Educational articles on how operating businesses and income-producing real estate are evaluated — written plainly, without deal claims or performance promises.
How to measure maintenance-plan and repeat-customer retention in a home-service business using cohorts, renewal data, and visit completion, and what the numbers can and cannot prove.
Read the articleHow buyers of service businesses can assess the condition, ownership, financing, insurance, and replacement timing of a vehicle fleet before closing, and why deferred fleet costs affect value.
Why booked or invoiced revenue can overstate a service company's value, and how to reconcile bookings, invoices, collections, receivables aging, refunds, and financing fees during diligence.
A practical way to measure field-service capacity in billable hours, compare it with real demand, and decide whether to hire, reschedule, price differently, or decline work.
How to stress-test a seller-financed acquisition: balloon refinance risk, working capital needs, combined debt service in a weaker year, and lender consent and subordination issues.
How to judge home-service lead sources beyond cost per lead: booking rate, completion rate, revenue per completed job, and contribution margin — and how it differs from gross margin.
Simon Leizgold explains why revenue alone doesn't make a business or investment attractive—and why cash flow, expenses, debt and realistic assumptions matter more.
A practical framework for evaluating an operating business: earnings quality, customer concentration, management depth, and the operational risks that rarely appear on a P&L.
The asking price is an opinion. Cash flow, debt service, and working capital determine whether an acquisition works. A plain explanation of why buyers should lead with cash flow.
A clear explanation of cash-on-cash return: how it is calculated, what it does and does not measure, and how it compares to cap rate and total return.
How seller financing works in a business acquisition, why sellers consider it, the terms that matter most, and the risks both sides should understand before agreeing.
Recurring work, dispatch discipline, technician retention, and reputation: the characteristics that make a home-services or B2B service business attractive to an acquirer.
Why revenue growth can hide declining margins, how gross margin and job costing reveal the truth, and what business owners should measure instead of top-line growth.
A structured list of diligence questions covering revenue, customers, staffing, systems, legal exposure, and transition planning for buyers of small operating businesses.
Owner dependence, key-person risk, and management depth change what a buyer is really acquiring. How to assess a management team before closing.
How to review an income-producing property: rent roll, trailing financials, expense normalization, capital needs, debt structure, and the risks behind a pro forma.
What due diligence covers, how to sequence it, when to bring in advisors, and why the purpose is a better decision rather than a longer document list.