11
Summary
Type
SMB Acquisition
My Role
Search Founder
Business Model
LBO acquistion
Location
Miami
Engagement
1 month
Core Brief
Build a new venture
In Q2, 2021 I visited Florida for a 1-month executive education program. On the side I conducted research into the possibility of starting or buying a small services business and quickly narrowed my search to the lawn-care niche. The plan was to buy and streamline a very small lawn-care business (±$100K SDE) by implementing modern operating principles, adding an online marketing presence and automating back-office operations. The target had to be servicing up-scale neighborhoods.
Research areas Coral Gables & Coral Terrace in Miami + Davis Islands & Tampa Palms in Tampa. I drove through every street in those neighborhoods and photographed every lawn care truck I saw to get an idea of the competition and market size.
Here is a video I recorded while walking around Coral Gables in Miami:
Go-to-market
If I were to execute this plan in 2024/2025, I would consider:
Identify + buy one of the local lawn-care leaders in a large, up-scale area
Keep the acquisition confidential (NDAs) for at least 1 year to get in the market without word getting out that lawn-care shops are up for sale. Workers talk!
When defining this 'local leader' I would under-index on financial metrics like revenue, margin and client mix and over-index on online reviews and reputation (proxy of quality & reliability) and on the degree to which the owner is involved in the day-to-day. Online reputation takes years to build.
Rebrand to a clean, trustworthy, memorable brand with a heritage element. Most mom and pop shops have unclear names/brands, this is another area of leverage: create a vivid, easy to recognize brand with roots/heritage for trust.
Design an in-house training + some kind of option-pool plan to ensure that the staff in the field is well incentivised to stay on for multiple years. This would be a key differentiator, add stability and quality to the quality of service and become a long-term unfair advantage in addressing the labor shortage.
Heavily invest in online content marketing using a combination of creative tools that will firmly establish the brand without relying on Meta/Google.
Demand a 1 week ride shadow period (ride-along) to experience the work
Product & Design
I created a fake business to gauge demand called Holland Mowing including a website, app mock-ups and a website.
Lessons & Resources
General learnings
At that time most sellers in this range were 1~2 man owned shops with poor- to no English proficiency, close to zero online presence with near-zero use of digital efficiencies. Turn-over among their staff was rampant when they tried to scale and since they didn't have any 'formal' business experience, putting SOPs in place was not going to happen. Larger lawn-care businesses with reliable teams in place were few and way out of my acquisition range (this is where the multiple goes up a lot). As with most blue collar businesses, demand is not the challenge - it is the lack of labor. Finding reliable and qualified staff that stay on seems by far the biggest challenge.
Resources
- I talked to a bunch of operators including Mike (founder/operator of Augusta Lawn Care - a franchise model)
- Put up a fake listing called Holland Mowing on Google maps to gauge traffic
- Built website for Holland Mowing: https://toney129.softr.app/ (domain expired)
