New Off-Market Businesses For Sale

Sign Up | Podcast | Sell Your Business | Work With Me

NEW OFF-MARKET DEALS

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

📍 Location: Illinois
💼 EBITDA: $1,500,000
📊 Revenue: $12,000,000
📅 Established: 2023

💭 My 2 Cents: In storm roofing the insurance company pays most of the bill, so the size of the claim sets the size of the job. Illinois has led the country in tornadoes for three straight years, 142 of them in 2024 against a long-term average of 54. This company started in 2023, right as that run began. Four partners split flat roofs, shingles, sales, and negotiating claims for the homeowner rather than the insurer, which is called public adjusting, with two employees and 30 to 40 subcontractors a day doing the jobs. What's for sale is one partner's 25% stake and the flat roof proposal and organizational work that comes with it. That said, I'd want to know whether the company ever adjusts a claim on a roof it then repairs, since Illinois licenses those two separately and that is the line that gets people in trouble. I'd also want to know how the partners take money out, since a minority owner's return depends on whether profit leaves as salary to the working partners or as distributions to owners. And since one partner brings in about 90% of the sales, the operating agreement is worth reading for what happens if that partner ever leaves. A quarter of a company without control is usually worth less than a quarter of its value, since a minority owner decides neither when profits get paid out nor when the company sells, and that gap is where the negotiation starts.

📍 Location: Texas
💼 EBITDA: $500,000
📊 Revenue: $1,900,000
📅 Established: 2024

💭 My 2 Cents: A food hall can get paid twice by the same customer: the vendors pay rent and a cut of their sales to cook there, and when the hall runs its own bar, it also sells the drinks people order with the food. This one does both, collecting $3,000 to $3,400 a month plus a 6% commission from 12 to 13 vendors, and its two bars bring in about $100,000 a month, well over half of everything the hall takes in. Two of the three owners are active, one as operations manager and one over marketing and sales. I like that bar and service staff are hourly and the trades are contracted out, so almost none of the labor cost is fixed. That said, sales by stall matter most: the 6% commission implies the average vendor sells about $20,000 a month, so rent and commission take roughly a fifth of that. Vendors sign two-year contracts and the hall opened in 2024, so the first renewals are arriving now, and which vendors re-signed shows whether that math works for them. The hall's own lease comes next, since it has to outlast the vendor contracts written against it. Then what the two active owners do in a week, because a two-year-old hall has never run without them. The vendors buy their own food and pay their own cooks, so the kitchen risk sits with 13 other people. The bar is the part a buyer actually operates.

📍 Location: Tennessee
💼 EBITDA: $250,000
📊 Revenue: $705,498
📅 Established: 2018

💭 My 2 Cents: American cars are older than they have ever been, 12.8 years on average, with the 2015 to 2019 model years rolling out of warranty. Running since 2018, it has grown into several shop buildings with room for about nine vehicles indoors, taking in commercial trucks alongside cars. Three technicians and an office manager handle the day-to-day work, while the owner explains each repair and gets approval, which in a repair shop is the sales job, called service writing. There is no paid marketing: the work arrives on word of mouth and online reviews. The real estate and $750,000 of tools and equipment can come with the sale, more than the shop does in revenue in a year. First stop is what the shop pays for its building today, since a separately priced property means a market rent comes out of the earnings. Then how long the owner will stay to hand the counter over, because nobody else in the shop does that job. And how the revenue splits between retail cars and commercial trucks, because one of those halves comes back on a schedule and the other only when something breaks. Every commercial truck owes a federal inspection once a year, and a truck sitting still costs its owner around $1,000 a day before the repair bill, so the fleet accounts are the one piece of this revenue that belongs to the shop rather than the person at the counter.

📍 Location: Florida
💼 EBITDA: $200,000
📊 Revenue: $450,000
📅 Established: 1989

💭 My 2 Cents: Most people picture a limousine outside a wedding, but the corporate side runs on weekdays: airport runs and meetings billed to a company account, for the same clients again and again. This one has done that since 1989 with no contracts in place, which also means no notice period: a client can stop calling tomorrow and breach nothing. But 43% of corporate travel managers hold no chauffeured contract with anyone, so decades of repeat booking here was never something a client was locked into. The owner handles client relations, scheduling and management; three drivers cover the road. The mileage on each car tells you how much buying is still ahead of a new owner, since a paid-off fleet earns like it is free right up until the year it has to be replaced. Whether the drivers are employees or contractors answers two things at once: how much of the cost base is fixed, and how the company grades out to a corporate buyer, since travel managers score employee chauffeurs higher than any other attribute. And how often a client needs a car in another city, since an operator can hand that trip to a partner there, called farming out, and keep the client and the invoice instead of turning it away. The oldest of these relationships date to 1998, so they have held through 9/11, 2008 and the pandemic, but each of those was a shock to the client. A sale is the first that happens on this side of the phone.

📍 Location: Indiana
💼 EBITDA: $400,000
📊 Revenue: $1,200,000
📅 Established: 2021

💭 My 2 Cents: The dust coming off a gravel road is the road itself wearing away. A gravel road loses about a ton of aggregate per mile each year for every vehicle that crosses it daily, so a road carrying 200 cars a day is scattering 200 tons of material the county already bought, which is the comparison a road supervisor is making when this line comes up in the budget. This company has run since 2021 and is an approved vendor with several counties, spraying a product it buys from an out-of-state supplier that grants it a protected territory. The owner works full time and does most of the driving, but the two employees are already being trained to run the spraying. Before anything else I'd read the supplier agreement: how many years the protected territory runs, and whether keeping it depends on buying a minimum amount of product each year. Then how many of last year's treated miles got a second pass in the same season, because some agencies apply in June and again in August, which means a mile count is not a revenue count. And how much of the $1.2 million comes from the single largest county, since this is public money and the answer tells you how few decisions it takes to lose a third of it. Anyone can buy the trucks and anyone can buy the chemical. What took five years was getting onto the list.