Is Buying an Online Moving Company Going to Move You into Wealth?
In this series, CapForge’s owner and founder gives us a little behind-the-scenes on what a good or bad business would be. CapForge helps tons of clients either buy or sell business and Matt was a business broker before starting CapForge. Let’s look at some of these businesses up for sale and see if Matt would be interested in buying them.
Video Transcript:
This episode of would I buy this business, we’re looking at a national online platform for moving and home services. So it sounds like a place where you connect with people to move your house if you’re thinking about a move, basically an online referral service. Let’s read the description and see if I’m on track here. Over forty-two thousand contractors signed up in the hundred and thirty-one largest metro areas, servicing forty-nine states. Worker database has been scaled to be able to accommodate 30 times the current customer volume. Company gets organic traffic and word of mouth and they advertise on Craigslist, that’s their marketing strategy. And yeah the usual “we don’t have the time or energy to know how to grow the business. It’s an amazing business but we don’t want it anymore. Someone else can pay us for it.” Okay so zero employees based in LA, relocatable.
Let’s see what are they saying where their metrics. So gross revenue they’re saying is 1.9 million, EBITDA is 750k, so about 45%, and they’re asking 3.2 for it. Okay, so good margin generally. I don’t know though how much of a market share they have, and what the competition is like, and whether or not this business is – got a lot of upward mobility and they really just haven’t done a good job of marketing. Or if this is already a crowded space and they’re actually declining. I would say just collecting a database of movers in itself is not much of a business. So really there’s gotta be a reason that you know people are finding this and using it and it makes sense. And then if they’re doing a little bit of it can you do a lot more of it?
I would definitely check this business out. I love high-profit businesses. It’s not recurring so that’s not as good as it could be, cause once people move they probably aren’t moving again anytime soon. But if the margins are good and the growth opportunity is there the price isn’t. Well it’s high, it’s like five times almost four times four and a half times, so on the high side for sure. But depending on the potential it might be worth it certainly. I would investigate this one further. I’m a fan of online businesses with, you know if you don’t need any employees and there’s opportunity to grow it, and it has good margins those are all positive things.
I’m just noticing now they established it in 2020 when a lot of people were moving because of Covid. That may also have something to do with their success and growth and if that slowed down and their on declining trend. That may also explain why they’re now looking to sell it. So definitely something to think about as well. Overall I would say this one has potential but definitely wanna dig in more before I get too excited about it.
