If you run a good door dealership, your phone rings every week or two with someone asking whether you have any interest in talking about selling the business. Chris Jones, who leads our overhead door and loading dock practice and spent his career inside the industry, puts it plainly: the callers are relentless, there are a lot of them, and most of them work for a group that has already bought several dealers like yours. Here is what is going on, and what to do about it.
1. What is behind the calls
The consolidation that rolled through HVAC and plumbing is well under way in the overhead door trade and, by Chris's count, has been for five to seven years. The biggest dealers were acquired first. The platforms built around them have moved the bar down to smaller dealers, and they are either attaching those dealers to an existing platform or rolling them into new groups. New money is still arriving: Chris saw another platform at the trade show this year that did not exist the year before. None of this means you should sell. It does mean the calls are not going to stop.
2. The buyer's number is the buyer's number
The person calling you has a model, a target return and a list of dealers to call. The number they put in front of you is the number that works for them. It may be a good one. You have no way to know unless you have your own read on the business, built from the inside: what the earnings really are once the personal expenses and the real estate are handled honestly, what the service book is worth on its own, and what a buyer would find in diligence that you have not thought about since you started on the truck. Most owners in this industry take that question to their accountant. An accountant can tell you what you made. He cannot tell you what the business is worth to the three groups most likely to buy it, or what they will knock off the price once they see it.
3. Ready is a separate question from worth
Plenty of dealers are worth a great deal and are not ready to sell. The owner still sells, estimates and dispatches. The dealer agreement is in his name. The books carry the trucks the family drives and the shop the owner's own entity rents to the company at a friendly rate. A small dealer Chris knows nets a reasonable living on paper and breaks even once you charge fair-market rent for the building he owns. None of that is fatal. All of it changes the number, and all of it takes a year or more to fix. Finding that out from a buyer's diligence team, after you have agreed to a price, is the expensive way to learn it.
4. The call you should take is a different call
The right response to a buyer's call is not yes or no. It is to get an independent read first, from someone who knows the door business and has no interest in buying yours. That read tells you three things: roughly what the business is worth today, what it could be worth a year or two out if you fixed what a buyer would find, and whether the group calling you is one of the right three to talk to or one of the fifteen to ignore. Each platform wants a different profile of dealer, a different geography and a different mix of residential and commercial. Knowing which ones fit you is worth more than any single offer.
5. Watch the calendar
Door dealers head into their busiest months in October and November, when everyone wants the building closed up before the weather and the tax year end. It slows down over the holidays and drops to a fraction of peak in January through March. The buyers know this too. If you take the independent read now and sit with it, you walk into the slow season knowing where you stand instead of taking the next call cold.
The takeaway
The calls are a sign that your business has value to the people consolidating this industry. They are not a reason to sell, and the number in the first call is not your number. Get an independent read on worth and readiness from someone inside the industry, then decide which calls to take.
