America the largest slice. This New York metro distributor sells all of that, plus facility-safety gear, to commercial, institutional, and government accounts, and it does it with a women-owned supplier-diversity certification. That certification matters more than it first looks, since many government and corporate contracts carry diversity-spending targets that steer work toward certified suppliers, a lane a generic distributor cannot enter. On top of that, it has recently secured several multi-year contract awards the seller expects to roughly double revenue. I'd want to know how concentrated the book is between government agencies and private accounts, and whether those awards are firm purchase commitments or estimated volumes a customer can walk back before they double anything. I'd also size the working capital those awards demand, since doubling a distributor's revenue means stocking twice the inventory and floating receivables on government accounts that pay slow, a funding gap that lands on the buyer the day after close. Women-Owned Business Enterprise (WBE) certification generally requires 51% ownership and active control/management by women, so a buyer who can't qualify as women-owned isn't buying the same business.

📍 Location: Indiana
💰 Asking Price: $1,700,000
💼 EBITDA: $583,737
📊 Revenue: $2,906,577
📅 Established: 2002

💭 My 2 Cents: Corrugated boxes are mostly air, which makes them costly to truck any real distance, so a box plant lives or dies on sitting close to the customers it supplies. That freight math is the quiet moat here, since this northern Indiana manufacturer sits inside a dense manufacturing region and has served its commercial and industrial customers for over twenty years. It comes with a diversified, repeat-ordering customer base, with fresh orders landing as fast as product ships out the door. It also brings long-standing board-supply relationships, which sounds like boilerplate until sheet cost and availability start swinging with the paper cycle. A 12-person operation is a sheet plant, buying finished board rather than running its own corrugator, so I'd want to know which sheet feeder supplies it, on what terms, and whether there's a credible second source if that relationship wobbles. I'd also dig into revenue concentration across the top few accounts, how much room there is to pass containerboard price spikes through, the age of the converting equipment, and whether the real estate is owned or leased, since a business whose entire moat is location has a problem if the lease is short. One more thing on the geography: northern Indiana means Elkhart country, and if a real slice of revenue touches RV, marine, or manufactured housing, this business rides that cycle up and down. The flip side is that the same concentration of manufacturers is what makes the freight moat worth having. The clearest play here is an owner willing to push outbound sales and sell harder inside the circle.

📍 Location: Connecticut
💰 Asking Price: $1,495,000
💼 EBITDA: $610,459
📊 Revenue: $2,271,361
📅 Established: 1990

💭 My 2 Cents: Replacement tire demand follows the cars already on the road rather than new-vehicle production, so it stays firm even when dealerships slow down. This Connecticut shop has sold tires and auto accessories for more than three decades, and it also runs U-Haul rentals alongside the counter. But the detail to stare at is the auto-repair license it carries and never uses. Tires are a traffic business, not a margin business. The rubber itself is a commodity anyone can price-check from the parking lot, while the real money sits in the service work that happens once the car is on a lift. This shop has spent 35 years paying for that traffic and capturing the thinnest slice of it, and the license means the door to the rest is already unlocked. I'd want to see how the profit splits across tires, accessories, and rentals, and whether bay space, zoning, or a lot full of rental trucks explains why the license sat idle. The clearest paths to more are activating it to capture service work from customers already walking in, and adding a seasonal tire storage program, because in Connecticut winter forces every customer back twice a year and the shop should be charging rent on it. This is an owner-operator business, so a buyer has to be willing to run the counter, though there's enough profit here to hire a manager over time. One more tailwind worth naming: EVs chew through tires faster and never need oil changes, which means the service visit that used to belong to the quick lube is migrating to the tire counter.