Prepare Your Pool Service Business for a Premium Exit
Or to Increase Net Profit and Enjoy the Business More
Either Way - You Win!!!
Strategic Pre-Sale or Business Improvement Consulting for Pool Service Owners
The owners who get the best outcomes - highest prices, smoothest transactions, cleanest exits - are the ones who started preparing ahead of time. In the best cases 12 to 18 months before they ever talked to a buyer.
Most sellers wait until they're ready to sell. Waiting until "the day" doesn't give you any time to fix the things that would have made the biggest difference. We work with you before you list or as part of listing - so that when the time comes, you're in the strongest possible position.
The reality is, whether you sell or not, making your business run its best is your single biggest responsibility as an entrepreneur. Whether you sell you business or not, you benefit from the improved operations both in better net profit and a better quality life.
Why Preparation is Everything
A last-minute sale means going to market with the business as-is. Disorganized books, owner-dependent operations, below-market pricing, aging equipment - every one of those factors hands negotiating power to the buyer when the day comes to sell.
With 12 months of preparation, most of those issues are fixable and, best of all, make your life better along the way. The sellers who command top-of-market prices treat the sale like a project, not a crisis.
The 5 Things Buyers Scrutinize First
1. Financial Records: Buyers and SBA lenders need 2-3 years of clean, reconciled financials. Disorganized books, or no books at all, don't just slow the deal - they reduce your price or kill it entirely.
2. Revenue Consistency: Steady, growing revenue signals a healthy business. Dramatic swings raise red flags and invite low offers.
3. Owner Dependency: If the business can't run without you, buyers discount heavily. Systems, documentation, and a capable team dramatically increase your value.
4. Customer Quality: Long-tenured customers with written agreements are worth significantly more than informal handshake arrangements.
5. Equipment & Assets: Buyers calculate what they'll need to spend after closing and deduct it from their offer. Well-maintained equipment protects your price.
Your Unfair Advantage
While Bluewater Brokerage is headed by Bill Burch, his wife, Sharon, is the founder and owner of Pool Service QuickBooks and poolservicesystems.com. When they owned the pool service business, they divided duties by strength. Bill took on all active operations responsible for face-to-face staff and customer interactions as well as facility, vehicles, equipment, and physical inventory. Sharon, using the tools she'd learned through a lifetime of entrepreneurship, dove into all things administrative. Within 90 days, she'd transformed the business's legacy (paper/dry erase board/clipboard) systems into automated digital simplicity. That included website creation and management, a unified communications system with staff, customers, and our online presence. Most importantly, she became an expert at working with the nation's two largest pool service software/app companies to integrate their systems with QuickBooks online. Today, she's become the most respected and referred consultant and service provider of her kind by those very software companies with clients nationwide.
As the founder and recognized leader in the pool service financial management industry, she can help you:
- Organize and reconcile your books for buyer and lender review
- Document owner add-backs clearly and compliantly
- Present financials in the format that justifies premium pricing
- Identify and fix financial red flags before they become deal-killers
This expertise is included in our pre-sale consulting -- and it's one of the most valuable things you can do to increase your sale price.
Combine this with Bill's operational consulting strength and you could transform your business, generating more revenue, more net profit, reducing the time demands on you and increasing both your quality of life and your final asking price.
We offer an additional advantage. If you combine consulting with listing and selling your business, we'll credit half of your consulting investment toward the brokerage commission due Bluewater Brokerage at the time of the sale and, of course, only if we are your listing broker.
