The lower middle market, in motion — read here, act inside Claude.
Revenue $1–5M · SDE $500K–$1M · Majority sale
Residential and light-commercial HVAC company, 22 years operating, large recurring maintenance-contract base, tenured field team. Owner retiring; management willing to stay.
Listings on Oppsheet are anonymous — buyers see the opportunity, never the identity.
Every week we feature one anonymized listing (with the seller’s consent). Buyers on Oppsheet see only what matches their criteria — never the whole market.
The lower middle market has a quality the headline M&A market doesn’t: businesses that people need in every economy. HVAC, plumbing, electrical — recurring demand, fragmented ownership, and a generation of owners hitting retirement age with no succession plan. That’s why searchers and independent sponsors keep concentrating here while larger auctions stretch out. The constraint isn’t buyer appetite; it’s owners who never hear that a market for their business exists. That’s the gap Oppsheet exists to close.
→ Selling? Post anonymously in two minutesFirst-time sellers anchor on a multiple. Experienced buyers anchor on the structure that makes the multiple real: how much cash at close, what a seller note carries, whether an earnout has terms anyone can actually hit. Two offers “at the same multiple” can be hundreds of thousands of dollars apart in outcome. The practical takeaway for owners: compare structures, not headlines — and make buyers show their assumptions.
→ Members can pressure-test a structure inside ClaudeA maintenance-contract base, a route book, a managed-services agreement — anything a customer pays for on schedule — changes how a small business is bought. It shortens diligence, widens the buyer pool, and supports more leverage. Owners two or three years from selling can move their eventual outcome more by building contract revenue than by almost anything else.
→ Buyers: set your criteria and see what matchesAn earnout defers part of the price against future performance. Used well, it bridges a real disagreement about the future; used badly, it’s a discount wearing a disguise. Three questions expose which one you’re looking at: Is the metric something the seller can still influence after close? Is it measured the way the business already keeps its books? Is the ceiling worth the wait? If any answer is no, the earnout is doing something other than bridging.
Members can request deal-structuring expertise directly — inside Claude.In small-business M&A, the seller often finances part of their own exit — typically standing behind bank debt, paid over a few years at a stated rate. Buyers read a meaningful note as a confidence signal: the seller keeps skin in the outcome. Sellers should read the whole stack before agreeing: what’s senior to the note, what triggers deferral, and what happens to payments if the business stumbles in year one.
Members can request deal-structuring expertise directly — inside Claude.A QofE isn’t an audit. It asks a narrower, sharper question: are the earnings the seller claims the earnings a buyer would actually inherit? Add-backs get tested, one-time revenue gets stripped, owner expenses get normalized. For sellers, commissioning your own QofE before going to market turns diligence from an ambush into a checklist. For buyers, it’s the cheapest expensive-mistake insurance available.
When Oppsheet Connect launches, requesting a QofE provider takes one sentence.Quality of Earnings · Home Services · Midwest “Under LOI on a residential services business, $1–5M revenue. Seeking a QofE provider who works sub-$10M deals and can start within two weeks.”Requests on Oppsheet are anonymous — responders see the need, never the requester, until the requester chooses to connect.
Deal Structuring · First acquisition “Self-funded searcher with an accepted IOI. Want 30 minutes with someone who has personally structured an SBA deal with a seller note — what do I wish I knew?”
Oppsheet Connect — anonymous expertise requests, matched to members who’ve done it — is coming soon. Members are already opting in to be found.
Search funds, independent sponsors, and M&A advisory shops hire from passion and proof, not just pedigree. Oppsheet Talent — coming soon — will let candidates list an anonymized profile (school, skills, target market; never your name until you connect) and let firms filter for exactly who they need. If you’re already in Claude polishing your resume, you’re one sentence from being findable.
Building a team, or trying to break in? Oppsheet Talent is on the roadmap — the Talent Guide shows how it will work.
Everything on this page is read-only. The marketplace lives inside Claude.