How Much Is a Hurricane Shutter Company REALLY Worth?

0:00Hello, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, and welcome back to another episode of Acquisitions Anonymous. This is the internet's number one podcast on buying, selling, and operating small businesses. I am one of your hosts, Bill D 'Alessandro, and I am here with Mills Snell today, and we have a really cool deal. This one I wanted to buy as soon as I heard about it. This business does roll up, roll down hurricane shutters on the North Carolina coast. So imagine like the things that protect your windows from a hurricane you roll down as the storm is rolling in. This business is 20 plus years old.

0:34It's got$1.3 million of EBITDA. Lot to like about this one. I struggle to poke very many holes in it at all. So it's not often that we really love one. And Mills and I both really like this one. So without further ado, I hope you enjoy this episode of Acquisitions Anonymous.

1:02big thanks to high level for sponsoring this video and helping us pay for our editors high level is the all-in-one crm that handles your emails text funnels and more all in one place think of it like the swiss army knife for small businesses and you can try it for free for 30 days at go high level.com slash michael girdley all right just me and mills today i love these ones you're holding down the fort man holding down the fort and mills is in his conspiracy theory layer. If you're watching on YouTube, you can see there's a whole bunch of strings and blueprints to buildings. He's either going to rob one of them or he's plotting the murder of the president or something.

1:37I'm not sure. It's the ultimate heist is what it is. No, it's just work. Thankfully, it's a lot of work that we have to get done. It's roofing diagrams and plants, but check it out on YouTube. He does look like a conspiracy theorist. I need to get yarn to tie between all the different jobs. You do. You do. Well, you somehow found time between re-roofing all of South Carolina to bring a deal today also. This one really piqued my interest, Bill. It's in North Carolina. I love it. I'm excited about this because I've never looked at a business like this before, but I don't know. There's something about it really caught my eye.

2:15I'll read it. It's on Biz Buy Sell, future aspiring sponsor for the podcast. It's a North Carolina hurricane shutter business. And it says they're asking$6 ,585 ,000. The cash flow, they say, is SDE, seller discretionary earnings, of$1 ,374 ,367. They say that they do that$1.3 million of SDE on just over$5 million in revenue. And they do break out EBITDA here of like$1.29 million. So there's about a$75 ,000 difference between EBITDA and SDE, which I'm guessing is just owners. You know, maybe it's base comp or maybe it's just like perks and discretionary spending. The business has been around since 2003 also, so 22 years old.

3:07It says, this North Carolina hurricane shutter business sells and installs various types of storm and security shutters and screens to homes and businesses from the Outer Banks to Myrtle Beach and to the mountains of North Carolina. The business is well-established with almost 20 years of experience and has installed over 30 miles. I love this. This is like such anecdotal. It doesn't mean anything, but it has installed over 30 miles of end-to-end roll shutters during this time. They are known in the area for their top-of-the-line quality products and exceptional customer service. The business, get this, this is what I was like, this is amazing.

3:45The business has over a million dollars worth of work in progress, which is not included in the sale price for the business. So they have like a whip, a work in progress schedule. These are jobs that they're actively on. It's a million of the five million in annual revenue. And they say that the seller wants a pro rated share due to them at the time of closing. The business is unique with their approach to customer service, work ethic and sales. Their real estate is leased. They don't say anything about the building or the lease. They have$114 ,750 of FF &E furniture, fixture, and equipment, and it is included in the asking price.

4:2817 employees, and they say their location is ideally situated on the main street with excellent visibility. I would think this is not like a retail-type focused business, but maybe it matters. They include a showroom and a storage area for inventory and equipment, you know, competition. They don't really miss a list all that much. Like it's a referral driven business and, you know, kind of history of repeat work. Let's see. They've expanded their territory, which is kind of it seems like the business has been driven by more storms, right? And larger storms and more severe storms. They talk about the possibility of expanding to a second or third location.

5:10due to the increase of new construction and home sales that are being brought to the area. Support and training is negotiable. They're selling because of retirement. And then there is an attachment here. So I pulled it up on another screen. I'll share it. It's a PDF. And it's just a one-page teaser. And it repeats most of the things. That's a real teaser. I like this. So this is by Benchmark Business Group, BBG, and R. Davis is the listing agent. It looks like it's pretty much all the same info, except we do have some historical financials here. So the business has really been around$4.8 to$5 million.

5:49And in the eight months of 2025, so this is very fresh, it looks like they either are in decline or they maybe have a seasonal business. because they've only got to be seasonal mills everybody puts these in at the end of summer yeah they've only done 2.4 million in the first eight months of 2025 uh which would put their run rate at like 3.8 you know um it says the selling price is 6 million so i think that's a different selling no that's right 6585 it's the same selling price yeah it's 5x 5x net owner benefit what they say yeah okay bill i mean are you are you buying this thing are you moving to the coast of florida coast of florida coast of north carolina i'm buying this thing this is awesome i love this so uh i know a little bit about this because we the we have a beach house in south carolina and the windows are very old and so we need to replace them and so we had to look at these roll down shutters so what this is is like imagine metal roll up like almost like bank vault shutters or like you know at the mall and they like pull it down and close the storefront it's like that but in coastal areas you need to put you need to protect the windows on the ocean side of your house because if you're not there and something goes through the window it can total the home yeah because of all the moisture and the wind and everything and then you've got mold and you got water damage and everything so these are really important to protect your house if you're in a coastal area from hurricanes.

7:26Um, and we looked at it and we actually ended up putting in hurricane proof glass instead of these things. Um, so the ratings on these are insane. These windows can withstand a bowling ball at a hundred miles an hour, which is a real concern, you know, on the coast sometimes. Yeah. Um, so that is what they're rated for a bowling ball at over a hundred miles an hour. Um, and there's the, I think the glass is a little bit more expensive, but these roll down shutters are super, super common. Um, but I would imagine your kind of primary alternative here is the hurricane glass. Um, because like what I see people do anytime a hurricane's coming on the coast, like if you don't have these, you're literally out there with like a ladder and you're trying to like hold up a sheet of plywood and screw it to your house.

8:17You know, like literally board up the windows. Yes. And we used like, we've done that. So for 25 years, we watched the weather. And when a hurricane is coming, we get in the car from Charlotte and we drive South on like 24 hours of notice and you board up the house. Yeah. Um, it's just what you have to do, but now they have these that are all internet connected. So you just press a button on your phone and it's like Alcatraz, you know, and it just goes down. It becomes a safe room. Exactly. So these are very, very cool things. And with hurricanes getting worse and worse, with global warming and everything, this is a growing market.

8:54I really like this business. So, I mean, margin wise, you're, you know, you think about it like it's a specialty contractor, kind of like if you had somebody like replacing gutters or something on your house or maybe doing like niche concrete work or like high end hardscaping or like building an outdoor kitchen. Like in my mind, it's not, you know, it's not the low, lowest of the low margin. And it's probably not like incredibly high gross margin because they're having to buy the, buy the shutter hardware, which my guess is they don't stock like a ton of this in their inventory. They don't mention inventory.

9:30It's going to be all custom, right? Cause it's got to fit your window. Exactly. And everything. Yes. And I imagine, right. There's probably more than one person manufacturing these shutters and they come in different colors. They come in different widths. They probably come in different, like. you know, like you said, the glass, different grades and ratings and performance standards. And so, you know, you call them out to the house, they send an estimator out to do a takeoff, measure all the windows. And then I, you know, be curious, like how tech enabled they are, uh, as a 20 plus year old business.

10:02A lot of these home service contractors have gotten so good at like doing takeoffs on site and with an iPad sitting in, you know, the home and like, there's like point of sale. You can make the decision right there and get financing. A lot of them have gotten to the point where there's like turnkey financing on site. I would be really I would tell you if they're not doing that, this is a big opportunity for this business. Yes, totally. All right. So the margins are good. What about this quirky seller wants to be paid for the work in progress? It's not included in the sale. You basically have to start day one with your own sales pipeline?

10:39Well, I don't necessarily think it's that. I don't think he wants to get paid for all the jobs he's got. He's not saying he wants to keep his AR. I think what he's saying is that he's basically got inventory in the field. I think what he's saying is he's probably, because these are all custom, right? That he's probably working on jobs or he's ordered shutters for jobs or whatever. And he's got cash in it and he wants to make sure he gets some of that cash out, which is obviously fair, right? And this business doesn't really have true inventory. And, but I think that's what he's saying that he's got cost into jobs that are not done and he wants to recover some of that.

11:17I mean, we, so like that would normally be encompassed in a networking capital calculation anyways, but because this is a like kind of smaller business, a little bit closer to main street, they even say they're located on main street. I think the seller is trying to hit at that. When I bought a construction business, I had to deal with this because especially in construction versus like if, you know, in e-commerce, right, you've got the inventory and you're getting paid for it. Count it and value it and say exactly what it's worth. But in construction, we have usually, and like I'm going to use this company as an example, because it probably, they probably got a deposit, right?

11:56They got maybe 35 to 40 % upfront when you sign the contract so that they could order the materials because they're custom materials to make sure that they don't get hosed and, and left, you know, left holding all this stuff they can't use, but they're not, that might cover, might cover the actual cost of the inventory if they're doing it right. But in all likelihood, right, they've got other sunk costs in, you know, in these jobs and they could be halfway done installing a house at the time of closing. and it takes another week to finish. And they're like, he's trying to grasp, but I would really want to hash this out early with him of what do you want out of these WIP?

12:36Because we have a WIP schedule that we have to give to the IRS every year of what's all our work in progress and how much have we billed and are we over or under billing relative to progress? But we have longer duration jobs than this. So I would really want to double click on this with the seller and figure out, are you wanting to collect all the revenue are you just wanting to recoup your sunk costs are you wanting you know maybe the it's like some of the profit out of the job and like profit sharing it's not it's not super clear but you you would hope for the best but i don't know it seemed something about it is just telling me that it could get weird well let me ask you this mills like like in practice let's say it's you got something i'll just use round numbers you got a $20 ,000 job and he's got, he's basically half done and he's got, you know,$5 ,000 of cost in it.

13:24You know, does he want$5 ,000 back? Does he want, Hey, I'm half done. So I want$10 ,000, which is half of the ticket price of the job. So like, I want my cost back plus the margin on my cost. Or does he try to collect the whole job? Like what is the fair way to do this? I mean, the fairest way to do it, it really ultimately depends on his AR and his AP. So what like the egregious example is I want to be paid back the cost I have in the job, but I have a payable for this material and I haven't actually paid the supplier yet. And you're going to foot the bill. You know, like you see these kind of weird things emerge where sellers a lot of times are like, well, that's that's my AR.

14:05That's my money, you know, and it's like, OK, that's fine. But are you keeping the payables to? Yeah, now you're back to kind of the classic networking capital, right, is the blood of the business, etc. Yes. So in this case, you know, the benefit, I think, in this whole calculation is the duration of these jobs is probably two to three weeks max. Well, maybe they might have to order these shutters. Totally. I'm talking about on site for sure. So let's say you're on site. I don't think there's that difficult of a calculation to say, hey, like you're functionally going to be done with this job by the time of closing.

14:39But in any construction business like this, you're like, where do you draw the line in the sand and go, these are your jobs and these are mine. And the one nice thing about this on the residential side that is more difficult on the commercial side is we have contracts that almost all of them are with very sophisticated, you know, contract writers who don't want assignment of contracts. And so you've got to figure out how do I navigate this? And a lot of those contracts have change of control provisions to say not just are you assigning a contract to a new LLC, but is there a change of control in the LLC that we have this contract with and we deserve to be notified?

15:19I mean, there's a whole can of worms, especially with commercial contracts. Well, especially because they're like, hey, who's finishing the job that is started here? Yeah. Residential homeowners probably don't care. They don't care. I would assume your counterparty here is all your customers are all residential. This doesn't strike me as something. And I don't know the building codes now in North Carolina, but I would wonder, I'm guessing this is all kind of aftermarket. Like you're going to put in existing. It looks like you could all be retrofitted. And my, you know, just like window people, you know, there's, there's windows with a nail fin on them that are for new construction and there's windows that are for, you know, retro and you're taking out the old window and putting in a new one.

15:59You're not removing all the siding around the window. You've got to be able to do it in the existing, you know, hole in the building envelope. I looked at a business one time, Bill, that did like almost like DOD level shades like this. They were like blast shades and blast. Oh, wow. And it was really funny because, you know, you get to a point in due diligence with any kind of commercial construction or like commercial service business where you want to see like a representative sample of like, do you have customer concentration? Do you have like really significant single job, you know, concentration?

16:36Like you had a great year because you got like a disproportionately large job. So we were at that point in due diligence. We were like, okay, we need to see like customer lists and like some kind of job history. And they're like, absolutely not. we can't share any of that info but it was because they were doing stuff like at the fbi office in new york and like the white house like they had blast shutters they were like we can't say it but they functionally said like we have blast shutters on the white house so that if an explosion goes off outside the windows close instantaneously yeah yeah and i'll never forget like just how like awkward of a moment it was in due diligence where it's like i think we're talking yeah okay we're talking about the same are we talking about the president yes we're talking about Yeah.

17:18Wow. All that to say, I think there is probably a commercial application. You think about every retail storefront in a beach town that has a ton of glass. It may be cost prohibitive for them to do something like this versus some of these higher end homes, but there's got to be, even if it's a small potential, there's got to be a potential to sell into that market. That's true. I wonder, I mean, obviously this has been around for what, we said 20 years. Um, so I wonder if they prosecuted any commercial business at all, or if they just have a great name in residential. Um, and what's also interesting is, you know, we mentioned sort of the run right financials.

17:54I do think this is probably seasonal. I bet a lot of people kind of put this in over the winter or they get hit with hurricanes and then they're, uh, crap, we have damage and then they're going to put it in. So like, this is like one of those classic, just every hurricane season, like you get busy. So I think it's definitely going to be lumpy, for sure. You're going to have crazy weeks and months and then lulls, but it's kind of evergreen. The hurricanes just keep on coming. Yeah. And you think, I mean, you know, this is probably a middle age owner, maybe not even an older owner, but somebody with a ton of new energy and just kind of oomph.

18:36You could imagine you could blast, you know, this, this could be like a postcard mailer, like Bonanza, where you are hitting all of these coastal towns in like South Carolina and up into North Carolina and marketing these. I just think you could probably drive a ton of business and maybe there's a lot of competition, but I've never seen or heard of one of these businesses before. And it's because I don't live in a coastal town, but I can't imagine that they get blitz. Like the Tam just has to be so kind of quirky that. I would think so. And also the market is so big. I mean, you're talking like from Northern North Carolina to Florida.

19:17I mean, the whole Southeastern coast, you know, it sounds like these guys are based in North Carolina. It's got to be an Outer Banks type company, right? And there's all up and down the Outer Banks. I mean, just tons and tons of houses and commercial businesses that you extend down into South Carolina. I mean, Georgia, like all this is Hurricane Alley, like all the time. I would think that if a young person or younger person with some hustle on the marketing side could do really, really well. I don't know, maybe even door to door. I mean, you need to do it in the summer when people are actually there.

19:50I would also imagine, you know, like scraping property tax records, you know, trying to figure out who owns it, trying to send the postcards to them. You know, there's a whole, you know, value equation. I also wonder if you get a discount on your insurance if you have these. That's a great point. I would feel sure that there's a component of that. Probably. I mean, you could go to, you could, I mean, you know, every beach town has like the one de facto property management. like the resort rental management people. You go to those people in every town and just say, we'll give you a referral bonus.

20:23I had somebody from a restoration company drop off something this week. It was a QR code and like a one page thing and a magnet,$750 if you refer a remediation job to them, which tells you about what their average order value is. It's many multiples of that. You could totally do something like that with them and say, hey, you know, like give us one job, we're going to win you over. We'll show you our customer service. We'll show you our ability to execute. My concern would be the performance of the work. If you're used to doing it kind of within maybe an hour drive, as you grow, the estimating becomes the bottleneck there.

21:01If somebody, a great, amazing job comes up in, you know, Hilton Head, South Carolina, that might be four hours away from your home base. It's a ton of sunk cost in time to send an estimator four hours, one way, four hours back just to qualify leads. And that's where you got to figure out how does the footprint of this business grow as it scales? Are you ready to take a leap into business ownership, but you don't know where to start? Well, look no further than Acquisition Lab, the premier resource for entrepreneurs seeking to buy their dream business. Founded by Harvard MBA and acquisition expert, Walker Dybul, the lab is your fast track to success in the search diligence and acquisition process.

21:39With hands-on support, world-class resources, and a community of like-minded entrepreneurs, Acquisition Lab gives you the tools and confidence to navigate every step of the journey. And we're proud to call Walker and Chelsea, the Lab's director, longtime friends of the podcast. They're passionate about helping entrepreneurs like you take the next big step. So don't wait to make your business ownership dream a reality. Visit acquisitionlab.com today to learn more and schedule your free consultation. And when you do, be sure to tell them the Acquisitions Anonymous podcast sent you. Yeah. I wonder if you could do some sort of self estimation or remote estimation.

22:11If you could get within 10 % of the cost of the job, it's probably worth booking the job. Yes. Right. Totally. And maybe you're like pre-qualifying people, you know, having them send you photos, you know, like counting the windows. There's probably like a really great tool for that in this world already. And then, yeah, you're kind of saying, Hey, here's the range that we would be in. And then maybe you get on site and finalize the estimate, um, you know, before you go to contract. Yep. I just, I love this business. I think this is an awesome business. Um, I do wonder, uh, do you think there is any warranty or liability tail on this thing?

22:50Cause they've installed, as they said, what 30 miles, you know, Now, so warranty tail, liability, how do you handle that? I think it would almost certainly be, and I'm not familiar with the specifics in North Carolina like I am in South Carolina, but in South Carolina, at least you would have a workmanship warranty on the install that by state law is either a year or two years, depending on the scope of work, which just says, hey, if I installed it wrong, I've got to come back and fix it. But what you're more than likely doing is having the homeowner register their product with the OEM, the person who made this shutter.

23:27And you're saying, look, all this liability, you know, and the risk here is now the manufacturers. And it's not mine after that 12 month period, because they may have a 10 year warranty or something like that on impact resistance or that, you know, the chains inside won't break or something like that. but maybe that also brings up, maybe there's a service component to this where you've got repairs and maintenance and kind of upkeep on these. Well, I'm sure you have a hurricane and a bowling ball hits it at a hundred miles an hour. You might need to fix it. Totally, yeah, yeah. I do think though in this deal, there is going to be warranty.

24:05Liability kind of a separate thing. I think liability can probably be solved with insurance, which I would definitely want to diligence, understand and have insurance in place because your claims can get huge. One of these fails, you could total a house with water damage. So I would really make sure my insurance was dialed. But I could really see a warranty escrow in a deal like this. They do, what,$6 million of work every year or something. You might need a million bucks in escrow that releases gradually over one or two years post-transaction than, you know, that pays any warranty claims. And a lot of times, you know, the mechanism on those reps and warranties, like they'll, they'll structure it as like a tipping basket where it's like, look, for the first, you know, $50 ,000 worth of me having to go back and fix the seller's previous work, I'm not going to nickel and dime.

24:59I'm not going to stick my hand down and say I had to pay a crew to go fix it. but when I get to the$50 ,000, when the basket is full, you have to, you know, it tips and you have to reimburse me for everything. And that could be a way you mitigate it, but it doesn't stop the huge catastrophic risk of if you total the house. So yeah, you may have to, may have to kind of quantify that and figure out some risks. Yeah. I think that's an insurance, insurance thing. Yeah. Cause I mean, they have a huge installed base here and you know what you have a catastrophic loss. The insurers are all over this thing.

25:32Yeah. Yeah. So I would, I would really, and also, you know, the nice thing though, is they have been in business for so long. They have been through catastrophic losses. Yeah. Right. And North. Yeah. They could tell you probably the horror stories of, we learned a little lesson, you know, back in, in like 2012, when we insult this thing the wrong way, we've never, you know, we've never made that mistake since. Yep. I, what I also like about this business mills is it is quasi technical. Like this is not like vanilla. Go to Lowe's and buy this. Right. And also like, you know, like any guy off the street can't set up like Mills's roll up windows.

26:09I mean, probably not that hard, but it's not like Mills is plumbing. Yeah. You know, but it's also not a licensed trade. So it's not going to be super hard. I don't think to staff it like you can probably hire guys in and train them up and you're not going to have the problem that all the HVAC techs are having and the plumbing and all the licensed trades. Absolutely. Yeah, I think with 17 employees, they don't mention fleet and assets and stuff like that, but it's probably relatively light and probably, I think, pretty manageable. Yeah, I like it a lot. We don't have Heather, our go-to expert on the financeability of this from BISO, but I think that Heather would say this is definitely in the sweet spot of SBA in terms of size.