When I was a teen my dad owned a pressure washing company in Western Kentucky. Worked with him in the summers doing window cleaning and pressure washing. Actually worked for a while editing the WCR magazine. Lot of hours in the sun raining bleach on my head and fighting wasps while cleaning gutters for Xbox money.
Anyway, long story short, I now work in investment banking and have been retained by a large pressure washing company with an equity partner to find acquisitions in pressure washing and window cleaning.
If you’re doing more than $500k a year in profit on the east coast, midwest, or southeast and have a few crews, I’d love to talk. My dad eventually sold too and ended up getting into real estate, which he loves more than the hours it takes to run a PW company.
Feel free to remove if not allowed, just thought I’d put out feelers at the source.
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Cool post. It’s nice that you have the background in the industry.
As somebody in investment banking, can you explain why - as the operator of a very small mom-and-pop exterior cleaning company - I get carpet bombed each day with texts and emails from people who “have buyers ready” to purchase a power washing business? My business could hardly be any smaller; nothing like what they are looking for. Are these people just buying lists of everyone in the industry and then sending the same thing to everyone without doing any research? If I’m getting so many inquiries, I can only imagine how many the big guys are getting…
Best wishes on finding a seller. As you know, most of the industry is small owner/operators, but it seems that each region has a few big dogs.
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Yeah, fair question. I think some of this is coming from generic business brokers, they’ll sometimes get a dentist or someone retiring from a much larger business that wants to run a small business almost as a hobby, so they will spam every business owner in a geographical area. Some of this might be you getting caught up by guys like me who use tools like Raylu, Crunchbase, ZoomInfo, Apollo that picked your info up from LinkedIn or BBB or business filings. They don’t have any indication of size online, so they just cast a wide net. I do some of this too.
For a business like exterior cleaning, the sites all look the same until they have a few locations under the belt, so it’s tough to determine if it’s a $75k a year owner-operator or a $5M a year 30 truck behemoth. Service businesses are pretty hard to estimate the revenue of from the outside.
Hopefully this was at least sort of helpful.
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Helpful. Thanks and good luck on your search. I’ll call you when we hit $5M 
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