Interior Design Firm, 1998-Founded Texas Multifamily & Senior Living Specialist

$2.7M

Revenue

$546K

SDE

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Full Editorial Writeup

This is a privately-owned interior design firm founded in 1998 that specializes in multifamily, student housing, and senior living environments. The firm differentiates on a boutique, art-forward aesthetic and does meaningful research into the history, culture, and architecture of each project location, which lets it charge for both design services and product markups. It is a lean shop with five employees running out of a 750 square foot office, so the economics are driven by relationships and expertise rather than overhead.

At $2.7M in revenue and $546K in EBITDA, the business runs at roughly a 20% EBITDA margin, which is healthy for a design services firm. The standout number is a 90% repeat business rate, with the top five clients having worked with the firm for one to eighteen years. That client stickiness, paired with a stated pricing initiative that lifted margins, suggests an owner who has been disciplined about profitability rather than chasing top-line growth.

The three verticals it serves (multifamily, student housing, senior living) are relatively durable real estate asset classes, but interior design itself is project-based and tied to development, renovation, and leasing cycles. A buyer is acquiring a reputation, a client book, and a design process, not a contracted revenue stream, so the durability of earnings depends almost entirely on keeping those repeat relationships intact through the transition.

Why we like it

Earnings quality is attractive for a services firm: $546K EBITDA on $2.7M revenue is a ~20% margin, and management explicitly credits a pricing and markup initiative for the improvement. That signals the owner understands unit economics and is not just buying revenue with discounted fees.
The moat is relationships, and the numbers back it up: 90% repeat business and top-five clients spanning 1 to 18 years. In project-based design, that kind of client retention is the whole ballgame and it meaningfully de-risks the first year post-close.
The vertical focus is smart. Multifamily, student housing, and senior living are large, institutionally-funded asset classes that continually renovate and reposition units, giving a specialist firm repeatable project pipelines and credibility that generalist designers lack.
This is a lean, capital-light operation: five employees and a 750 square foot office with no real estate or equipment to carry. That means high incremental margins on new work and almost no capex drag on free cash flow.

How to improve it

Convert repeat clients into formal master service agreements or preferred-vendor arrangements with the institutional owners and developers behind the multifamily and senior living portfolios. Turning informal loyalty into contracted pipelines shifts the business from project-to-project to a more recurring posture and lifts the exit multiple.
Build a procurement and FF&E sourcing arm to systematically grow the product markup line the seller already identified as a margin driver. Design firms that control furnishing procurement capture meaningfully more dollars per project without adding design hours.
Geographic expansion is listed as upside, so productize the firm's research-driven design process into a repeatable playbook that less senior designers can execute. This reduces key-person dependence on the owner and enables servicing new metros without diluting the brand.
Invest in sales and marketing, which the firm admits is underdeveloped. A dedicated business development hire targeting regional and national multifamily operators could materially expand the client count beyond the concentrated top five.
Add digital technology and visualization tools (3D rendering, design-management software) to shorten project cycles and win larger clients who expect modern deliverables. Faster turnaround directly improves designer utilization and throughput.
Diversify the client base to reduce concentration risk. Given that five clients anchor the firm, intentionally adding mid-market accounts protects earnings if any single long-tenured relationship churns post-sale.
Formalize recurring touchpoints such as annual refresh programs or portfolio-wide design standards packages for senior living operators who update units on a cycle. This creates a semi-predictable revenue cadence tied to real estate turnover.

Diligence notes

Scrutinize client concentration carefully. The top five clients drive the repeat business story, so pull revenue by client for at least three years and confirm how much of the $2.7M comes from the top one or two accounts and whether any have already signaled slowdown.
Validate the EBITDA and the pricing initiative. Confirm the $546K is adjusted correctly for owner compensation and that the margin uplift from the pricing change is sustainable rather than a one-time catch-up on underpriced work.
Assess key-person risk. In a five-person boutique, the owner is likely the rainmaker and senior creative lead; determine how many relationships and projects originate with the owner personally and structure an earnout or extended transition to retain them.
Investigate the project pipeline and backlog. Because revenue is project-based, get a signed-contract and proposal-stage backlog to understand how much of forward revenue is already committed versus needing to be re-won.
Clarify the reason for sale beyond 'other life objectives,' and confirm there is no impending client loss, team departure, or market softening in the Texas multifamily and senior living development cycle that is prompting the exit.

Source

Originally listed on BizBuySell. View original listing →