First visit / Accountability · Searcher School:Buy a Business

Sep '25 • Daily Accountability Updates ⏰

First visit / Accountability

Did my first site visit yesterday. Flew in to meet the seller. One aged 64 the other 54. No sucession. Got a good feeling of the biz. We sat there for 3h after they showed me around trading experiences due to our similar background.

I think I have an idea of a valuation that could work but I'm super early on in my search process. Trying to get some DD quotes asap and Tier 2 in Portugal got me squat after 2 weeks of the first meeting with their partners. Can someone do a roll up on auditing firms? aha

Many doubts float on my head now. I keep pushing numbers into the LBO model since the company is a 26M revenue, 2M ebitda with 6.2M debt so the playbook would be to acquire with equity and do an earn out (I think the revenue can grow 6% but in the CIM they have 12% so I'm happy to share if there an upside).

Some questions come to mind:

Do you discount all the debt in the Offering? Half of their debt is short term and half long term;
How do you factor assets? In Europe its common to do stock purchase only. The assets are core to the operation (shopfloors, warehouses, etc) and I'm guessing they are already included in the EBITDA number.

On the personal side I'm going to have my firstborn in Feb so assuming this goes forth and all goes well how "intense" would it be to have a weeks old and starting a new job. Anyone passed this? Not worried about me delivering but I'm more worried if i have to stay out of our home for 4/5 days straight and how this would impact the home balance.

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First visit / Accountability