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: Arizona
💼 EBITDA: $235,398
📊 Revenue: $784,659
📅 Established: 2020

💭 My 2 Cents: What comes up for sale in a franchise system is almost always a franchisee, the operator who put up the money to open the store. This is the other side of that, the franchisor those stores pay. A franchisor collects on sales it never has to produce. It does not open at 7am, it does not sign the leases, and its costs do not move when a franchisee has a busy Saturday. This one has run since 2020, owns one bubble tea and gelato shop outright, and has five more locations run by franchisees paying a monthly fee. The owner is hands off, 8 to 10 people staff the company side, and marketing was pulled back this year with the stores still moving on social media and name recognition. American boba is a $2.7 billion business across roughly 7,845 shops, and last year's 18.2% growth beat its own five-year average of 10.2%, so a new franchisee is walking into strong demand that is still picking up speed. That said, I'd want to know whether those five pay a percentage of their sales or a flat monthly amount, and how much of the revenue is fee income rather than the shop the company runs itself. I'd want to know whether franchisees buy their pearls, tea and cups through the company, since a markup on supplies is a second earnings stream. And I'd want what it costs a franchisee to open one of these, because that is the number a candidate weighs against the $169,000 to $378,000 a national boba brand asks for the same buildout. Growth here is signing the next franchisee rather than opening the next store, which makes this a business for someone who can sell.

📍 Location: Michigan
💼 EBITDA: $1,240,000
📊 Revenue: $3,100,000
📅 Established: 2018

💭 My 2 Cents: A plumbing contractor that hangs pipe in new buildings needs somebody to be putting buildings up. A contractor that fixes what is already in the ground works on a building stock that does not shrink when construction stops. This company is the second kind, and its equipment says so: eight work trucks, a backhoe, an excavator, a skid steer, a hydro jetter and a drain camera. That is a kit for finding a break and digging it up, not for running pipe in a building going up. It has run since 2018 with 12 people on the payroll and a general manager who handles the day to day and decides where the field crews go. First thing I'd pull is the state license: Michigan attaches a plumbing contractor's license to one named master plumber and puts it inactive the day that person stops being named, so I'd want to know whether that is the owner or somebody else on the team. Then the customer list, the top five and what share of revenue each one is, because a shop this size usually runs on a short list of property managers. Then hour meters and service history on the backhoe, the excavator, and the skid steer, since eleven machines turn into a replacement number a buyer budgets every year. Emergency and repair work sits at the top of this trade's margin range while new construction plumbing runs closer to 10 to 12%, and repair is exactly the work this company is built for.

📍 Location: Remote
💼 EBITDA: $575,000
📊 Revenue: $2,500,000
📅 Established: 2012

💭 My 2 Cents: Multicultural audiences hold about 28% of American buying power and get 5.3 cents of every advertising dollar. That gap is the business this company is in. It sells the commercial time on television channels beamed into the United States for South Asian, Filipino and Middle Eastern viewers, the kind people pay a satellite provider extra every month to keep, in tiers running up to 31 channels in a single language. Whereas most television time is sold by the spot, this is sold on results, so the money moves when a viewer calls or buys rather than when the commercial airs. It has run since 2012, holds agreements with more than 100 international networks reaching roughly 15 million Americans, and four contractors run all of it remotely on under $100,000 of annual overhead. One question comes ahead of all the others: whether the revenue line is everything advertisers pay or only what the company keeps once the networks are settled. Then whether those network agreements are exclusive, since an exclusive right to sell a channel's time is a different asset from permission to sell it alongside three other firms. Then who the advertisers actually are and how much of the revenue the biggest few represent. No single network can leave and take the business with it, which is a kind of safety most companies this size never get.

📍 Location: Minnesota
💼 EBITDA: $660,000
📊 Revenue: $2,000,000
📅 Established: 2005

💭 My 2 Cents: Americans have been eating more honey for three decades, and the country stopped producing enough of it a long time ago. Imports have exceeded domestic production every year since 2005 and run about three quarters of supply. Last year American production fell another 14% while the price beekeepers received rose 27% to $3.05 a pound. This company packs honey, which means buying it in bulk and putting it into the jars a shopper picks off a shelf, so it buys on a world market rather than from a hive. It has run since 2005 with three employees, no marketing, and about $340,000 of automated stainless steel equipment. It just added 212 stores from one grocery customer and a new retailer with 104 more, and it hauls the freight to most customers' distribution centers. I'd start with the sales velocity in the stores it was already in (units per store per week) since that is the number a chain looks at when it decides whether to keep a product. I'd also want to know whether the jar price can move when bulk honey moves, because a chain sets a shelf price and holds it, and until the next review the packer absorbs the difference. And I'd want to know how many shifts that line runs now, since that's the growth ceiling without spending on capex. Honey does not spoil, so inventory here does not become a write-off the way it does in most food manufacturing, and a packer with somewhere to put it can buy when the price is right rather than when it runs out.

📍 Location: New York
💼 EBITDA: $450,000
📊 Revenue: $1,500,000
📅 Established: 1956

💭 My 2 Cents: In New York the heating season runs October 1 to May 31, and a building that cannot hold 68 degrees during the day is accruing a $250-a-day violation until it can. In addition, every boiler in a building of six units or more and in every commercial building also has to be inspected once a year and the report filed with the city inside 14 days, or the owner pays $1,000 a boiler. That means heat is not a purchase a building owner gets to postpone. This company has been welding on those boilers since 1956, with five employees and customers who arrive by word of mouth. Most heating companies replace a boiler. This one repairs it, by welding on the pressure vessel itself, which is a different trade from swapping a unit out. The repeat rate is the first thing I'd dig into: what share of last year's work came from buildings it had already been to. I’d also want to know many of the five employees can actually do that welding, and how long each of them has been here. Then how a job gets priced, time and materials or quoted up front, because a repair that opens up bigger than it looked is the normal case in this work. A commercial boiler repair in New York runs $350 to $5,000 while replacing the same boiler runs $10,000 to more than $50,000, and that gap is the whole reason a shop like this one exists.