B2B services
Commercial and industrial services with recurring work and established accounts.
Our Search
What we are looking for.
Wildhorse Partners is searching for one established business to acquire, and works with investment partners on a transaction-by-transaction basis.
This page sets out the search in plain terms: the businesses in focus, indicative size, what we look for operationally, and how a partner would participate in a specific transaction.
In focus
Durable, physical-world businesses.
We are interested in companies where demand is repeat or recurring and the work is difficult to displace — not project-to-project, and not dependent on a single contract.
Commercial operations
Businesses with physical operations, equipment, and a defined service area.
Rentals
Equipment and asset rental businesses with repeat customers and utilisation-driven revenue.
Distribution
Specialty and regional distribution with entrenched supplier and customer relationships.
Geography: the search is nationwide. We are not limited to a particular state or region, and business characteristics matter more to us than location. Wildhorse is based in St. Louis, Missouri.
Indicative deal size
Where the search sits.
- Enterprise value
- $2M – $6M
- Normalized annual operating earnings
- $500K – $1M+
These are indicative rather than fixed. They describe the range the current search is built around, and a business outside them can still warrant a conversation where the fit is strong.
Management
A business that runs without the owner in every decision.
- Experienced people already in place, with real responsibility below the owner.
- A second layer capable of continuing through a transition, or a defined role the founder is willing to hold for a period.
- Operations documented well enough that knowledge is not held by one person.
- A culture worth keeping. We would rather support an existing team than rebuild one.
Customer relationships
Revenue that returns without being re-won each year.
- Repeat or recurring demand rather than one-off projects.
- Reasonable diversification, without a single customer carrying the business.
- Long-standing accounts, contracts, or route density that would be costly for a competitor to replace.
- Pricing that reflects the value of the service rather than the lowest bid.
Start a conversation
Interested in seeing what we are working on?
If you invest in lower middle-market acquisitions and want to understand the search in more detail, we are glad to have a direct conversation about how a specific transaction would work.
Discuss a partnership