The best exits aren’t decided at the closing table — they’re decided two to four years before, when an owner starts running the business like it’s already for sale. By the time a broker or banker is in the picture, the multiple is largely baked in. What moves the needle is the work you do before the LOI ever shows up.
This category is for home services owners thinking seriously about a sale, recap, or internal transition. We cover the things private equity and strategic buyers actually diligence: quality of earnings, owner dependency, customer concentration, working capital pegs, adjusted EBITDA that will survive a buy-side QofE, and the operational clean-up that turns a 5x business into a 7-8x business. We also talk candidly about the parts nobody warns you about — earn-outs, rollover equity, management carve-outs, and what life looks like on the other side of a deal.
If you’re 6 months or 6 years out, the decisions you make now determine what shows up on the wire when you finally sign.
The practical foundation every home services owner should build 12 to 18 months before selling — clean books, owner separation, margin optimization,...
Most acquisitions that fall apart do not fail because the business was bad. They fail because of what the buyer's due diligence...
Private equity has spent the last decade quietly rolling up the home-services trades, and in 2026 the pace hasn’t let up. There...
PE firms are not buying every home services company. They are buying specific types that meet specific criteria. Here are the 8...
The gap between having a valuable business and getting that value at close is where most owners lose money. These 10 avoidable...
An earnout is a deal structure where a portion of the purchase price is contingent on the business achieving certain performance targets...