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Hello SMB Deal Hunters!

I’m excited to share 5 new off-market businesses for sale sourced directly by our team in today's Off The Grid issue.

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

This issue is proudly sponsored by SMB Deal Exchange, our new platform for connecting buyers and sellers of off-market businesses.

COMMUNITY WINS

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

👀 P.S. Q2 numbers are in…

Our members closed $50.3 million in deals and went under contract on another $117 million, the most momentum we’ve carried into Q3.

Most buyers check out over the summer. Meanwhile our off-market deal flow doubled last quarter. So there are more deals than usual and fewer people competing for them.

If you want to take advantage of this window…

👉 Book a free strategy call and we'll pressure test your buy box and map out a timeline to your first offer.

NEW OFF-MARKET DEALS

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

1/ Wellness Recovery Spa

📍 Location: Southern California
💼 EBITDA: $342,000
📊 Revenue: $900,000
📅 Established: 2023

💭 My 2 Cents: Recovery has moved from a niche athlete habit to something people put on a monthly plan, and the fitness recovery industry is on track to more than triple to nearly $27 billion by 2035. This spa operates two Southern California locations, and memberships and packages bring in 70% of revenue, which is the recurring base most service businesses wish they had. The equipment mix of cold plunge, sauna, hyperbaric oxygen, and compression is what lets it sell a membership instead of a single visit, since members keep coming back for the full protocol. The owners run both locations from out of state with no management structure in place, and those two facts don't fit together, so I'd start there: someone is opening the doors and maintaining that equipment every day, and either a key employee is doing a manager's job without the title (which makes their retention the whole deal) or the buyer is inheriting the manager role themselves. I'd want the membership churn rate month by month (because at this size a few dozen cancellations swing the whole year), and I'd check how much of that 70% is true recurring membership versus prepaid packages, since unredeemed sessions come over to the buyer as an obligation to service, not revenue. That said, the sellers already wrote the playbook, and a buyer just gets to run it on more locations than they did.

2/ Auto Body and Wrecker Business

📍 Location: Texas
💼 EBITDA: $700,000
📊 Revenue: $2,300,000
📅 Established: 1970

💭 My 2 Cents: The average car on American roads is now a record 12.8 years old, which fills body shops and repair bays, and this West Texas operation has been catching that work for 55 years. It runs three businesses under one roof, including collision and body work, a heavy wrecker service, and used car sales, and the yard is what ties them together: the wrecker tows the vehicle in, the lot stores it and collects fees, and some of what never gets claimed ends up for sale out front. The owner is down to part-time, with a full-time manager running the body shop and the lead mechanic running the wrecker, and three of the eight hands have been there more than 22 years. That depth is the asset, but it also means the wrecker line runs on one mechanic, and heavy recovery is the hardest piece to replace. I'd start with the revenue and margin split across the three lines, because body work, towing, and used cars are three different businesses with three different buyers, and I'd find out who controls the flow of jobs into each one: whether the wrecker sits on any police or motor-club rotation (in a rural county that rotation can be the whole moat), and whether the body shop is on insurers' direct repair lists (insurance work is most of collision and insurers steer it). On the lot, I'd look at how the used inventory is financed and how fast it turns, because a slow-moving lot ties up cash a buyer has to carry. I'd lock the lead mechanic in early with a retention package, since he is the one whose exit breaks a line of the business.

3/ Tree Service Company

📍 Location: Georgia
💼 EBITDA: $350,000
📊 Revenue: $1,000,000
📅 Established: 2023

💭 My 2 Cents: Two-thirds of Georgia is covered in trees, more privately owned timberland than any state in the country, and every one of those trees eventually dies, leans, or drops a limb on something expensive. This 3-year-old company built itself to catch that demand, spending around $8,000 a month to sit number one on Google in its local market with a sales rep running estimates, an office manager, and a crew foreman behind the phone. Call it what it is: a lead generation business with a tree crew attached, and that's not an insult, since removal is the high-ticket end of tree care where the dead oak leaning over the kitchen doesn't get price-shopped. It has grown fast, with revenue this year projected to reach roughly $1.5 million, but removal is a one-time job that spikes after storms, so every month starts from zero and that Google spend is buying the entire pipeline. Before anything, I'd pull three years of monthly numbers rather than the annual headline, because a business this young hasn't been through a slow stretch yet, and I'd figure out what happens to the leads if a buyer keeps that spend up or trims it. I’d also look at how much of the $170,000 in booked work is removal versus anything repeatable, and ask why a company ranked number one locally has never sold a maintenance or trimming contract. Every removal customer is a homeowner with more trees, and right now nobody calls them back, so the fastest revenue a buyer can add is mining the customer list this business has already paid to build.

MEMBER SPOTLIGHT

Bailey runs a $450K-a-year-profit business on 20 hours a week. And she hasn't quit her day job in tech.

Bailey is a software engineer who’s dabbled in side hustles her whole life, from flipping house to selling designer handbags. But none of those side hustles were able to make enough money to replace her tech salary.

And with a family on the horizon, she didn't want her stability riding on whether the tech billionaires kept her employed. That’s when she joined SMB Deal Hunter Pro.

6 months later, she acquired a 55-year-old landscape architecture firm in Southern California, beating out another buyer at the table.

In diligence, we helped her discover the profit came in closer to $450K than the $350K advertised, so she paid just over 2x earnings.

When the financing snagged on her lack of a landscape license and the seller's balloon note, we found a lender comfortable with both and structured it to be win/win for both sides.

Today she runs it on the side and already draws a paycheck. If one day Big Tech no longer needs her, Bailey will not be starting over. She will own a half-century-old firm with her name on the door.

4/ Stainless Steel Fabrication Company

📍 Location: North Carolina
💼 EBITDA: $400,000
📊 Revenue: $1,200,000
📅 Established: 1985

💭 My 2 Cents: The hardest thing to buy in metal fabrication right now is people, with the industry needing more than 300,000 new welders in the next few years and the average one already 55 years old. This 40-year-old shop got ahead of that quietly, running a state-backed apprenticeship that covers half of trainee pay. The owner is 65 and stepping back, but his daughter runs it day to day and may stay on, which is a cleaner succession than most retirements offer. The piece that doesn't transfer as easily is that the owner still handles the estimating and the finances. Estimating is where the money is made or lost in fabrication, so I'd need to know whether that pricing judgment can be documented and taught before he leaves. I'd also ask who the end customer actually is, because stainless work could mean food processing plants, pharma, breweries, or restaurant kitchens, and those run on different cycles: food and pharma work is steady and driven by sanitation regulations, while breweries and restaurants rise and fall with openings. Since the work is project based, I'd see whether a handful of repeat customers drive most of the revenue and get the current backlog and how far out it runs. And I'd ask why the daughter isn't the one buying it, since nobody knows this business better. Sometimes the answer is boring (like no appetite for the debt or no interest in owning what she already runs), and sometimes she knows something more about the customer list or the pipeline. Most fab shops turn down work because they can't man it, so a shop that manufactures its own welders isn't just protected from the labor shortage, it can grow by taking the jobs competitors are too short-staffed to bid.

5/ Automotive Accessories Franchise

📍 Location: Indiana
💼 EBITDA: $550,000
📊 Revenue: $2,150,000
📅 Established: 2006

💭 My 2 Cents: Drivers keep shifting toward trucks and SUVs, with passenger cars dropping below 100 million for the first time since the 1970s, and trucks are the vehicles owners spend the most to protect and dress up. This franchise has sold vehicle protection and accessories for two decades and blankets the county in signage, radio, and referrals. What keeps a shop like this alive in the Amazon era is that the product isn't really the product: anyone can buy a tonneau cover online, but a spray-in bedliner and a tint job only happen in a bay, and the labor is where the margin lives. It's also a model with a bull case in both halves of the cycle, since new truck sales feed the pipeline in good years and in tight years people keep vehicles longer and spend to upgrade the one they have. The owner is stepping away after a 40-year career and has shifted his time to training salespeople, so the first question is how much of the selling still runs through him and whether the bench can close without him. I'd dig into how much of revenue is dealer and fleet work, since a few dealer accounts sending trucks over before they hit the lot can quietly be half the volume, and fleet upfitting for utilities and the trades is the closest thing this model has to recurring revenue. In a franchise system this mature, the good territories were claimed years ago, so this isn't a business a buyer could choose to start: the only way to own this county is to buy the operator who got there twenty years first.

COMMUNITY PERKS

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RECENT PODCAST EPISODE

Evan spent a decade on political campaigns, living in five states before he turned 30. He wanted roots and a business of his own, so he got his MBA at night and searched for a business to buy for years on the side.

He looked at everything, solar panels, spark plugs, even souvenirs. Then a broker pointed out the obvious: he'd spent years inside a direct mail agency, and that was his edge.

So he maxed out an SBA loan and bought a 30-year-old commercial printing and direct mail business in Orlando doing $1.7M in EBITDA, in an industry everyone kept calling dead. The catch was the mail shop had barely touched political work, the exact clients Evan could bring on day one.

Then reality set in. At the finish line the bank demanded more working capital than he had, and the deal nearly slipped. Friends and family he'd quietly lined up months earlier plus a seller willing to float the receivables got it over the line.

Three years later, the business clears over $3M in EBITDA, and he's chasing $5M next.

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

THAT’S A WRAP

See you tomorrow!

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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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