Traditional brokers: list and pray.
A traditional business broker lists your business the same way a realtor lists a house. It goes up on a public marketplace — sites like BizBuySell — with a price tag, a blurry description, and a “for sale” sign, essentially. Then they wait for someone to bite. That approach works fine for a business worth a few hundred thousand dollars. A landscaping route. A single-location shop. What it was never built for is a $5M–$50M home services or construction company with real enterprise value, real employees, and real complexity in the deal. Brokers don’t run a competitive process. They take whoever shows up first, because “whoever shows up first” is the whole strategy. If you’re in the annual profit range I work with, a traditional broker is under-equipped for what your business actually is — and you will leave real money on the table finding that out.
Buy-side brokers: they don’t work for you.
This is the one that trips up the most owners, because it’s built to be confusing on purpose. A buy-side broker, sometimes calling themselves an “advisor” or a “buyer’s rep,” is paid by the buyer, not by you. And this is the source of the vast majority of the outreach you’ll get. Their job is simple: the PE group pays them to conduct outreach and bring back opportunities. They get paid through retainers and success fees from the buyer, so what they really want is to play connector, tell you the buyer covers their fees, and sit back hoping you proceed.
Here’s what that looks like in practice. An email lands in your inbox that sounds like genuine interest in your company. It’s flattering. It creates urgency: “we’re moving fast on a few opportunities in your space.” They ask for financials early, before you’ve had a chance to remove personal expenses and identify add-back items that improve your enterprise value. And because there’s no competitive process behind it, you’re negotiating against one offer instead of many. Sound familiar? That’s not a negotiation. That’s a formality.
Understand what they actually care about. It isn’t whether you got a good deal or good terms. It’s that the deal closes, so they can collect their fee and move on to the next one. So let me be direct. A buy-side broker representing a buyer is never working for you, no matter how the email is worded or how nice they are on the phone.
Investment banks: not built for your deal size.
Investment banks are the real thing — legitimate, FINRA-licensed, and genuinely good at what they do. The problem for most owners in home services and construction is simple: what they do doesn’t start until your deal is a lot bigger than yours. Most investment banks have a minimum around $10M in EBITDA (what I’ll call annual profit, because that’s what it actually means to you). If your business is doing $1M–$10M in annual profit, you’re below the floor for almost every investment bank in the market. And if they do tell you they’re interested in the engagement, they’ll tag in a junior team, because you’re not their priority. You get a process built for a $200M industrial company, not a founder-led trade business.
There’s also the fit. Investment banks are built to be industry-agnostic. They’re finance guys, first and last — transaction specialists focused on larger deals — which means they don’t really take the time to understand your industry or what makes your specific company valuable. You become one more deal in the pipeline, and at your size, you simply won’t get the attention and treatment you deserve.
So who do you actually need?
For a founder-led roofing, HVAC, plumbing, electrical, or construction business generating $1M–$10M in annual profit, you need someone who sits in a specific gap: too big and too sophisticated a deal for a traditional broker, smaller than an investment bank, and not compromised by working for the buyer.
That’s the seat I built Options2Exit to fill. A few things that make it a genuinely different model:
We’ve built and sold a business like yours. Not advised on paper — actually owned, operated, and exited a Top-100 roofing company. I know what it feels like to hand over the keys, because I’ve done it.
We work exclusively in your world. Roofing, HVAC, plumbing, electrical, commercial landscaping, construction, and other services. Not a generalist shop that handles restaurants on Monday and your business on Tuesday.
We run a real competitive process — outreach that commonly includes 100+ private equity firms — to create genuine buyer competition instead of a single take-it-or-leave-it offer. That competition is usually the single biggest driver of a better outcome.
We represent you. Only you. Not the buyer, not both sides, not whoever’s easiest to close.
$0 until close. No retainer. No discovery fee. No upfront cost of any kind. If we don’t get the results you want, you pay nothing. That’s not a marketing line — it’s the whole structure of how we get paid.
Before you respond to the next email
The next time someone reaches out about buying your company, ask one question before anything else: who do you work for?
Selling your business is likely the single largest financial event of your life. It deserves someone who’s actually sat where you’re sitting — not a broker praying for a buyer, not a buy-side rep working an angle, and not a bank that won’t return your call until you’re three times your current size.
If you want to talk through where your business stands and what your options actually look like, let’s start a conversation.
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