Not every boring business is worth buying.
In this episode of Jackquisitions, Jack Carr breaks down eight home service businesses he would never acquire, from pressure washing and window cleaning to handyman services, dryer vent cleaning, and even dog poop pickup. He explains why some businesses create great incomes for owner-operators but fail as scalable acquisitions, and the common characteristics that make him walk away.
If you're evaluating acquisition opportunities, this episode will help you avoid businesses with limited market size, low ticket values, weak operating leverage, and business models that depend too heavily on the owner. Great acquisitions need the fundamentals to scale tomorrow.
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In this episode, Jack covers:
• The eight home service businesses he would never buy
• Why owner-operator success doesn't always translate into a great acquisition
• The biggest red flags he looks for before buying a business
• How seasonality, low ticket sizes, and weak recurring revenue hurt valuations
• Which businesses work as add-on services but fail as standalone companies
• Why scalability—not just profitability—is the deciding factor in every acquisition
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There's a ton of boring businesses that I would love to own. I'm talking plumbing, HVAC, electrical, septic, roofing, pest control. But there's also a bunch of boring businesses that I would never touch with a 10-foot pole. These are not sexy, don't have real demand, they don't have large markets, don't have expensive tickets or high tickets, and there's almost never a clear path to scale. So not every boring business deserves to be bought. Some are just really jobs. They're just jobs hiding in like a business costume. They're pretending to be businesses. And they may produce a decent income for an owner operator. I'm never not going to claim that. And if that's what you want, skip to the next video. But they all have the same thing in common. There's a rough market size, maybe it's too small. The ticket sizes are not big enough. They are not repeatable businesses or repeatable income sources. They don't have operating leverage to become meaningful companies. So here are the top eight home service businesses that I would never buy. And I'm gonna go a step further and say never owned.
Number eight, pressure washing only, specifically residential. Pressure washing businesses became extremely popular because of this uh low startup cost. So they're very easy to start up. You can buy a machine, throw it in the back of your truck, run some Facebook ads, and voila. We'll do an LLC, also, of course, obviously. Uh, but you you have a pressure washing business and you're ready to go knock doors and start pressure washing people's driveways. That's why I wouldn't buy one. There's almost no barrier to entry. Every spring, a new group of people is going to come into the market with similar equipment and push your prices lower. And then the work's also discretionary and it's weather dependent and it's inconsistent. So it's a really hard business from a residential standpoint. Commercial can help, and that's where I'll deviate from like this is a boring business I would never own. Is if you can get commercial contracts, that's when it starts to look a little bit better. But for residential, it's all low-ticket size, non-reoccurring, very, very hard to scale with a heavy spend on marketing. The businesses can create decent income for a skilled owner who wants to sell and perform the work themselves, but I'm not gonna pay multiples on a company whose competitive advantage can be recreated from Home Depot over the weekend. It's just not gonna happen. Number seven, this one's gonna get me in trouble, but it's Christmas lights installation. The caveat here is again, this can be a great business for an owner operator. I'm not saying the Christmas lights business is terrible. I'm saying that I wouldn't buy one and I still would say I wouldn't own one for the same reason as I gave above. That the business is gonna obviously install, remove, store, and sometimes lease holiday lights, and it can produce extremely strong margins in a very short window. I know some operators making three, four, five hundred thousand dollars, a million dollars in a three-month period, but the seasonality is obviously brutal. It's three months of the year. You have a limited time to sell, limited time to install everything, and a limited time to fix everything if it fails. And then cash flow is all concentrated to a singular part of the year. There's a bunch of labor issues. Uh, there's insurance issues, which I think most I'm gonna go on a limb here and say most Christmas lights uh installation companies don't have, they don't have the correct insurance, and so they're rolling the dice every single season. But at the end of the day, like the real reason I don't want to own this business is not because it can't generate amazing cash flow for an owner operator, but because it doesn't scale. There's no 50 million dollar Christmas light installation companies anywhere in the nation, and that's just because it's not a scalable business.
Number six is there's a big trend. I've seen residential trash cleaning companies. That's usually a truck and it rolls up and it washes your garbage bin for you. It's a specialized truck, they do some pressure sanitation. I don't even want to get into this. It's it washes your garbage can. Like, let's be real. You have to buy a really expensive truck, then you have to buy a whole custom setup to wash garbage cans out. I don't think that this is a problem. And if it really is, like customers can wash their own garbage cans with a pressure washer. Like we're back up to the residential pressure washing company. It's just there's no scale. Most of the time, these are sold as like a franchise model. And so not only are you having high churn and low tickets and you know, easy to cancel service and no urgency, and it's like, oh, also you have to pay five percent royalties on top of that. So I'm just staying as far away from residential trash can cleaning businesses as possible. Number five, handyman companies. So, specifically under the guise of like, hey, I'm not buying these businesses. Again, handyman companies are great. There's been hundreds of handyman companies that have been successful for owner operators for years and years and years, but they're so difficult to scale just because the handyman, handyman, is usually a man who runs his own business and runs things on the side or runs it as a full-time job, doing odds and ends and tasks. But it depends on the person's judgment, skill, and flexibility. And it's usually a singular person. So when the owner leaves, much of the goodwill leaves with them. If it's Joe's handyman, when Joe leaves because you buy the company, like that's gone. And then when you try to scale, you hire somebody who's not Joe. So it's an extremely difficult business to scale over the long term. And then on top of that, you don't have specialists. So I've seen these companies uh when they're working for property maintenance companies or they're working, they're subbing out to like large um property management companies, they can do okay, right? They can do one, two, three million dollars in top line um working like really uh high volume amounts of jobs, but the difficulty that they've generally had is you can't keep specialists in every trade busy 24-7. So it becomes a really, really difficult capacity issue for a lot of the guys on your team. I'm not a huge fan of these businesses. I pass on on uh handyman businesses.
Number four, standalone gutter cleaning businesses. Models super straightforward, remove leaves from residential gutters once or twice a year. The problem is that it's seasonal again, or it's a low-ticket, high seasonality, weather-dependent, labor-intensive business that competitors can easily get into. I think that this is a great, great line, like a skew of product if you own a gutter business, like a gutter installation business, or if you are really a gutter cleaning business, but you're actually like a gutter guard sales business. So there's lots of companies out there that sell the gutter guards that go on top. So if that's what you really are great, like that business can scale, you can do amazing uh margins on those businesses. But if you don't have any other product line alongside gutter cleaning, I think that it's a poor business to be in. Number three is gonna be residential window cleaning. So this is the same as pressure washing. It got really popular a few years ago as like the entrepreneur entry level. Hey, I'm gonna send a crew out to a neighborhood to knock doors and we're gonna clean all your interior and exterior windows. Come out here, look at this, look at this, look at this, and and become really good at doors and door knocking and sales business. Again, tickets can be very low, seasonality depending on the market, high, high labor demand. Uh, quality control can be super difficult because, again, it's a seasonal business. You know, you're having to hire people to wash windows. Great if you are a window washer yourself. Maybe you add it on to a pressure washing business. Like some of these can all go together, which I found extremely interesting. But as a standalone window cleaning, especially residential window cleaning, just doesn't have the scale, it doesn't have the ticket size, it doesn't have the repeatability that I would want in a business that I would buy
or own. Number two, dryer vent cleaning. But for this case, I'm gonna talk about standalone dryer vent cleaning businesses. So I've seen them pop up, they're the same as like um patch companies that only do drywall patching. It's a legitimate service. It reduces the drive, dry time on your clothes, it improves efficiency on your blah blah blah, and it lowers your fire risk on the house. But I would never own a company that only does this. The model is the technician comes and visits the home once every few years, cleans it out, charges a relatively small ticket. I think we charge like $99 for our dryer vent cleaning. So your business is competing with my business that charges $99 for a dryer vent cleaning. We use it as a lead loss. Like we are losing money on dryer vent cleanings to pick up a house's HVAC. So that's what your competition is is people that are willing to take losses in their business to be able to run the SKU. So I think it's another one of those businesses where it's hey, this is a great line item for or skew for an HVAC company, but it's not a good standalone. Maybe if you're a uh dryer vent cleaning and duct cleaning business, maybe, and maybe it's the same thing there. It's like, hey, we'll do both. But as a dryer vent cleaning, it's just not enough. And then my number one is gonna be dog poop pickup. This one has a particular area of hate in my heart, not only because John Wilson, my partner on owned and operated, loves it, but because I think it's a terrible business. The model's simple, right? You customer pays you weekly to come and walk the yard and pick up dog poop. But the economics for me just aren't there. The average customer is not worth a lot. The routes are always spread out because, yes, on a pest control, every house has pest control, right? Every house has windows, even, every house has a garbage can, even, but not every house in a neighborhood has a dog, and so you're already working on compressed tan. You're working on a compressed amount of people that you can actually sell to. And then on top of it, like labor, good labor, right? It's hard to find people that want to uh like do non-labor intensive tasks already, or even labor-intensive tasks already. But now, like this person's picking up dog poop and they have to dress up and like it's just a hard thing to hire for, and you can't raise pricing on that because that's cutting into your low cost of like charging per customer for dog poop, like the the tickets just not enough to be able to hire a good labor. So I'm not buying a dog poop business where the growth plan is like, hey, I need to start this up in 50 cities and then hire 50 people to go around town and pick up dog poop for 20 bucks a week. Like the numbers, the economics just aren't there for me. I hate this business. And worst of all, is most of these dog poop businesses, 90% of them, they're all franchises. So on the back end, you're also paying a percentage to the franchise, which in some cases franchises can be great. Don't get me wrong, I'm not hating on franchises. I just don't think there's any margin to pay franchises to pick up poop. So there we
are. That is my top eight boring businesses that I would never buy and probably definitely never own. If you like what you heard, like, sub, subscribe. Talk about why I'm wrong. If you own one of these businesses, I'd love to hear it. And if you agree or you think that there's another business that should be in this list, post it below. Catch you guys next time.
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