Mike Andes explains how to make a small trades/construction business more sellable by moving away from custom, project-based work toward recurring-revenue services and operational systems. He contrasts an owner-dependent, technician-sensitive remodeling business (narrow buyer pool, low valuation) with a subscription/scale-ready business that has predictable monthly growth, measurable churn/turn rate, and a much higher sale multiple.
Chapters
When I hear the goal of the entrepreneur is I want to sell the business, I think, how do I increase the amount of people that could buy this business? Like no one wants to buy a custom build remodeling business because there's not any longevity of that revenue. I have no guarantee that someone's going to come back to me and if I lose two or three technicians, I'm out of business. Both the owners are in operations and admin sales. The business is not built on systems and it doesn't have recurring revenue. It's basically worthless because the only buyer that can come along is someone that has your experience. Yeah. Which is difficult. Yeah. Like we just like narrowed our buyer pool by like 99%. Right. Versus we build a business where it's like, hey, you need to come in here with capital and if you want to take us from 5 trucks to 20 trucks, here's the path. And we have the subscription. And every single month it's been growing and our turn rate is this. That becomes a very sellable business. And your multiple is probably two to three times more on that compared to a construction project based job.
