D'SOUZA GROUP
D'SOUZA GROUP
We help founders of $2M–$10M B2B service companies prepare for a premium exit in 90 days — starting with an immersive strategic retreat to clarify your life's next chapter.
★ Strictly limited to one founder per month · Applications personally reviewed by Paul D'Souza
You started with a truck, a phone, or a single crew. Twenty years later you run a company that does real work for real clients, employs people who have mortgages, and throws off genuine profit. By any honest measure, you won.
And yet: your house, your retirement, your children's future — the overwhelming majority of your family's net worth — is a single illiquid position in a company that leans entirely on you. You are the highest-paid dispatcher, collections department, and head of sales in your own business. The phone still rings on Saturday. It rings for you.
And that is exactly what caps your price. Buyers will not pay top dollar for a business that falls apart when the owner leaves. They will pay for predictable cash flow that survives your absence — and they will discount everything else, aggressively, because they are the ones who inherit the risk.
You don't have a business problem. You have a liquidity problem wearing a business costume.
Why the best operators get the worst offers.
If you leave, it stops. Every key relationship, price exception, and hiring decision routes through you. That isn't a company — it's a job with payroll attached.
Buyers discount founder dependency, hard. Nobody pays a premium multiple for a business whose single point of failure walks out at closing.
Messy books become leverage — theirs. Commingled expenses, cash-basis records, and no clean add-back schedule hand every negotiating advantage to the buyer's diligence team.
So you wait another year. And another. The trap isn't that you can't sell. It's that you can only sell badly.
Every Buyer Asks One Question
“What happens to this company on the first Monday after the founder is gone?”
Your valuation is not decided by your revenue, your trucks, or your reputation. It is decided by the buyer's confidence in the answer to that one question. The next 90 days exist to make the answer boring — documented, provable, and completely independent of you.
This is not consulting. You do not receive a slide deck and a follow-up call. It is a physical extraction followed by an operational rebuild and a disciplined M&A packaging process — three phases, one month each, in the only order that actually works.
Ninety days is not a longer version of a thirty-day sprint. It is the minimum honest runway to do the one thing that moves your multiple: prove the business runs without you. You cannot document a system in week three and call it proven. A buyer wants a full quarter of clean financials and a leadership team that has actually operated in your absence.
Month One · Days 1–30
Begins with an exclusive 2-to-3-day strategic retreat at Casa D'Souza.
You cannot make the largest financial decision of your life between service calls. We start by taking you out of the building entirely — no dispatch, no crews, no inbox — and we answer the questions you have been too busy to face: what the business is truly worth, what your family needs it to pay you, and who you become the day after it sells. Then, with that defined, we turn a cold light on the company itself.
The Casa D'Souza retreat. Two to three days, one founder, zero interruptions.
Post-exit identity defined. Who you are, and what you do, once the company is no longer the answer.
Ruthless financial audit. Normalized statements, add-back schedule, true adjusted EBITDA, revenue quality by customer and contract.
Ruthless operational audit. Every decision, relationship, and approval that currently requires you, mapped and named.
Wealth extraction target. The number your family must net, worked backward into deal structure.
The 90-day battle plan. Scoped, sequenced, and starting the week you get home.
Month Two · Days 31–60
We install the systems that replace you in the day-to-day.
This is the month that changes your valuation. Every task the audit found sitting on your desk gets a named owner, a written process, and a number they are accountable to. We build recurring revenue moats so the cash flow a buyer is underwriting is contracted rather than hoped for. And we clean the books to a standard that survives a professional acquirer's diligence team without a single uncomfortable question.
Operating system installed. Dispatch, quoting, collections, and hiring run on documented process, not your memory.
Leadership layer stood up. Named owners, clear authority, a weekly scoreboard, and decisions that stop at their desk.
Relationship transfer. Your top accounts are introduced, warmed, and held by someone whose last name isn't yours.
Recurring revenue moats. Service agreements, maintenance contracts, and renewal mechanics that convert one-off work into predictable cash flow.
Books rebuilt for scrutiny. Personal expenses separated, accruals corrected, margin provable by job and by line.
The absence test. You step back for real, on purpose, while there is still time to fix what breaks.
Month Three · Days 61–90
We turn a good company into a package a serious acquirer competes for.
By now the business is genuinely different, and it can be priced that way. We finalize the enterprise valuation on the strength of two months of clean, founder-independent performance, assemble the data room the way acquirers expect to receive it, and set the go-to-market strategy: who to approach, in what order, with what story, at what number. You finish the ninety days holding a decision, not a wish.
Enterprise valuation finalized. Defensible, documented, and supported by comparable transaction multiples in your trade.
Buyer-ready data room. Financials, contracts, licenses, insurance, org chart, equipment, and customer detail — indexed and complete.
Buyer universe mapped. Strategics, private equity platforms, roll-ups, and internal succession, ranked by fit and by price.
Positioning narrative. The story of why this company is worth a premium, written to withstand a skeptical buyer.
Go-to-market sequence. Outreach order, timing, and the leverage that comes from running a process rather than taking a call.
Diligence rehearsal. We ask you the hard questions first, so the buyer's team is never the first to.
No apps, no pre-revenue stories, no whiteboard valuations. Real companies with trucks, crews, inventory, and invoices, doing $2M to $10M in revenue — the kind private equity and strategic acquirers are quietly paying record multiples for right now.
HVAC
Residential & commercial
Commercial Plumbing
Service & new construction
Landscaping
Commercial grounds & maintenance
Supply Chain
Distribution & logistics
Manufacturing
Contract & specialty production
You do $2M to $10M in annual revenue and you are genuinely profitable — not breaking even on volume.
The business is heavily founder-dependent, and you know it. You are the bottleneck and the safety net.
You own enough of it to make the decision yourself, or with one partner in the room.
You are somewhere between tired and finished — and you want your family's wealth out of this company within 12 to 36 months.
You will give this ninety focused days, starting with two to three away from the business entirely.
You are looking for a broker to list the company as-is and hope for the best.
You want a valuation opinion to file in a drawer. This engagement changes the business, which means it changes how you work.
You are unwilling to let anyone see the real numbers, including the ones you are not proud of.
You have no intention of ever letting go. That is a legitimate choice — it is simply not this program.
Tangible assets in your hands at day 90 — not a relationship that bills you forever.
A defensible valuation with normalized financials, true adjusted EBITDA, add-back schedule, and comparable transaction multiples in your trade — so you walk into negotiations knowing your number and how to defend it.
Books reconciled to withstand diligence, personal expenses separated, margin provable by job and by line, and a full quarter of clean financials a buyer can actually underwrite.
Documented process, named owners, and a leadership layer that has genuinely run the company without you — the direct answer to the only question a buyer truly cares about.
Service agreements, maintenance contracts, and renewal mechanics that convert one-off jobs into contracted, predictable cash flow — the single fastest way to move a multiple.
A single indexed repository of financials, contracts, licenses, insurance, org chart, equipment, and customer detail — built the way acquirers and their diligence teams expect to receive it.
Your buyer universe mapped — strategics, private equity platforms, roll-ups, and internal succession — with the positioning narrative, target multiple, outreach sequence, and the order to run it in.
Drafted at the retreat · Finished at day 90
What your family needs to net, how deal structure gets you there, and a written plan for the first twelve months of the rest of your life. Most founders arrive believing this is the soft deliverable. By day 90, it is the one they reference most — because it is the document that tells them whether an offer on the table is actually a yes.
Here is what the M&A advisors will not say to you out loud: the hardest day of an exit is not diligence, and it is not the negotiation. It is the first Tuesday morning after the wire clears, when your phone does not ring and no one needs a decision from you.
For twenty years, “what do you do?” had a one-sentence answer. The company was not just your income — it was your identity, your standing at every table you sat at, and the reason you were the person people called when something broke. Selling it converts an illiquid asset into cash, and it converts a life into a question mark. Founders who ignore that part sabotage good deals at the eleventh hour, or take the money and spend two years quietly lost.
That is precisely why this begins at Casa D'Souza and not in a conference room with a spreadsheet. Before we touch the valuation, we work on the person holding it: what you want to be doing at 7:00 a.m. next spring, what your family actually needs, what you would grieve if it were gone tomorrow, and what — honestly — you are relieved to put down.
It is also why ninety days matters more than you think. Month two asks you to genuinely step back while you still own the company. That is a financial exercise on paper and an identity exercise in practice, and it is far better to feel it now — with us, with the business still yours — than for the first time on the Tuesday after closing.
A premium exit is a financial event with an emotional bill attached. We plan for both, so you sign with conviction instead of doubt — and so the life on the other side is one you chose on purpose.
This is not a cohort, a mastermind, or a group program. The retreat is private and all ninety days are hands-on, which means we accept exactly one new founder per month — and that engagement receives complete focus. When a month is committed, the next opening is the following month.
One new engagement accepted each month. No shared attention, no junior team running your file.
Nothing is disclosed to your team, your market, or your competitors. Your name never appears in our marketing without your written permission.
A mutual non-disclosure agreement is executed before you share a single financial document. Every conversation is protected from the first call.
Investment
$35,000 – $50,000
Scoped to the size and complexity of your company, and inclusive of the retreat and all three phases of the 90-day transformation. For a business where a single turn of EBITDA multiple is measured in seven figures, this is the least expensive part of your exit. We confirm scope and fee before any engagement begins.
You will spend the next three years building this company either way. The only question is whether you are building it for a buyer or building it for yourself to keep carrying.
Tell us about your company below. Paul D'Souza personally reviews every application and responds directly. If it is not a fit, we will tell you plainly — and point you somewhere better.