Read the asset list on this Maine business slowly, and count how many different businesses are hiding inside it:

That's three unrelated businesses and a real-estate play, bundled into one $3.5M price tag on one blended multiple. And that bundling may be quietly costing the seller a fortune, because some businesses are worth more in pieces than as a whole. Here's why, and how to know if it applies to you.

The Listing

Lesson 1: Different asset types have different buyers and wildly different multiples.

Here's what most owners never think about: the type of asset determines both who buys it and what multiple it commands. Watch what happens when you separate this bundle:

Now look at the deal: all three are bundled under one blended ~4.7x SDE. Which means the highest-value component, the self-storage is almost certainly being mispriced, valued like a septic route when it should be valued like real estate.

Your move: recognize that different parts of your business may live in different valuation worlds. A recurring, real-estate-like income stream (storage, rentals, leases) is worth far more per dollar of profit than a labor-driven service stream. Lumping them together under one multiple hides that and usually hides it in the buyer's favor, not yours.

Lesson 2: The bundle shrinks your buyer pool and can lower your price.

When you force a single buyer to want a septic company and a gravel pit and self-storage units, you've eliminated almost everyone. The waste operator doesn't want storage units to manage. The storage investor doesn't want a fleet of pump trucks. Very few buyers on earth want all three.

So bundling does two damaging things at once: it shrinks your buyer pool (fewer buyers means less competition means a lower price), and it denies each piece access to the specialized buyer who would pay the most for it. The sum of the parts, sold to the right buyers, very often beats the price of the bundle sold to a generalist.

Your move: if you've accumulated unrelated assets over the years, genuinely consider whether selling them separately, each to its natural buyer, at that asset's proper multiple — would net you more than selling one complicated bundle to whoever will take the whole thing.

Lesson 3: But separating isn't always clean, watch the entanglements.

Here's the catch that makes this hard. These pieces are tangled together. The gravel pit and the self-storage units both sit on the 30 acres of land which is being offered separately. So how does a buyer purchase the storage business without the land it's literally built on? They can't, not easily. And the husband-and-wife owners run everything jointly, she handles office and dispatch, he runs the field, across all the divisions at once.

Untangling businesses that share land, staff, equipment, and overhead is real work. And if you wait until you're already selling, it's too late to do it cleanly, you'll be forced to sell the whole knot to whoever will take it.

Your move: if there's any chance you'd sell pieces separately someday, build them to be separable from the start, separate the real estate into its own entity, keep separate books per division, don't fully commingle staff and equipment. Entanglement is what destroys the sum-of-the-parts premium. Separability is what preserves it.

Lesson 4: The genuine strengths and the two-owner reality.

Credit where due: 23 years in business, a 5-star/A+ reputation, and genuinely recurring demand (septic tanks must be pumped on a cycle; storage is billed monthly). That durability is real.

But note the ownership: the SDE reflects both a husband and a wife working full-time, dispatch and office on one side, field operations and customer service on the other, and both plan to stay on as employees. As we've covered before, that means a buyer replacing them faces two salaries, and the genuinely owner-independent earnings are lower than the headline $750K suggests.

Your move: if two of you run the business, remember a buyer prices what it costs to replace both of you, not one.

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Claim my spot

The through-line.

This owner did what many successful operators do over two decades: they accumulated. A service business, then a gravel pit, then storage units, then land. Each made sense on its own day.

But at sale time, an accumulated pile of unrelated assets often sells for less as a bundle than it would in pieces because each piece has a different natural buyer willing to pay a different, sometimes far higher, multiple. So take honest inventory of what you've actually built. If you're holding assets from different worlds, a service business and real estate and a storage or rental stream, you may be sitting on a sum-of-the-parts opportunity worth well more than any single blended number.

But you can only capture it if the pieces come apart. Untangle them early — or be forced to sell the whole knot at the lowest common multiple.

To your future exit,

Andrew
Unlock Your Exit