New Off-Market Businesses For Sale

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NEW OFF-MARKET DEALS

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

📍 Location: Southern California
💼 EBITDA: $500,000
📊 Revenue: $1,220,000
📅 Established: 1996

💭 My 2 Cents: The number of licensed smog stations in California has been shrinking every year, but the number of cars that need one keeps growing. This 30-year-old shop is on the right side of that trend, and the owner's only involvement is payroll and light admin. The margin runs well above a typical independent auto repair shop, which makes sense because smog inspections are a 20-30-minute job with very little cost beyond the technician's time, and a smog-heavy shop can run 30-40% margins versus 15-25% for general repair. The seven-person team runs the operation independently, and a licensed smog technician is already on staff, which is the certification most buyers would need to solve for post-close. A marketing hire manages Google Ads and reviews, so customer acquisition is professionalized too. The sale is driven by the remaining owner's business partner passing away, not a performance issue, so a buyer is stepping into something that was working before the exit decision was made. I'd want to know if the shop is STAR-certified (STAR stations get a state-mandated funnel of higher-value inspections). I'd also want to understand the smog-to-repair attach rate, since cars that fail smog need repairs to pass and the inspecting station is the natural place to do them. For a buyer who doesn't want to turn wrenches, this is one of the few auto repair models where regulatory demand and an independent team make semi-absentee ownership realistic from day one.

📍 Location: Central California
💼 EBITDA: $385,000
📊 Revenue: $1,100,000
📅 Established: 1996

💭 My 2 Cents: The real moat on this 30-year-old Central California frozen distributor is route density and the fact that nobody else wants to drive a reefer truck to remote convenience stores twice a week at these volumes. The business handles Nestlé, Häagen-Dazs, and off-brand frozen products, with no sales team and no marketing budget, growing through referrals among the store owners on the routes. The owner drives part-time and manages the business while his wife handles bookkeeping, and two additional drivers run the routes. The most important question is what kind of distributor this is. A Direct Store Delivery (DSD) operator with contractual territory rights from Nestlé and Häagen-Dazs is a real business with transferable enterprise value. A redistributor buying from a master and reselling without formal brand relationships is a much weaker proposition with thinner margins. I'd also want the gross profit breakdown by product category since off-brand is often where the margin actually lives, monthly revenue across two years to see the seasonal curve (Central California summers do all the work), and a read on truck age and whether the business owns the freezer cases sitting in customer stores. The most realistic lever in DSD frozen is usually adding SKUs or expanding into adjacent channels like food service, schools, or vending.

📍 Location: Minnesota
💼 EBITDA: $1,700,000
📊 Revenue: $8,000,000
📅 Established: 1982

💭 My 2 Cents: Dealership service departments rely on outside vendors for the parts, sublet labor, and reconditioning work they don't handle in-house, and after 44 years this operation has become a default call for service managers across the market. Seventy new car dealerships across the Minneapolis metro are sending this business 75% to 80% of its work, and revenue has nearly doubled from $4.3 million to $8 million over the past five years while the owner works part-time managing dealership relationships. With 70 employees and two dedicated salespeople already on staff, the day-to-day runs without the owner on the floor. I’d want to see revenue by ownership group, since 70 rooftops in a consolidated metro like Minneapolis often answer to 10 or 15 decision-makers, and that's the number that actually determines concentration risk. I'd also want to understand revenue by service category over the last five years. When new car supply collapsed during COVID, dealers leaned hard on used cars, which meant every trade-in needed reconditioning (paint touch-up, dent repair, glass, detail, mechanical fixes) before hitting the lot. Vendors doing that work saw volume spike, so it's worth separating real share gains from a tailwind that's now fading. That said, the average U.S. vehicle is now nearly 13 years old and climbing, which means every car that stays on the road another year is another year of aftermarket spending this business is positioned to capture.

📍 Location: Iowa
💼 EBITDA: $1,500,000
📊 Revenue: $5,200,000
📅 Established: 2012

💭 My 2 Cents: Most trucking operators live on the spot market or renegotiate rates quarter to quarter. This Iowa carrier has twelve-month contracts on every customer lane and isn't actively seeking new business, which tells me the demand side is locked in and the service reputation is doing the selling. The company runs roughly 24 drivers out of a six-person office that includes the owner, his fiancée, a remote dispatcher, and billing and payroll staff. That's an efficient back office, but the family involvement is the transition piece a buyer needs to plan around, because both the owner and his fiancée handle daily operations and replacing two roles at once takes more planning than one. I'd want to understand if the contracts come with volume commitments, what driver retention looks like (which depends heavily on whether lanes are regional or long-haul), and whether the fleet has been kept up or has deferred maintenance that will hit capex in the first year or two. 2023 and 2024 were among the worst freight years in four decades, so monthly revenue from 2022 through today is the cleanest test of whether the contracts are real. If revenue held through the downturn, the story checks out.

📍 Location: Florida
💼 EBITDA: $400,000
📊 Revenue: $2,000,000
📅 Established: 2022

💭 My 2 Cents: A truss is the prefabricated triangular framework that forms a roof's skeleton, manufactured in a factory and craned into place in a single morning instead of being built stick by stick on the jobsite. A typical house uses 30 to 60 roof trusses, each engineered to load requirements and stamped by an engineer. Trusses don't ship economically beyond about 150 miles, so every regional market needs a local manufacturer, and once a builder integrates a truss supplier into their construction schedule they don't switch easily since a delayed delivery delays the entire job. This Florida operation has scaled to 20-25 employees in four years without aggressive marketing because capacity was the bottleneck, not demand, and revenue is tracking toward $3 million on a recent surge. In Florida, strict hurricane codes drive higher truss-attach rates than most states, and storm damage creates a counter-cyclical re-roof demand stream that holds up even when new home permits soften (which they have in Florida as insurance costs and rates have cooled buyer demand). That said, I'd want to understand whether the recent surge is backlog already booked or new orders just landed, since backlog gives a buyer 6 to 9 months of visibility while new orders can reverse quickly. The owner handles sales, engineering, and oversight, so this deal is best suited for someone with construction experience.