Success on Aggregated sites?
December 10, 2023
by a searcher from University of Michigan - Ann Arbor in St. Petersburg, FL, USA
I'm new to the platform and am wondering who here has had a successful acquisition sourced from an aggregated site like BizBuySell....and if so what were the circumstances?
from Harvard University in Manhattan, New York, NY, USA
I recently closed my first deal (non-medical petcare) sourced on bizbuysell. Our market is deep and fragmented so we did the standard sourcing exercise of pulling the one deal worth our time (from our perspective) out of the several hundred if not thousand deals we considered (with 30-second cursory reviews included in that tally).
Our seller demographic was retiring ~65yo sitting on a 25yo long established gem of a business with stable demand we understood and clear opportunities to grow. We used our own capital and an SBA 7(a) loan, deal tallied to 20% equity 80% debt all-in including all fees and cash as working capital to balance sheet at close. Debt service is very comfortable, valuation was extremely favorable but the catch was we had to buy the facility/real estate too. Turns out we are happier owning the full system so glad it turned out that way.
The general experience was very “unsophisticated” and the headaches were numerous so it is best to be ready to run the whole m&a show yourself as you will find you are both buyer and educator. We feel the juice was in fact worth the squeeze and plan to add locations in time after rolling out our playbook, documenting SOPs and blueprinting said playbook, and rightsizing our capital stack to something a little less exciting than###-###-#### equity-debt.
Good luck to you sir.
Best,
Luke
from University of Oklahoma in Austin, TX, USA