I ran a high-end residential remodeling firm in San Francisco and Sacramento for 16 years. This year I closed it. Now I'm searching, and my criteria are mostly a list of things that hurt. Labor, and how it emptied my pipeline When I moved the business to Sacramento, I couldn't find craftsmen good enough for the work I was selling. So I staffed jobs with the people I could get. That's where it started to unravel. Problems on the jobs kept piling up, and I lost confidence in my own crews. Once that happened, I couldn't sell with conviction. It's hard to promise a client something you're not sure your team can deliver. By January of this year, I had nothing on the books forredactedIt looked like a sales problem. It was a labor problem. So the first question I ask about any business now is where the labor comes from, and whether it's there in this market. If the skill lives only in the owner's hands, I'm out. Recurring revenue That empty January also showed me how fragile project work is. Every job ends, and the pipeline resets to zero. I want something with a recurring piece, like service, maintenance, or contracts, that keeps paying when sales are slow. Selling to businesses, not homeowners Working in someone's house is emotional for them. A small miss becomes personal. I got good at handling that, but I don't want to spend the next ten years doing it. B2B customers still have expectations. They just don't take it personally when something slips, and they come back. Alignment This took me the longest to learn. EOS is what finally taught it to me. If people don't know the goals, they make up their own. You have to set them and repeat them until everyone's sick of hearing them. Most small businesses don't, and I've worked inside ones that didn't. What I'm looking for An owner, probably later in his / her career, who built a good business on craft and has a team that can carry it. He wants out, or wants help. I'd come in on sales and operations, with a path to own it over a few years. If you know someone like that, or you're searching in the trades too, send me a message.