Last month a buyer came to me frustrated. He had been looking at deals for six months and could not find anything exciting enough to pull the trigger on.
I told him that was the best news I had heard all week.
He had been chasing restaurants, tech-enabled services, trendy fitness concepts. The kind of businesses that sound impressive at a dinner party. Every one of them had the same problem - the numbers fell apart the second you stress-tested them. Thin margins. Customer acquisition costs that ate the cash flow. Seasonal revenue swings that would keep you up at night in January.
I asked him one question. Have you looked at commercial cleaning?
He laughed. Actually laughed. Said he did not leave a $180K corporate job to mop floors.
Fair enough. But here is what commercial cleaning looked like through the Bulletproof lens. The deal I showed him was a janitorial services company in the Southeast. Fifteen-year operating history. $1.6M in revenue, $410K in SDE. Forty-seven recurring commercial contracts with an average client tenure of six years. The owner had not knocked on a door in four years because referrals handled growth.
We ran it through the Bulletproof criteria. Purchase multiple: 2.4x. DSCR stress-tested at a 20% revenue decline: 2.1x. Owner cash flow after all debt service and a full-time GM: $212K per year. Working capital was healthy. The seller agreed to carry 10% because he knew the business would keep performing after he left.
Five for five. Every criterion passed.
Here is the thing nobody talks about in the acquisition space. The businesses that change your life are almost never the ones that impress your friends. They are the ones with boring, predictable revenue, sticky customers, and math that works even when the economy does not.
My buyer closed that deal four months ago. He does not mop a single floor. He has a GM and a team that runs everything. He works about 25 hours a week on growth and client relationships. And he takes home more than he ever made in corporate - with equity building underneath him every single month.
The sexiest business you can buy is the one that deposits money into your account like clockwork. Everything else is just entertainment dressed up as an investment.
If you want to learn how to find and evaluate deals like this one - the boring ones that actually build wealth - I walk through the entire Bulletproof method in a free 28-minute masterclass. No fluff, just the framework.
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