Selling Your Garage Door Business: Why You’re Right to Be Skeptical of Brokers
You’ve spent twenty-some years building something. Garage doors aren’t glamorous. The money’s in the install, the service contracts, the relationships with builders and property managers who keep coming back. You know your customer list better than your CPA does. You know which guy on your crew is the one you can’t afford to lose.
Now someone’s telling you it’s time to think about an exit. Fine. You’ve thought about it. What you haven’t done is hand the conversation to a broker, because most of them don’t know your business well enough to sell it without making you look like a fool, or making your buyer think they’re stealing it.
You’re right to be skeptical. So let me say what most brokers won’t.
Most brokers can’t actually sell a garage door business. They can list one. They can drag it through a generic process designed for any service business between $1M and $20M EBITDA. They can hand you a CIM that reads like every other CIM. And they can find you a buyer eventually, at a discount, because they didn’t know how to position what makes your shop different from the next one.
Different from the next one looks like this. Your revenue mix between new construction, replacement, and service. Industry-typical is roughly 30/50/20, but the buyer who pays the most is the one who values your specific split. Your service economics: what a tech bills per call, your spring-versus-opener replacement margins, your callback rate, your truck-roll cost. Your supplier terms with Clopay, Amarr, Wayne Dalton, and where you sit on their volume rebate tier, the rebate you’ve earned over the years is real money the next owner inherits, and most brokers don’t price it in.
Your install crew: what they make per hour, your dispatch efficiency, your workers comp mod rate.
Your customer concentration — whether any one builder or property manager is more than fifteen percent of revenue, because that’s a number the buyer will use to discount your price. Your name on the truck: whether it still pulls work, or whether you’ve built a brand the next owner can run without you on it.
If your broker can’t name three of those before he walks into your shop, he’s reading from a checklist. I read from a checklist too. For the first thirty minutes. Then I close it. Then I ask you what your father did and what your son is doing, and whether your family wants you home at five for the next ten years or whether she’s going to lose her mind if you actually retire.
Because how this deal closes depends more on what you’re walking into than what you’re walking out of.
The thing nobody warns you about is that the hardest part of selling a business you built isn’t the price. It’s the moment someone hands you a check for work nobody else watched you do.
It’s the moment your crew finds out. It’s the moment the new owner calls a customer you’ve known for fifteen years and butchers it. If your broker isn’t preparing you for those moments, he’s not selling your business. He’s offloading it.
And most owners don’t lose money on the headline price. They lose it after the LOI is signed.
The working capital peg, the line item nobody walks you through until it’s too late, quietly subtracts six figures from your check at closing. The earnout structure, the one you accept because the headline number sounds good, gets killed eighteen months later by the buyer’s accounting team who suddenly find reasons your post-close revenue doesn’t qualify. The personal guarantees you signed years ago on your bank line, your equipment loans, your vendor credit, the buyer agrees to release them in the LOI, then the bank tells you in October that release will take another quarter, and you’re still personally on the hook for inventory you no longer own. The real estate, your building, the one you bought in 2009 because you couldn’t find a landlord who’d let you put a fifty-foot bay door in — gets handled three different ways depending on your deal, and only one of them is right for your situation.
If you’re an S-corp,there’s a 338(h)(10) election to consider that can be worth real after-tax dollars; if your broker doesn’t know what that is, ask him to spell it.
A broker who isn’t walking you through those traps before you sign an LOI isn’t representing you. He’s hoping you’ll close before you notice.
So here’s what I’m offering, and what I’m not.
I’m not promising you a number. I won’t quote you a multiple I haven’t earned. The valuation comes from the work: your numbers, your buyer pool, what the market is actually doing in your sector this quarter. If a broker tells you what your business is worth before he reads a P&L, walk out.
What I am offering: someone who’ll spend the time to know your business at the operator level before we go to market. Someone who knows the difference between a strategic buyer who wants your install crew, a roll-up that wants your service revenue, and a private buyer who’s going to wreck what you built in eighteen months. Someone who’ll say no to a deal you should say no to, even when the commission says yes. Someone who’ll read every line of your LOI and tell you which line will hurt you.
If you want to know what your business is actually worth, before you commit to any process, fill out the Snapshot Valuation. Sixteen questions. No commitment. Just clarity.
You don’t need to decide today. You just need to know what’s possible.
Jake Taylor
Exit With Jake / Menlo Business Brokers