Sell-side brokerage
Sell-side representation for trades and field-service companies.
Built for businesses with trucks, crews, equipment and licenses.
Electrical·HVAC·Fire & Life Safety·Security & Low Voltage·Fleet & Equipment Service·Industrial Services
Call Ray directly
It’s my cell. You’ll get me, not a screener. No pitch, no obligation, and nobody else hears about it.
Owner-operator experience
A decade of business brokerage experience alongside acquiring, operating and selling privately held companies.
Sell-side focus
We represent business owners through the sale process from preparation through closing.
Trades & field services
Focused on established businesses built around crews, equipment and field operations.
Buyer outreach
Strategic acquirers, private equity, family offices, search funds and qualified individual buyers.
Businesses built on trucks, crews and licenses.
We represent established trades and field-service companies with enterprise values from approximately $1 million to $20 million, with a core focus on the trades.
How an engagement is run
Your engagement is led by a senior broker from the first conversation through closing. That broker owns the strategy, the judgment calls, the buyer conversations, the negotiation and the leadership of the transaction, and remains accountable throughout.
Behind them, BuiltEquity handles the work that keeps a transaction moving: financial preparation, marketing materials, buyer qualification and management, diligence coordination, workflow, and transaction administration.
You also get a secure seller portal where you can review materials, track buyer activity, manage approvals, access diligence documents, and see where the transaction stands.
If we believe specific changes over the next six to eighteen months are likely to materially improve your outcome, we will tell you. If the company is not ready for market, we would rather say so than take the listing.
What drives value
For many privately held companies, financeable earnings put a hard reality check on value. What lenders will support often sets an important boundary around what buyers can pay and how a transaction can be structured.
So we evaluate the whole picture: normalized earnings, buyer appetite in your category, the deal structures available to you, lender support, and the strategic value your company carries for a particular acquirer. Those five pull in different directions, and the distance between the first and the last is often the entire negotiation.
The engagement
Valuation
Financials restated the way a buyer and a lender will read them: owner compensation normalized, one-time costs removed, every adjustment documented with the reason it qualifies. You get a defensible range and the analysis behind it.
Preparation
The information a buyer needs, assembled before it is asked for. Service agreements, job costing, technician tenure, fleet and equipment schedules, license and bonding continuity — and the questions diligence reliably raises, answered in advance.
Go to market
A targeted approach to buyers who already understand the work, under confidentiality, in a sequence you approve. We do not rely on public advertising to find the right buyer, and no buyer learns your name before signing.
Negotiation
Price is one term. Cash at closing, seller financing, working capital, which liabilities transfer, your transition period and what happens to your people routinely decide more than price does. Offers are compared side by side on the full structure.
Close
Diligence, lender conditions, license and bonding transfers, the working capital adjustment and the closing statement — coordinated with your attorney and your CPA until the funds move.
Who buys these companies
The buyer who pays the most for your company is usually the one who needs it most, and that buyer is identified and approached rather than attracted. Part of the work is knowing which type fits your goals, and what each will want from you after closing.
Operators growing by acquisition — buying capacity, technicians, licenses, equipment and a service base in markets they want. They understand the work, and they can move when the fit is clear.
Active in these categories both as new platform investments and as additions to companies already held. The structures differ widely, and so does what each one asks of you after closing.
Patient capital, often a single acquisition held for a long time, usually asking the owner to stay through a transition. Frequently overlooked, and frequently the right answer.
Where the fit is genuine and the financing is real. These deals turn on lender approval and on who can hold the license the business operates under.
Industries
Three groups of businesses that share the same buyers, the same diligence questions and the same operating realities.
Electrical, HVAC, plumbing, fire and life safety, security, low voltage, controls.
Equipment service, fleet service, specialty maintenance, testing and inspection.
Pest control, specialty cleaning, environmental and recurring route-based services.
Confidentiality
In these industries the same suppliers, customers and technicians know each other. Confidentiality is a set of procedures, not a promise.
Before you send anything, we sign a confidentiality agreement to you. Your information is protected before the first document moves.
Only the personal phone and email you nominate. Never the office line, never a general mailbox somebody else opens.
Interest begins with a profile that identifies nothing. A signed agreement comes before your name, and what follows is released in stages you approve.
Some of the best buyers for your company are people you compete with. Every buyer is named to you before anything leaves our hands, and you can strike any of them for any reason.
Behind the engagement
Every BuiltEquity transaction runs through one operating system and one continuous deal record — from financial preparation and buyer approvals through offers, diligence and closing.
Your broker sees the full transaction in one place. Through your secure seller portal, you can review materials, approve buyers, track activity, access diligence documents, and see exactly where the deal stands.
One record. Start to close.
The platform keeps the transaction organized and moving so your broker can stay focused on strategy, buyer conversations and negotiation — the work that ultimately gets the deal closed.
The firm
Every BuiltEquity engagement is led by a senior broker. Founder Ray Myers personally leads select engagements and remains directly involved in how the firm prepares, markets and manages transactions.
Ray has spent more than a decade around business sales while also acquiring, operating and ultimately selling privately held companies of his own. That combination matters: he has advised owners through transactions, but he has also sat on the owner’s side of the table with employees, capital and years of work at stake.
That owner-operator perspective is the foundation this firm was built on.
Ray Myers · Founder, BuiltEquity
Insights
Written to be useful whether or not you ever call. If you read one and do nothing else, you should still come away with something you can check in your own numbers.
Normalized earnings, customer mix, recurring revenue and owner dependence — and how each one changes the figure a buyer can support.
A licensed business adds a question most sales do not have. Four ways it gets solved, and why it has to be raised early.
Any business billing work in stages carries estimates in its earnings. Here is the test a buyer runs on them.
Free, confidential, and it commits you to nothing. Twenty minutes on where the company is, what it might be worth, and what your options look like. Bring your CPA if you like.
Call Ray directly
It’s my cell. You’ll get me, not a screener. No pitch, no obligation, and nobody else hears about it.
