Bought to be operated.
Held to compound.
SF Advisor acquires profitable owner-operated businesses across five verticals, Continental US, $750k+ EBITDA, ten-year hold, and operates them ourselves. The thesis is operating-led, not transaction-led.
Ten years lets us actually build.
Most search funds run a five-year clock. The math demands it: an LP needs liquidity, a fund needs to recycle capital, an operator needs a story to tell the next investor. The owner-operator who built the business over twenty years now has a steward whose horizon is half as long as their own was.
Ten years is a different decision. It rewards the equipment we should have replaced, the technician we should have promoted, the customer we should have called back, the system we should have built. None of those show up in the first thirty-six months. Most of the value of a well-run small business compounds slowly, and most acquirers' patience runs out before that compounding does.
We hold ten years because that's the horizon over which an operator-led decision actually pays off.
Five verticals that share one thread.
Each is local or regional, recurring or contracted, fragmented at the buy-side, and rewarded by operating discipline. Different vocabularies, same playbook.
- 01
Non-emergency medical transportation (NEMT)
Local, regulated, contract-driven. Recurring revenue underwritten by Medicaid programs and managed-care organizations. Highly operator-rewarded, fleet utilization, dispatching discipline, driver retention, and credentialing are the levers.
- 02
Healthcare services
Home health, durable medical equipment, dental groups, urgent care, specialty clinics. Aging-demographics tailwind, regulatory moat, professionalized buyers. Operating discipline directly drives EBITDA and patient outcomes simultaneously.
- 03
Residential & commercial services (commercial-weighted)
HVAC, plumbing, electrical, fire and life safety, janitorial, landscaping. Commercial customers carry larger contracts, more predictable cycles, less seasonality. Service businesses reward dispatching, hiring, retention, and pricing discipline, the work we know.
- 04
Multi-unit independent restaurants (5+ locations)
We don't acquire single-unit restaurants. We do acquire 5–15 unit independents whose concept is proven and whose unit economics work. The operator's job is repeatability, systems, training, supply chain, retention, not invention.
- 05
Managed service providers (MSPs)
Recurring monthly revenue, sticky customer bases, technical service businesses with software embedded in the delivery. Different from B2B SaaS, MSPs sell ongoing service, not a product. The operating discipline is sales-team rigor, capacity modeling, and retention, exactly the work we built at Google, Elastic, and FireHydrant.
We back the GM. We don't replace them.
Our strong preference is to acquire businesses where a general manager, president, or operating leader is already running day-to-day. The owner is ready to step back, the operator is ready to keep going, and the business doesn't need a new face on the floor, it needs aligned capital and a long-term partner above the GM.
That's a different model than the typical search fund, where the searcher becomes the new operator. We don't need to be the operator. We hire, empower, and partner with great ones, and bring the operating-systems rigor that turns a good GM into the leader of a much larger business in ten years.
Operating depth, paid for in advance.
Twenty years building the operating systems that scale revenue inside Google, Salesforce, Elastic, and FireHydrant, and a finance-first foundation from investment banking. We are not a first-time operator with a thesis. We are an operator with a track record, choosing to deploy that depth into a small number of businesses we'll run for a long time.
An owner selling SF Advisor is selling to someone who already knows how to run their second act. That is the only reason this thesis works.