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This is a franchised specialty home remodeler serving homeowners across central North Carolina, with a core product line that has operated in the market for roughly three decades under a recognized national franchisor. The company has built a leading local reputation on quality, product selection, and an industry-leading workmanship warranty, and it runs a complementary second service line that broadens its footprint across the broader renovation category. A particular strength is demand from older homeowners pursuing accessible, aging-in-place upgrades, a segment with durable demographic tailwinds.
The business is a genuine turnkey operation: 28 employees including an experienced management team, trained in-house installation crews, and a structured in-home consultative sales process. Operations are centralized in a 15,000 square foot standalone showroom-plus-warehouse facility held under a long-term net lease with a renewal option, plus a multi-vehicle service fleet and off-site trailer storage. Lead generation runs through a multi-channel marketing program and national retail-referral partnerships.
At $10.5M revenue and $2.53M cash flow, this is a roughly 24 percent SDE margin business asking 3.79x on a full-time owner-operator basis. The SDE is stated on an LTM basis through July 2026 and already carries a $135,000 market rent charge with a 3 percent escalator, so the earnings are cleaner than many owner-operated remodelers where rent and owner add-backs muddy the picture. The seller is retiring and offering meaningful seller financing.
Why we like it
- Earnings quality is above average for a remodeler: $2.53M SDE on $10.5M revenue is a healthy 24 percent margin, and the number already absorbs a $135,000 arms-length rent charge rather than assuming free real estate. That means the buyer is underwriting to a fully-loaded facility cost, which reduces the usual post-close margin surprise in owner-operated contracting deals.
- Durability comes from three decades of operating tenure, an in-house trade team rather than reliance on subcontractors, and a national franchisor brand and warranty behind the core product. That combination of tenure, brand, and captive installation crews is hard for the small independents that dominate remodeling to replicate, and it supports the repeat-and-referral base the seller describes.
- The aging-in-place tailwind is real and largely recession-resistant. Older homeowners funding accessibility upgrades tend to spend from home equity and necessity rather than discretionary whim, and the North Carolina demographic and in-migration trend supports rising renovation demand over do-it-yourself for years.
- Seller financing of roughly $1.3M over 120 months at 8.25 percent signals the retiring owner is willing to keep skin in the game, which both eases the equity check and provides an alignment check on the earnings quality. A structured management team plus a 4-week training window means this is not a business that lives entirely in the seller's head.
How to improve it
- Pressure-test and then scale the marketing engine. The listing points to increased marketing spend and expanded national retail-referral partnerships as the primary levers, so in the first 90 days map cost-per-lead and close rate by channel and reallocate budget toward the highest-ROI sources before adding spend blindly.
- Add mobile showroom capacity to extend reach without new real estate. The current facility is at capacity but the growth path avoids capex-heavy expansion, so a mobile showroom or two lets the existing sales and install teams cover more territory and shorten the sales cycle for aging-in-place buyers who prefer in-home consultations.
- Deepen the complementary second service line into a systematic cross-sell. Every core-product job is a warm lead for the adjacent line, so build a structured attach process at the point of sale and measure attach rate as a KPI to lift average ticket without new customer acquisition cost.
- Formalize the aging-in-place niche as a dedicated referral channel. Build relationships with occupational therapists, home health agencies, senior living communities, and Medicare Advantage plans that fund home modifications, turning a demographic strength into a repeatable, lower-cost lead source.
- Tighten installation scheduling and crew utilization. With 25 full-time staff and a multi-vehicle fleet, small gains in jobs-per-crew-per-week flow straight to margin, so implement job-costing and route/scheduling software to lift throughput on the existing headcount.
- Reduce owner dependence before you need to. Document the consultative sales script, train a sales manager to own the funnel, and delegate the estimating function so the business runs on process rather than the seller's relationships, protecting the multiple at your own eventual exit.
- Evaluate a second-territory expansion using the franchise playbook. The franchisor structure makes a second market more replicable than a green-field independent, so model the economics of opening or acquiring an adjacent territory once the core operation is stabilized under new ownership.
Diligence notes
- Scrutinize the LTM-through-July-2026 dating of the SDE. That period extends into the future, so confirm whether these are actual trailing results or partly projected, and rebuild the P&L on genuine trailing-twelve-month actuals with monthly detail to validate the $2.53M cash flow.
- Verify the franchise agreement terms, royalty rate, transfer conditions, and remaining term. The brand and warranty are central to the moat, so confirm the franchisor will approve the transfer, quantify all franchise fees already deducted or not, and understand any territory or renewal restrictions that could cap the growth thesis.
- Examine the lease carefully. The real estate is offered for lease by a third-party landlord at $135,000 with a 3 percent escalator, so confirm the net lease terms, remaining term, renewal option, and whether the landlord has any relationship to the seller that could affect renewal pricing at capacity.
- Break down revenue by service line, ticket size, and lead source. Understand how concentrated earnings are in the core franchised product versus the complementary line, the mix of aging-in-place versus general renovation, and how dependent lead flow is on paid marketing that a new owner must keep funding.
- Assess the durability of the management team and installation crews post-close. With the owner retiring after four weeks of training, confirm which relationships and estimating knowledge sit with the seller, and secure retention or non-compete arrangements for the key managers and lead installers.
- Validate warranty and backlog liabilities. An industry-leading workmanship warranty is a marketing asset but also a future obligation, so review historical warranty claim costs, current job backlog, deposit liabilities, and any open customer disputes that transfer with the business.
Source
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