Alan_Beshore

As someone who has been actively pursuing the buy side of these transactions, I can tell anyone, and everyone, the single most overlooked aspect of the sell side is properly documented financial statements. It is truly amazing how many shops I have investigated that don't keep proper books. As a buyer, its actually really disappointing. I wonder if some of the sellers I've looked at can even count past two digits, meanwhile they think their business is worth seven figures. Stupid. Btw, I'm looking in Harris county Texas.

Since I am actively searching for auto shops for sale, I can tell you that is a fair way to value things, provided you have proper accounting to support the profitability claims. I don't mean audited financials; just proper bookkeeping.

First, I realize this is an old thread, but in your hypothetical situation you would want an indemnification agreement. A liability waiver is something different, and like you said, wouldn't help.

Had this job been assigned to a tech, how would you want that person to have handled it ? Obviously it would be impossible for the tech to catalogue each and every problem before he estimated what it would take to get the top functioning properly.

I'm of the opinion that fully autonomous will never happen. We presently.have air planes that can fly on auto pilot but there's still a flight crew. I just don't see it.

It seems like between 10-20% profit margin is a reasonable expectation. Low interest rates have helped things overall, in my opinion. There seems to be a lot of opportunity. Its possible that its just an illusion. It seems like almost no one keeps genuinely accurate books, and no one has audited financials. So they can never support the asking price with actual data.

The assumption would be that they run at respectable margins. In that case then more shops would be better. It seems like the exit strategy would be to sell the operations at some point, or maybe just cease operations and sell the assets and real estate if any. I think growth by acquisition is a viable idea because there seems to be a lot of value in some of the businesses I have investigated for sale. Some are a lot of blue sky combined with junk in the garage, but others seem to be genuinely worth the asking prices.

Thanks for the response. I have been wondering about the prospects for growth for quite a lot of time now. I am thinking most people that come up in this business tend to fixate on the actual act of repairing cars, instead of focusing on the financial metrics and the system as a whole. I'm guessing about that though, and since I haven't actually done it, I cant say for certain.

Hello, new member here. So i am giving the idea of buying, or starting, an auto shop very serious consideration. One question I would like to get some input on is how easy it is to grow by acquisition. Has anyone in the room actually bought or sold an actual operating business ? Is anyone attempting to borrow to buy out other operating shops ? Assuming you have solid 12 months trailing P&L statements, how difficult is it to acquire financing ? Does anyone here presently operate more than one location ? Is it a silly idea to think you could grow from one location with say four employees, to four locations with 16, in say 3 years ?? Does that sound like total fantasy, or not likely, or reasonable, or easy ?