This Dryer Vent Franchise Makes $130K a Year—Would You Buy It?

0:00Hey, Michael here. Welcome to Acquisitions Anonymous. Today's deal was super fun. Heather and I talked about it. and it was super fun because Bill gave us the deal and it wasn't here today. So we did the deal and talked through it and it was a deal in his hometown of Charlotte, North Carolina and it was a fascinating kind of dig into something that looked like a terrific deal at first and then we learned some stuff about it and it kind of went off the rails. So stay tuned, see what you think and let us know in the comments below how you felt about this episode. Talk to you soon. We'll start Acquisitions Anonymous.

0:33Hello, another episode of Acquisitions Anonymous. We don't have 100 % beers anymore. Thumbs down on just the plus inventory.

1:05to 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. Well, Heather, Bill sells his business and then he goes on vacation for a month. So well-deserved, but we're going to get back to it today. He left us here alone, right?

1:37He left the Gen X podcast members unsupervised. Watch out. Well, he sent us a deal in our group chat. And so in the pre-show, you and I were like, let's do it. Let's do it. He's not here. You snooze, you lose. So let me put you on this deal. All right. When I find the button, sometimes I feel very boomer. All right. So this is a, it's from Biz Buy Sell, no photos, which already has me excited. It is a dryer vent cleaning business with 575 five-star Google reviews located in Charlotte, North Carolina, Mecklenburg County, which I believe is where Bill's located. I believe that is correct. ASCII price is a mere$200 ,000, half the cost of a median, half the median price of a home in the United States now.

2:32Can you believe the median price of a home is like$450 ,000 in the United States? Being in Southern California, that sounds good to me. So yes, that's easy to believe. It's funny. I go on these long bike rides and yesterday I was in a big group of like 100 people. It's the biggest group ride in San Antonio. And we go out into the country on the south side and there is vacant land as far as the eye can see. You can build basically until you either get to the Gulf of Mexico or Houston or El Paso. Like there is just like we have plenty of land. When people are like America's too full, I'm like, bro, you got to come to West Texas.

3:10We got plenty of space. Yeah. Look out your window when you fly across the country and see some land. Yeah. And so some of these housing developments, the land is so cheap. The construction is so cheap. We still have people selling new home builds, two and three bedroom houses in suburbs for under$200 ,000 in South Texas. Wow. See, that's great. I mean, that sounds really good. Yeah. The young people in Southern California have a reasonable gripe. They are really priced out of the first-time buyer market. Yeah, it's really tough. We got you covered here in San Antonio. Yeah. They got to move to Texas.

3:49Everyone's moving. They are. they are like crazy i mean we grew six seven percent last year wow um you know it's just nuts what's going on in all of south and central texas makes sense all right so this business started to get me off get us off on a tangent this business is two hundred thousand dollars asking price and the profit is a hundred and thirty thousand dollars so it's selling for basically one and a half times cash flow revenue is 356 000 it was established just in 2023 Oh, here we go. There's the rub. Here we go. It is dryer vents and duct vents with a Z, Charlotte, which cleans, repairs, and installs dryer vents.

4:31We also clean air dunks and bathroom vents. And it's located in Charlotte, North Carolina. They have$2 ,500 in inventory, included in asking price, three employees,$65 ,000 in furnitures, fixtures, and equipment. Here's the equipment they have. They have a wrapped Ram ProMaster air duct cleaning equipment. Is that a truck? I don't know. It sounded like it was when it said wrapped, but now I'm not sure. It feels like now it's just a machine. I don't know. Okay. While there are several dryer vent and air duct cleaning companies in Charlotte, our company has earned a strong reputation with just under 600 five-star Google reviews and nothing less than a five-star review.

5:10As a result, we've secured a large portion of the market as a result. There are so many opportunities to expand in the commercial space, including apartment communities, university, property management companies, etc. The owner will provide two to four weeks of training and support wherever needed. This guy who's selling it says, I enjoy starting businesses, just not managing them. Don't want to run them, though. Look, I would shame this guy, but it's like... That's fair. Just being honest. That's good. I like it. I was like, okay. Yeah. He runs it out of his home and they have a great domain name that they list here called dryer vent and duct cleaning Charlotte.

5:51So I will click on that. Okay. Our new policy as a pod for those of you new here is we try not to out listings when they're anonymous, but they're, they're not anonymous. We just, yeah, go for it. They're telling us. Yeah. So this is, here's the owner, Ben Davey, who's the owner and technician. Okay. So that's maybe the first thing to know about this. Owner and technician. Yes. It appears Ben is cleaning ducts. Yes. This is a job. Yes. Yes. You're buying yourself a job. They've got a good website. What do you think about this website? I think it looks nice. I mean, it looks better than companies I've seen that do, that are much larger.

6:30And so now we know it is a vehicle. There it is. There's a vehicle, a little van that I'm sure has the equipment inside that they use to clean out the ducts, right? Like almost like a, It almost looks like a carpet cleaning type of van that would come with all their equipment inside. And it looks nice. And this is not franchise, right? This is just an independent? Bill said he thought it was a franchise. We have to go back to the listing and see what it said there. But I think this is a nice deal for somebody. Yeah. So this is, if I look at this website, if you go ask somebody to build you an SEO ready business for optimized for Google local and Google my business, this is what the websites come out looking like.

7:13Tons of text and then like straight up like zip codes is what this guy has. Yeah. Like on the website here. This is what works now if you're trying to optimize for Google my business, which is fascinating. and those zip codes are links are they not uh they actually link yeah they well they will link to individual location pages like this okay and the idea is google sees this and if you type in um you're in that zip code there's a page for you i see got it makes sense so dryer vents tm let's google this because i think so bill said he thought this was a franchise eyes i know i have seen one that is so i would not be surprised so i typed in dryer vents here in san antonio and i got sponsored links from one two three four people who want to do air duct cleaning for me and so here is oh look this is the guy for san antonio ian strong um who has the exact same website so my guess is the franchisor yeah is making these websites for and that's part of the deal yeah you have to you have to probably have this kind of website they maintain it for you but that's right okay so it is a franchisee um relatively a startup two years or less than two years old yeah okay well so maybe this is a good time to ask what am i buying here I'm buying the franchise and...

8:52And this cash flow and a van. And a van. And you're getting a van. And I don't know, you know, so we don't know how, if they've just reached this$130 ,000 of cash flow, most likely, right? It's only two years old. So this is probably not, you know, something where you can look back and see that that's been sustained. I don't know how these services work. I doubt that they're like pest control where you have a subscription or there's a lot of reoccurring revenue, but maybe there is. I mean, here's my kind of dumb question. I don't get my vents cleaned. Should I be? Maybe I shouldn't admit that, but I don't use this kind of service.

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10:17So whether you're raising a single deal or managing a full fund, VeriVend gives you the speed and confidence to execute all in one single platform. So you can check it out and learn more at verivend.com. V-E-R-I-V-E-N-D.com. There are all kinds of horror stories of people's dryers catching on fire. So I don't know. So that's what's going to happen if I don't do this. You know, I would recommend, there's a lot of scare tactics out there. I would recommend go ask Chad GBT, like how do I know when to clean my dryer vent? And there's like a lint holder in dryers as well that I've heard has caught on fire because it's just like you just heat it up and then it catches itself on fire.

11:01I've never had it happen, but I think it's a Chad GPT kind of question. Okay. I mean, I feel like I've been on this earth for, you know, 50 plus years and I've been doing laundry and it hasn't happened to me and I haven't cleaned my vents either. So I don't know. Maybe it's certain configurations are more dangerous than others. That's what I would imagine. So let's maybe talk about what, so what you're buying here and I would add to what you're buying here, which is really important, is this number of five-star reviews and the SEO placement these guys have figured out is really, really powerful.

11:36Like this is what you're getting. And I love, you know, it's hard to replicate that. That is a defensible thing for this business. And that's really, I mean, sounds like what the franchisor sort of offers you. And there was some kind of, you know, this guy that bought it two years ago, paid a franchise fee and then pays royalties for that. But I imagine the royalties are already sort of counted in the 130. They're already taken out of that. So, you know, they've reached a good place. They're profitable. And that's a pretty good income for somebody, you know, especially if you're only, you know, paying$200 ,000 for it.

12:13Yeah. Well, I mean, you're, I guess the fundamental question is there are a bazillion franchises that will allow you to basically buy yourself a job, right? And own, own something like this. And would you be better off just paying the franchise fee for a new concept that's out there? Cause there's a bazillion of them in addition to dryer vent cleaning. Um, and friend of the pod, Connor Gross talks about a lot of these, like, would you be better off just paying$30 ,000 or$50 ,000 to set up a new one versus paying this guy to do this? Because it looks like their model here is the person that is a franchisee is the person coming to your house to clean the dust.

12:57That appears to be the model. Yep. Right. Well, I mean, if you're not the startup type, I guess, is sort of the buyer for this one, right? He said he likes starting up. He likes that zero to one. And, you know, obviously he had help with the franchise concept, but that was a lot of work, I'm sure. And I'm sure he had a period of months before a break-even. And so maybe a buyer that just doesn't want to deal with all of that and can find a way to finance this. This is the other thing. At such a small asking price, there's no SBA lenders available for something this small. what people don't realize is there's a cost inside the bank for putting on a business acquisition loan you know and banks know very well what their cost is for each type of loan that they that they produce and there's a break-even point for the bank and below a certain loan amount it's just too small of a loan they'll never make it back in interest because they're not going to make enough interest so for most banks for business acquisition that's 500 ,000 there's a few banks it'll go all the way down to$350 ,000.

14:01But when they do, it has to be super clean and easy. But they will not go sub$350 ,000 loan amount. So this one's too small. Yeah. I like, man, I like the business because I think there's so many scammy franchise systems that are like, wait, why do I need a franchisor to help me with window washing? Like, you know, or car detailing. Like, why do I, every car detailer I know, every time I text them, they're like, we're too busy to work this week. True. right like we we can book you out six weeks from now they're all totally booked up and by the way it's four hundred dollars to detail your car like that's those are the two things going on but this feels like one where it's it makes sense right because there is this level of kind of economies of scale they're getting by having you know this centralized seo google landing like that stuff is not easy to do and these guys have figured it out and they've done it once and then they've copy-pasted that for everybody in their network, which I love.

15:01What do you think about this one? Well, there's demand, obviously, for the service, even though I admitted my stupidity not using this kind of service, but there's demand for it. And maybe that's part of the demand is that not everybody realizes they should be doing this. Maybe there's a lot of people like me out there that they can sell into. So there's growth opportunities that way. You're not trying to take market share away from somebody else. You're just selling into markets where people don't already have this service. And just once you educate them that they need it, it's easy to sell. So I think it's, you know, this probably got some growth potential here from here.

15:35And obviously, Charlotte is a huge growth market. So this is a great location, I think, as well. Yeah. I guess that's also a question. What is the limitation to competition for this guy? Like, does he have exclusivity on all these zip codes, which I think is pretty darn important? I would hope so. If that's what they're letting him put on the website, I would think that's his territory, right? That's his franchise territory. And so, yeah, as a buyer, you would look into what sort of market share, you know, what you can tell about how much growth potential he's still got in all those areas. And if you've got growth potential and someone with energy can come in here, like I said, they've got to figure out how to finance it.

16:15So this is, you know, probably cash and a seller note or some other kind of creative financing rather than SBA here. Cool. Yeah. Overall, if this is a job you wanted and you wanted to do it, then I like the business. It's a good business. It's a good lifestyle to be in. I mean, you're making 130 grand a year. There's nothing wrong with that. If you want to be your own boss and you like cleaning ducts and you like dealing with people, there's tons of market for that. I'm still confused why somebody would pay 200 ,000 for it. I just don't understand it. Like I said, It'll be a tough one, but I think people that just, they want to be in a small business that's already, you know, plug and play.

16:54They don't have to start from, you know, no customers. And I guess that would be appealing to that kind of person. Yeah. This also feels like one of those things where some rich parent is going to buy it for their kid, being like, okay, Jimmy, here's your first job, right? Here's your business in a box. And I don't know. And then Jimmy might mess it up. We've seen that numerous times on this pod. I remember, I think it was before you joined as a co-host, there was a business where a guy bought a fuel haul boat for his sons to drive around and fuel people at the lake. It was just a total mess. You could just read between lines.

17:32Putting his sons on a boat at the lake, that sounds like the beginning of a mess. You know the first thing that's turned into is a party boat. I mean, there's no doubt about it. Yeah. All right. So I would just give myself like a purple thumbs up. Like I'm a thumbs up on this because I like the business. I think there's actually some value here. I don't understand the asking price. And so for that reason, my thumb's purple. What do you think? I'm thumbs up. I like it. Super cool. All right, everybody. Thanks for being here today. Let us know what you think about this deal. And if you're going to move to Charlotte and buy this and you tell us about it, we will ask Bill if he'll go to lunch with you.

18:10And so that would be an added benefit if you get this one. I don't know if he'll say yes, but we'll ask. So, all right. Catch y 'all next time.