Questions We Get Asked

Straight answers to the questions owners ask

No. Nothing leaves this conversation without your say-so. We sign a mutual NDA before you send us anything specific, we don’t contact your employees, customers, or suppliers, and we don’t visit your shop during working hours unless you want us to. Most first conversations happen by phone or at a restaurant, and that’s fine with us. If you decide not to move forward, nobody knows we talked.

In a few minutes, you tell us what you’re thinking about, roughly what the shop does in revenue, and how many people and machines you have. We tell you whether we’re a realistic buyer for your shop. No financials, no tax returns, no commitment. If it’s not a fit, we’ll say so on that call. It costs you nothing.

Nothing. We’re the buyer, not a broker. There is no fee, no commission, and no listing agreement. We are not going to market your shop or bring you offers from other people. If a deal happens, money moves from us to you.

Diligence is on us as well. The work we do to evaluate the business is our expense, not yours.

Later on, once things get serious, you will want your own attorney and accountant looking at the deal, and you should. We would rather you have good people on your side of the table. But that is well down the road, and the conversations before that point cost you nothing but time.

This is the right time to start the conversation. Owners who start the conversation before they have to almost always get a better outcome than owners who wait until something forces the decision.

Knowing where you stand costs you nothing and puts you in a stronger position whenever you do decide to move.

We’ll follow your timeline, not ours. We’re not going to call you every quarter asking if you’re ready yet.

United Manufacturing is a new company. That’s the honest answer, and it would come out anyway.

The people behind it are not new to this. Our founder bought, grew 15x, and sold a company before starting United Manufacturing. Our board includes a chairman with an extensive background in mergers and acquisitions, two corporate attorneys, a CPA who handles tax and audit work, and a career manufacturing operations executive. Every deal is reviewed by all of them.

What that means for a seller is straightforward. We are not learning the transaction at your expense, and we are not the first-time buyer who ties up your business for four months and then disappears during diligence.

Most shops this size are valued as a multiple of adjusted earnings. The starting point is what the business actually earned, which is rarely what the tax return shows. Owner compensation, personal expenses, and one-time costs get added back to get there.

The multiple depends on customer concentration, equipment condition, how much of the business depends on the owner personally, and whether margins have held steady. Two shops with identical revenue can be worth very different amounts for those reasons.

What matters more is how the number gets presented. We show our work. You get the earnings we calculated, the adjustments we made, the multiple we applied, and why. If something in the shop would move the number, we tell you what it is rather than quietly pricing it in.

Two commitments. We do not open low expecting to negotiate up. And we do not revisit a price after diligence unless we find something materially different from what was represented.

Nobody’s books are perfect at this size. Personal expenses run through the company, categories drift over the years, the return is on a cash basis, and the P&L is not, inventory has not been counted properly since the last time a bank asked. This is normal. We expect it, and reconstructing earnings from imperfect records is a routine part of what we do.

The distinction that matters is between messy and misrepresented. Messy is a bookkeeping problem, and it gets solved with a few questions. Misrepresented is revenue that never happened or expenses that are not what they appear to be, and that is a different conversation. We are looking for the shape of the business, not for reasons to reprice it.

Practically, this means you do not need to clean anything up before talking to us. Owners sometimes spend six months and thousands of dollars with their accountant getting things presentable before making a call. That work is usually wasted. Send us what you have, and we will tell you what is missing.

Then you stay. This is more common than most owners expect, and it is often the better outcome for both sides.

What it looks like is defined before closing, not figured out afterward. The role, the hours, the pay, and what you are responsible for all get written down while we are still negotiating. Some owners stay full time for a year and hand off gradually. Some drop everything except the part of the job they still enjoy, whether that is programming, quoting, or the handful of customer relationships they built. Some stay on as an advisor and come in when there is a reason to.

On reporting, you would work with the executive team and the board rather than being managed day to day. The relationship we want with a seller who stays is closer to a partner than an employee. You spent years being the final word in that building, and we are not interested in putting someone over your shoulder.

The one thing worth saying plainly: this works when the role is specific. Vague arrangements where the former owner is still around but nobody knows what he decides are how these go wrong. Define it upfront and it tends to work well for everyone.

Your crew comes with the business. We are not buying a shop to run it with fewer people. Pay and seniority carry over, and coverage will be the same or comparable with no gap.

That is not sentiment. A shop this size runs on what the people in it know. Who can hold a tolerance on a difficult part, who can look at a print and tell you what the quote should be, which customer will accept an early ship. None of that is written down, and none of it transfers with the equipment. Removing people would destroy what we paid for.

If you want us there when you tell your crew, on your timeline, we will be.

The shop stays where it is. We are not buying a machine shop to move the equipment elsewhere, and we are not buying one to shut it down and absorb its customer list. Both of those destroy the business we paid for.

Location is part of what makes a shop work. The customers are nearby, the people live nearby, and the reputation is local. Moving any of that would cost more than it saved.

Long-term, we are building a group of shops. If shared capability ever makes sense across locations, that is a decision made with the people running them and for good operating reasons, not a plan we arrive with.

Your personal guarantees get addressed as part of the transaction. This is standard in any sale, and it is something we work through with you rather than something you handle on your own.

Worth knowing: a sale does not automatically remove a guarantee. The obligation sits between you and the lender or lessor, so their agreement is what releases it. We identify the guarantees early, and depending on the lender, either we assume them or the underlying obligation is retired at closing. Either path can work. It just affects how the deal is put together, which is why we look at it up front.

By the time you sign, you should know exactly which obligations are being released and how. This is not something we leave to the end.

It depends on the structure of the deal and how complex the business is. Some move quickly. Others take longer, and that is normal.

Once both sides are moving, plan on four to eight months from first conversation to closing. The early stretch is conversation, an NDA, and enough financials to put together a real offer. After a letter of intent is signed, diligence and legal work generally run ninety days or more.

Seller-financed deals tend to move faster than bank deals since there is no lender committee setting the pace. Most of the calendar goes to legal work, equipment and title review, and getting the transition details right.

The pace is usually set by how quickly information comes together on both sides. We stay on top of our end of it.

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