Thread: Advice on Business For Sale

Help in deciding value of business

I would like some assistance from those of you who have bought or considered buying a business and have some insight:

This is the business

Years in business 5 well established in our area.

Average Income $90k having increased by $15k each year for the past 3 years.

We would save approximately 40k after buying the business and restructuring areas in which they are wasting money and keeping 1 guy instead of 3 as I would handle the work up here until I built the business up more – the couple who own this business aren’t window cleaners and do none of it themselves.

Services they offer are Christmas lights, residential & commercial window cleaning, power washing, gutter protection installation and gutter cleaning. Approx 85% of their customers are window cleaning customers, however, here windows aren’t done 2 or 3 times a year like on the coast. Most of these are residential customers with a smaller commercial route built up.

Further marketing needs to be done quite badly from my assessment to push additional services and in our own current business we already offer gutter protection and gutter cleaning that we market separately under a different business name and as an add on service with window cleaning.

We would receive in the sale if purchased a nice 2005 truck, 6 ladders of varying sizes, lot of belts, scrubbers, squeegees, etc, along with a fairly new power washer and approx 650 customers.

Our main reasoning for looking at this business is that we moved to this area 1 ½ years ago to grow our business (however it turned out to be at the beginning of the recession) and the area here is considerably larger than where we started our business and still operate. We are well established where we moved from approx 60 miles away and still operate and service our customers there but with their established name and customer list here it allows us a better start and base to work from and grow much quicker than spending 3-4 years trying to push our services – I’m no longer 25 years old anymore either.

They have asked for $40k. We are not sure what to offer and would appreciate any insight and useful info – much appreciated

Live Long & Prosper ha ha

3 months of the gross is a fair amount or at least a good start. You have alot of work ahead of you. there are so many varibles in the aquisition of a business, you will need to do some serious homework. 1st step is: Are his accounts profitable? You pick a few and go check them out. Cross reference his pricing methods with yours. Remember "You can be busy, but are you making money?" I could be the largest company in my area if i wanted to work for peanuts- no thanks! There are good threads on this forum that will talk about how to handle this type of situation. I would look them up. BTW- As with buying a vehicle- Buyer Beware.