SECTOR FOCUS

The Best Service Businesses Don’t Need to Advertise. Their Customers Never Leave.

Industrial and B2B service businesses are fragmented, operationally intensive, and often undervalued by buyers who don’t understand what makes them sticky. We do. We look for businesses with repeat revenue from customers who don’t leave, strong regional presence, and operational complexity that keeps competitors out. This is one of the most durable sectors in the lower middle market when you know what you’re buying.

$2.5M–$12M Target EBITDA Range

60%+ Revenue Recurring or Contracted

Top-3 Local Position Required

15 Investments

WHY WE FOCUS HERE

Service businesses with the right economics are among the most defensible assets in the market.

01 Recur

A field service company with 500 active maintenance contracts has a fundamentally different revenue profile than a T&M business that re-bids every job. We specifically target businesses where repeat revenue is structurally built in: long-term service agreements, maintenance contracts, consumables replenishment, or relationships where the customer’s switching cost is high relative to the spend. That revenue quality changes everything about how you model and operate a business.

02 Dominate

In many industrial service categories, the market leader in a metro or regional area has advantages that scale players struggle to replicate: route density, technician relationships, local reputation built over decades, and institutional knowledge of the customer base. We don’t need businesses that are nationally recognized — we need businesses that are indispensable in their geography. That’s a more durable position than most buyers appreciate.

03 Operate

Your name, your technicians, and your customer relationships are why we’re interested — and they stay. We don’t absorb businesses into a national brand or rebrand your trucks. Field service logistics, technician deployment, and customer scheduling are genuinely hard to do well. We’re operators who understand that complexity from the inside.

What We Look For

Loyal customers. Repeat revenue. The service businesses we partner with.

We look for service businesses with loyal customer bases, structural repeat revenue, and strong local market positions. If the customers don’t leave — and there’s a real reason they don’t — we want to understand the business.

A 28-year customer relationship is not goodwill on a balance sheet. It is recurring revenue, institutional trust, and the single hardest thing for a competitor to replicate. That’s what we’re buying.

Recurring or Repeat Revenue

Maintenance contracts, service agreements, consumables replenishment, or documented customer re-order patterns. Structural stickiness, not one-off transactions. We look hard at the ratio of contract revenue to time-and-materials work.

Captive Customer Relationships

Customers who stay because switching is genuinely painful: installed equipment bases, trained technician familiarity, long-term pricing agreements, or compliance-driven service requirements. Low churn is the starting point — the reason for low churn is what we analyze.

Strong Local or Regional Market Position

Top-three share in a defined geography, with brand recognition among the customer base and referral-driven new business. Route density and local presence are competitive advantages that national players spend years and millions trying to replicate.

Essential Services with Non-Discretionary Demand

Industrial maintenance, safety-related services, environmental compliance, critical equipment support, commercial pest and wildlife management. Services customers cut last, not first.

EBITDA

$2.5M – $12M. Large enough to have a real management layer and an established customer base, small enough that focused operational attention creates meaningful margin improvement.

What We Bring

Operational depth and the tools to back it up.

We understand field service economics from the inside. With teams in Chicago and Boston, we’re close to the industrial Midwest and Northeast markets where most of these businesses operate — and we show up in person.

Operating Experience in Service Business Dynamics

Technician utilization, route density, parts margins, service contract pricing, and the real cost of customer churn. We come in knowing what good looks like — and we build toward it without disrupting the customer relationships that drive the business.

Systems That Make the Business Visible

Most service businesses at our target size run on a mix of spreadsheets, legacy software, and institutional knowledge. We’ve implemented field service management platforms, dispatch software, CRM systems, and financial reporting infrastructure in businesses like these. The right systems don’t just create efficiency — they make every customer relationship more visible and more retainable.

Tuck-In Acquisitions Where the Foundation Supports It

Industrial and B2B service markets are fragmented. Where a business has a strong core and a market that supports consolidation, we’re equipped to add geography, service lines, or customer bases. We do this carefully and only when the operational foundation can absorb it — bolt-ons that overwhelm the platform destroy more value than they create.

Two professionals reviewing a certificate of analysis on the shop floor

The Customer Relationship Is Everything

The hardest asset to build is the first one we protect.

In every service business we evaluate, the customer base is the most valuable and most fragile asset. Relationships built over decades can erode in months under the wrong ownership — new management that doesn’t understand the account, technician turnover, broken service commitments. We structure every acquisition to keep the people and the practices that earned those relationships in the first place.

Own an industrial or B2B service business you’ve spent years building?

We’re actively looking for service businesses with loyal customer bases, repeat revenue, and strong local positions. Whether you’re ready to move this year or thinking three years out — we’re worth talking to early. We move at the pace that’s right for you.