Northern California · Acquisition & Stewardship
We buy, build, and steward businesses worth keeping.
The buyer, not your broker. Most owners we talk to aren’t selling. Start with an honest read on what yours is worth.
Most established businesses are sitting on finance, technology, and succession decisions that quietly make one choice for them.
You built this over decades. Whether you ever sell is your call. But where you stand should not be a mystery that somebody else’s spreadsheet gets to answer.
You know the business cold. The numbers people quote about it are another matter.
Somebody quoted you a multiple; nobody told you what it multiplies. The people across the table do this every day. You do it once.
Between what you believe it is worth and what a buyer will defend sits a gap, and it usually favors whoever finds it first.
Owner pay buried in the earnings, a customer list more concentrated than you remembered, a handover nobody has put a price on. None of it is fatal, and all of it is knowable before anyone else turns it into a discount.
Know what it’s worth, how to grow it, how to make it worth keeping, and who should keep it.
Selling is one honest outcome of three. Growing without selling is served here as a first-class outcome, not a consolation.
The Read
A structured conversation with our principals, then a written read you keep. It covers where the value sits, where it leaks, and what we would do next in your shoes. Sometimes the read says don’t sell, and explains why.
Every buyer who sits across from you will say they care about your people and your legacy. The sentence is free.
Inventory
Bought to be improved and sold again, with the clock starting the day the ink dries. Legitimate, and often the higher bid, because it prices in changes a keeper will not make.
A home
Bought to be kept and run, with no resale in the plan and therefore no clock. The team, the name, and the standard carry forward.
Intent leaves fingerprints, and you can read them before you sign anything. We published the tests, and every one of them works on us as cleanly as on anyone else. Point them at us first →
Where we buy. Where we serve.
The trades businesses of Northern California
Field services, skilled trades, and specialty manufacturing: the businesses with a name on the building and neighbors on the payroll.
One platform. Four arms. Capital at the center.
Clients begin with one arm and expand. Every engagement is a potential acquisition. You should know that on day one, not discover it in month six.
Heritage Capital
The buyer who keeps. We acquire established businesses and hold them for the long term. No flip, no strip. Three honest outcomes, stated up front: we buy; a vetted partner broker runs your third-party sale, on their license and their commission, never ours; or you keep the business, stronger.
Heritage Advisory
Fee-for-service counsel, loyal to the owner. That includes advising you not to sell to us when that is the honest answer.
Heritage Studio
Research-led brand, web, and customer experience for owner-operated businesses.
Heritage Intelligence
Systems, data, and automation for the shop floor and the back office.
The people you’d be dealing with.
Experience across Visa · Meta · YouTube · BNP Paribas · Estée Lauder
Insights: the M&A Education Hub.
The whole truth about selling, keeping, and everything in between, written from the buyer’s side of the table. All of it works against us too.
How much is my business worth? SDE vs EBITDA, plainly.
The two figures under every valuation conversation, and why the letter matters more than the multiple.
Reading the buyerThe business is either inventory or a home.
You can tell which one a buyer thinks it is before you sign. The tests work on us too.
The deal itselfHow buyers take millions off the price after the LOI.
Explained by a buyer that refuses to run the play.