Who you'll be talking to
Mark Dhamma, MA
I’m not a finance person who discovered the trades.
I’ve spent eighteen years working inside small businesses with the people who own them — sitting in the office on a Tuesday afternoon, going through the numbers, working out why the thing they built has ended up owning them instead of the other way round. Before that I studied organisational psychology at Claremont Graduate University, where my supervisor was Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. My master’s was in what makes people and organisations actually function.
That sounds like an odd background for someone buying HVAC companies. It’s the most useful thing I have.
Because the single biggest factor in what your business is worth has almost nothing to do with your revenue. It’s how much of the company runs through you personally.
A business that depends on its owner typically trades at two to three times earnings. One that runs without its owner trades at six to ten.
Same customers, same crew, same trucks — very different number. I’ve watched a lot of owners discover that gap far too late. That’s the thing I’m actually in business to fix.