Business brokerage · Gainesville
Most owners sell a business once. Buyers, lenders, and the other side’s accountant will treat it like a profession. Foundry exists so you are not the only amateur in the room. The first job is keeping the sale itself from becoming news.
A foundry does not invent the metal. It heats it, cleans it, and pours it into a form that will hold. We recast a closely held company so it can change hands: books a buyer can trust, a structure that survives the tax, and a close that does not crack the thing being sold.
How owners use us
A confidential process from recast earnings to a funded close. We price against what has actually sold in Florida, not a multiple from a national listing mill.
Search, underwrite, and negotiate. If the offering memorandum does not survive the tax returns, we will say so before you spend diligence money.
A private opinion of value for an exit two years out, a partner buyout, a bank, or a family conversation. Defendable numbers, not a sales pitch in disguise.
After tax
A broker who cannot read a return will price the deal on pretax earnings and call it a day. The principals here are CPAs. We treat the sale as a tax event with a closing attached, so more of the price survives as after-tax cash — for the seller walking away, and for the buyer who has to live with the basis they just bought.
01
The headline price is vanity. Asset versus equity, how the price is allocated, installment paper versus cash, recapture on equipment you depreciated for years, and whether the building rides in the deal — those choices change what lands in your pocket after federal tax. We run the close against that number.
02
What you paid is not what you can recover. How you take title, how the price is split among goodwill, equipment, and real estate, and whether the seller holds paper: that is the after-tax cost of owning the company. Two letters at the same headline can be very different Mondays.
03
Most files have a broker, a lawyer, and a CPA who meet for the first time at the closing table. We are the CPAs in the brokerage seat. The purchase agreement and the tax plan are written to match, so neither side is surprised by the return next April.
Confidentiality
Employees, vendors, landlords, and competitors do not need to know you are in market. We treat discretion as the work, not a line in a listing agreement. Curiosity is not a qualification.
01
A buyer learns the industry and the geography first. The name on the door comes after an NDA, and after we believe they can close.
02
Most files never appear on this website. If a public teaser helps and does not name you, we both decide. Looking busy is not a reason.
03
Tours are planned. Cover stories are agreed. A manager is told when you say so, not when a stranger walks the shop with a clipboard.
Who we sit with
Owner-operated companies where the owner is still in the work: services, trades, light manufacturing, local retail that actually makes money.
Contractors and specialty trades with real backlog, licensed people, and equipment that has to transfer with the name on the door.
Practices, agencies, and North Florida agricultural and service businesses that do not look like a franchise listing. North Florida.
Conversation. Recast. File. Qualified buyers. Offer. Diligence. Close. That is the industry sequence. The difference is whether a CPA who lives in merger-and-acquisition tax is in the room when the buyer’s accountant starts asking questions — and when the allocation decides what each side keeps.
Short essays for owners and buyers: selling a Gainesville company, defensible valuation, keeping a Florida sale quiet, after-tax proceeds, and buying a going concern in North Florida.