Experience on both sides of the transaction

The firm

Wild Rose Advisors is a Texas sell-side advisory firm serving owner-operated, licensed businesses: companies whose revenue derives from inspection, compliance, renewal and contracted service work that the customer is required to purchase. The firm runs full practices across the licensed trades, independent insurance agencies and home health, and maintains research coverage of 13 licensed markets statewide: 63,250 businesses on file, each traced to the state license record from which it came.

That research operation is the foundation of the practice. Before the first conversation with any owner, we already know who holds which licenses in their market, for how long, at what address, and which competitors have already been acquired. Most advisory firms several times our size do not build this. We began with it.

The principal

Transaction experience

1. Buy-side

   Inside the acquirer

   Seven years in senior leadership at Foundation Automotive, concluding as Senior Vice President, while the platform acquired and integrated more than forty businesses across four states and Canada: franchised dealerships, collision centers, a service truck upfitting facility that later sold for ninety million dollars, and dozens of property parcels. Cole sat in the room where the platform determined what a business was worth, and personally identified, acquired and integrated one of those companies.

2. Sell-side

   The same assets, from the other side

   Years later, across the table on those same businesses, when the platform divested them.

3. 2024

   A founder’s own exit

   As founder and CEO, Cole built ICOM AI, an enterprise AI platform for dealerships, from inception to more than two hundred clients, raised financing at a nineteen-million-dollar valuation, and led the company’s sale to a major automotive technology company. The seller’s position described on this page is therefore not a figure of speech: the documents, and everything preceding them, are recent first-hand experience.

4. Today

   Transactions closed monthly

   Alongside Wild Rose, Cole structures and finances cross-border commodity transactions, with individual transactions of one to five million dollars, through a Houston trade platform he founded. The relevance to a seller: the most difficult part of most private-company sales is the financing and the closing mechanics, and that is work this firm performs every month rather than once a year.

The firm therefore knows what a diligence request list involves in practice, which line items a buyer will contest and which they will concede, and how a consolidator arrives at the figure in its offer, because Cole spent seven years inside those decisions.

Why automotive experience is relevant to your trade

It is a fair question, and we would rather answer it than hope it goes unasked.

A franchised dealership and a collision center are owner-operated, family-held, real-estate-intensive service businesses carrying license obligations and recurring revenue, usually run by the person whose name is on the building. Structurally they have far more in common with a sprinkler contractor or a towing operator than the trades suggest. The trade differs; the anatomy of the transaction does not. The diligence questions are the same, the working capital negotiation is the same, and in both worlds buyers pay for the same three things: predictable recurring revenue, a team that operates without the owner, and clean records.

What we do not claim is twenty years installing fire alarms. What the firm built instead is the market map from public records, which is why every figure on this site names the state file from which it came, and why the first conversation will include something you did not know about your own market.

What moves the number

Almost never the quality of the work. It is whether the revenue is contracted, whether one-time service customers have been converted to inspection agreements, whether the financials separate recurring work from projects so that a buyer can see it, whether renewal and attrition rates are documented, and whether the business can operate without the owner.

The deficiency reports your inspections already generate are the clearest example. Most operators never systematize quoting them. It is margin the business has already earned the right to, and it is a metric a buyer will underwrite directly.

All of it is correctable. None of it is correctable in the ninety days after the decision to sell, which is when most owners begin.

How an engagement proceeds

Most of the work begins twelve to twenty-four months before a business goes to market: converting one-time customers to agreements, restructuring contracts with defined terms and renewal language, building the deficiency-to-repair process, separating recurring revenue in the financials, and documenting the business so that it does not reside in the owner’s head. When the business is genuinely ready, we take it to market.

Most owners have one opportunity at this and take to market a business that was never prepared to be sold. The buyer can tell, and that is where the discount originates.

Location

The firm is based in Tomball, in the Houston metropolitan area, and works statewide. For owners within a few hours of Houston, we meet at your place of business.

Cole can also be reached on LinkedIn. Everything above is documented, and we are glad to provide the supporting record.