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: New York
💼 EBITDA: $350,000
📊 Revenue: $700,000
📅 Established: 2025

💭 My 2 Cents: New York's Taxi and Limousine Commission capped rideshare plates in 2018, so the cars this company rents are worth more than the vehicles themselves. It rents plated, insured cars by the week to Uber and Lyft drivers across the tri-state area, the drivers who can't get a plate or afford the commercial insurance on their own. The operation is thin, with the 60-year-old owner verifying payments while a virtual assistant overseas runs nearly everything else. Here's where I'd slow down, because margins this rich almost never last in a fleet business, and this one is barely a year old, so it hasn't replaced a single vehicle yet and today's earnings are borrowing from tomorrow's capital expenditure. I'd find out whether the cars are owned outright or financed and how old they are, because a wave of replacements or a balloon of fleet debt changes the math entirely. The offshore worker handles acquisition, background checks, and collections, so day one I'd be documenting their processes and cross-training a second person. I'd also get the driver default and turnover rate since weekly rentals to gig workers invite nonpayment, and cost out the commercial insurance renewal, which in New York can eat a fleet like this alive. The interesting question is whether more plates can be acquired, because if the moat is real, the play isn't running this fleet, it's rolling up the other small operators sitting on plates they don't know how to price.

📍 Location: California
💼 EBITDA: $900,000
📊 Revenue: $3,200,000
📅 Established: 1975

💭 My 2 Cents: California just poured fresh money into its schools, a $10 billion state facilities bond in 2024 plus a $9 billion Los Angeles Unified bond, and this 50-year-old glazing shop already holds contracts with the Los Angeles school system. Commercial glazing is a licensed, bonded trade where the work comes from relationships and repeat institutional buyers rather than advertising, which is why $2,000 to $3,000 a month in ads and a stack of referrals keeps this shop full. After 50 years the owner is retiring, and a manager already runs the day-to-day, but the owner still personally does the bidding. That split is the whole risk, because the one who is leaving prices the work, and in glazing the estimate is where a job is won or lost, so the manager can keep the doors open while the revenue engine walks out the door. I’d dig into how much of revenue is the school system versus private commercial work, because public school jobs come with prevailing wage, held-back retention, and slow payment that ties up cash a buyer has to float. I'd also ask why the manager isn't a potential buyer (no appetite for the debt, or a warning about the pipeline the seller isn't voicing) and lock that manager in early regardless, and I'd confirm who holds the contractor's license, because in California the license attaches to a qualifying individual (and if that individual is the retiring owner, the license walks with him and the buyer needs a replacement qualifier before he can legally bid a job). The bond money is what makes this timely: school construction dollars take a decade to spend, so a buyer isn't inheriting a busy year, they're inheriting a prequalified seat at a ten-year table that new competitors can't easily join.

📍 Location: South Carolina
💼 EBITDA: $300,000
📊 Revenue: $1,700,000
📅 Established: 2024

💭 My 2 Cents: The usual reason to like a liquor store is the license, since most states cap how many exist and owning one keeps competitors out, but that logic is weaker in South Carolina. In 2017 the state supreme court struck down the old three-store cap in a case Total Wine itself brought, and the legislature responded by allowing up to six stores per owner in large counties, Charleston included. So what protects these two stores isn't a scarce permit, it's location, convenience, and a regular local following. That makes the next fact matter more than usual: the owner handles all the ordering himself, says he reads the sales patterns better than his staff, and is relocating out of the area. Unlike a retiring owner who lingers, a relocating one is simply gone, so the buying instinct either gets documented before the move or leaves with him. I'd pull each location's books separately, because two stores this young often means one is carrying the other and the blended figure hides it. I'd dig into how fast the $160,000 to $180,000 of inventory per store turns, because however the deal treats inventory, included or bought at cost at closing, slow stock is worth less than the invoice says. I'd also read both leases closely, because with the license moat gone the corner is the moat. And I'd map the big boxes already here rather than watching for filings, since Total Wine has operated in Charleston for over a decade, which means these stores' numbers already reflect life alongside it. The law that weakened the moat also cuts the buyer's way: six licenses per owner in this county means these two corners don't have to be the whole deal, they can be the first two stores of a local roll-up built on the same convenience logic that protects them.

📍 Location: Texas
💼 EBITDA: $1,000,000
📊 Revenue: $3,900,000
📅 Established: 2011

💭 My 2 Cents: At most industrial plants, you cannot even bid on the maintenance work until you clear a safety prequalification like ISNetworld, and most operators won't look at a contractor below a B grade, so the barrier here is a clean safety record, not the lowest bid. This 14-year-old Texas company lives on exactly that, since it wins work on certifications and relationships rather than any marketing. Its 18 people, scalable past 20 for bigger jobs, handle plant maintenance for industrial customers under master service agreements that get quoted job by job. The reason it's for sale is the interesting part, because this company has outgrown its own funding and is turning away contracts it can't bankroll. That's a growth story if capital is the true bottleneck, so I'd pin down exactly what work they're passing up and whether it's receivables float or bonding capacity that's blocking it, since plant customers pay in 60 to 90 days and every new contract means fronting months of payroll first. I'd pull the experience modification rate and the OSHA logs, because one bad year can drop the grade and close bid lists overnight. I'd also find out how concentrated revenue is across plants and whether one operator is most of it, and I'd ask for the quote log under each master service agreement, since MSAs are hunting licenses, not backlog, and the win rate on quoted jobs is the real revenue engine. The question I'd want answered before anything else is why a bank didn't solve this, because a 14-year-old company profitably turning away work is exactly what a line of credit exists for, and if lenders passed, the diligence job is finding out what they saw.

📍 Location: Missouri
💼 EBITDA: $500,000
📊 Revenue: $1,000,000
📅 Established: 2023

💭 My 2 Cents: Insured losses from natural disasters hit $103 billion in the United States last year, and that is the tailwind behind the disaster-relief side of this Missouri tree business, which gets called in for storm cleanup on top of its everyday removal work. Normally I'd run from a business this owner-dependent, because the owner does the bidding, cutting, and crew oversight himself. On a crew of three that is usually the fatal flaw, the one-man dependency that makes a small service business impossible to hand off and therefore impossible to buy. Except the seller flips the whole problem, because the owner wants to stay on as an employee, telling buyers plainly that the paperwork is what he wants to escape, not the cutting. That turns the biggest risk into the centerpiece of the deal, and the structure has one trap in it: on a standard SBA buyout the seller can only stay 12 months, so a buyer who wants him for years needs a partial buyout where he rolls a minority stake, which keeps him legally employable and gives him a reason to care what the business earns after closing. I'd back that up with an employment agreement and a non-compete, because without him this is three people and some trucks. On the financials, I'd separate the steady local removal work from the storm cleanup, since disaster revenue is lumpy and rides on a single contractor relationship that could vanish, and I'd inspect the fleet closely (because a 2009 bucket truck is near the end of its life and replacements run six figures each). The equity keeps him invested, not immortal, so the first hire that matters is a foreman he trains to bid, because the buyer's real deadline isn't the loan term, it's however many years a man in his line of work has left on a saw.