Investment criteria
We are specific about what we invest in
A tight screen saves you time. It means we will not spend three months on a process that was never going to end in a deal.
Category
Home and residential services. Commercial services where the operator profile is the same. We stay where our experience is real.
Size
$300K to $3M of EBITDA. Big enough that the model is proven and the unit economics are real. Small enough that the franchisor function is the constraint, which is where we add the most.
Units
Roughly 15 to 150 franchised locations. Enough operating history to know the model works, early enough that development is still the constraint.
Unit economics
Proven, and provable. An average carried by five outliers is not a system, it is five good operators.
Available whitespace
Unsold territory in markets worth developing. A brand with weak development and no territory left to develop is a resale story on a different timeline, not a development story. This is the gate most investors skip.
Royalty structure
We read the fee structure before we read the pitch. Percentage royalties, flat fees and per-job fees behave completely differently as a system scales, and they change what growth is even worth.
The founder
A founder who wants to roll meaningful equity and stay, or one who wants to step out cleanly. Both work. Halfway does not.
The franchisee-health screen
Before anything else, we look at the system from the franchisee's side. If the units are not healthy, no development engine will fix the brand — it will only bring more people into a problem.
Performance dispersion
Median against mean AUV, and how much of systemwide sales sits in the top decile. A wide gap tells us performance is concentrated, not systemic.
Closures, transfers and survival
Closure and transfer rates read by cohort, not in aggregate. How many units from a given opening year are still open five years later is the honest number.
Disputes
No material pattern of franchisor–franchisee litigation in the FDD. Occasional disputes happen in every system; a pattern is a finding.
Where the dysfunction sits
We will invest in a brand with a leadership problem. We will not invest in one with a product problem or a unit-economics problem. Those are different problems.
What we are not
We are not a broker. We are not a lender. We do not invest in individual franchisees or run territories ourselves, and we are not looking for a brand we can strip down to its royalty stream and hold flat.
What we are is business builders. We buy on the foundation a founder has already laid — the brand, the unit economics, the operators who made it work — and we grow from there. We are operator partners, not just capital partners.
We work with founders directly and alongside bankers, attorneys and advisors, and we are comfortable inside a process or outside one. What we bring to either is a direct conversation with people who have built what you built.