New Deals: An automotive engine repair business, commercial printing business, and 3 other finds

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

NEW DEALS

1/ Automotive Engine Repair Business

📍 Location: California
💰 Asking Price: $950,000
💼 EBITDA: $650,000
📊 Revenue: $1,100,000
📅 Established: 1979

💭 My 2 Cents: People rely on their vehicles for daily life, and engine issues are inevitable. This 45+ year-old auto engine repair business located in Glendale, CA specializes in high-quality rebuilt engines for various makes and models. I like their long history, location in a major urban area where there is always a need for their services, solid customer base, well-equipped facility, and very reasonable multiple even if we include the cost of the inventory. I also like how they hold an extensive inventory of quality engine cores and other parts (available for purchase separately), making them a strong player in an auto repair market where cost-effective alternatives to new engine replacements are in high demand. For a motivated buyer, I also see the possibility of expanding into performance engine building, fleet contracts, or parts sales. While this is a straightforward business, labor is where most of the profit lies with auto engine repair businesses, so I’d want to make sure the mechanics are loyal to the business and planning to stick around.

2/ Commercial Printing Business

📍 Location: New Jersey
💰 Asking Price: $2,499,000
💼 EBITDA: $786,900
📊 Revenue: $3,450,700
📅 Established: 1970

💭 My 2 Cents: This business stands out as one of a kind in the Northeast combining traditional printing, promotional materials, and business system sales under one roof. Commercial printers are great because they come with a lot of repeat revenue, but I especially love this business's diversified revenue streams and how their different business lines create multiple opportunities for cross-selling. Other real positives are their over 50 years in operation, long list of repeat clients, and highly skilled team able to work with both traditional print and digital systems. The margins are exceptional for the industry, so I’d want to better understand whether they specialize in any special formats and see their margin breakdown across different services. I’d also want to look into their supplier relationships, what their recurring equipment maintenance and replacement costs look like, how they source new business, how much competition they face, and how they keep up with the latest technological advances in their industry. While this company should readily appeal to someone with a background in printing, the seller is open to providing needed training (as well as financing!).

3/ Two Towing Businesses

📍 Location: Florida
💰 Asking Price: $10,000,000
💼 EBITDA: $3,000,000
📊 Revenue: $3,500,000
📅 Established: 1996

💭 My 2 Cents: Towing is your classic stable and essential business. As long as there are cars on the road, there will be a need (sigh) for towing companies. This listing includes two established businesses: one focused on light and medium towing and recovery services and a second specializing in medium, heavy, and oversized load transport. I really like their 1,500 tow away and numerous police accounts, which together ensure a nice steady flow of work. The businesses also come with a huge amount of trucks and equipment, valued at $7.5M, and two separate facilities valued at $2M. This amount of highly specialized and expensive equipment gives them a great moat and would provide a huge amount of value to a new buyer, who would be using essentially the entire asking price to purchase hard assets. While at first glance everything looks promising, I’d need to dive into their numbers to verify that they make sense, as they have an extremely high margin for cash flow to revenue. I’d also need a lot more detail on the equipment, including its quality, condition, utilization rate, and annual repair and replacement cost. Finally, I’d want to look into the standard terms of their recurring contracts, how they source new business, and if there are challenges in finding and retaining drivers. Assuming everything checks out, this looks like a deal where you’re getting both a great business and a ton of valuable assets.

4/ Remodeling and Restoration Contractor

📍 Location: Missouri
💰 Asking Price: $5,900,000
💼 EBITDA: $1,625,000
📊 Revenue: $8,124,060
📅 Established: 2001

💭 My 2 Cents: This company specializes in remodeling and restoration services for multi-family and residential complexes in the rapidly growing Kansas City metro area, where there is a large stock of aging housing that requires work to remain competitive. 90% of their business comes from repeat clients, with contracts ranging from small renovations to multi-million-dollar fire restoration projects. I like their 20-year track record, excellent reputation, ability to handle different types of projects (with a wider range of clients), and impressive level of earnings. That said, I’d want to know how much of their business is restoration compared to standard renovation, how they source new jobs, if they are involved in competitive bidding and their win rate, how much work is currently in progress or on backlog, if they use subcontractors and what is involved in managing this, and how key the owner is to their current client relationships and how these would work post-transition. What makes this deal even more attractive is that Kansas City is offering economic incentives (such as tax credits and grants) for revitalizing older properties.

5/ Niche Digital Marketing Agency

📍 Location: New Mexico (Home-based)
💰 Asking Price: $6,950,000
💼 EBITDA: $1,448,011
📊 Revenue: $3,641,600
📅 Established: 2011

💭 My 2 Cents: Talk about an incredibly large and well-defined market. This digital marketing agency serves 37M military families within the $11B commissary and exchange retail industry (providing essential goods, groceries, and consumer products to military families at competitive prices), specializing in omnichannel campaigns for an established client base of Fortune 500 advertisers. They own proprietary military-focused websites, have an 85% retention rate with recurring clients, and average an impressive $195K MRR while bringing in great margins. However, I’d need to better understand what percentage of their revenue is tied to long-term contracts with advertisers versus short-term campaigns, average contract size, how much traffic their websites see, if there are any advertisers that account for over 10% of their earnings, what advantages they have against possible competitors, what the roles and responsibilities of their staff are, and what additional revenue streams could possibly be developed from existing digital assets. This business is currently home-based, which will appeal to someone looking for a remotely operated business.