HighTide Capital: make the no fast

What it is

HighTide Capital Group is a buy-and-build platform, formed in 2025, that acquires owner-operated trade-services companies in Arizona and holds them: painting, HVAC, plumbing, electrical, landscaping, excavation and glazing.

The seller it looks for is in his sixties, holds the contractor's license in his own name, has no successor, and owns a business worth real money only while he is in it. Most sellers are founders and brothers with cash inside the corporation and no pressing need to sell, so the competitor on every deal is the status quo.

Jesse Fowler holds the operations and integration seat: sourcing, screening, diligence and the operating plan for anything the platform buys. He is the one who would run the company on the Monday after a close, he personally guarantees as the operator, and he takes no transaction fee. The capital partner holds capital and structure and is the registered broker; any outside raise runs through Prince Capital as the licensed placement advisor.

What Common Ground did

• Diagnosed the real constraint. Within two hours of Phoenix there were twenty-seven brokers selling trade businesses and the boards refilled every week. What a first-time buyer lacks is a reason for a broker to put its offer ahead of a strategic buyer's, so the problem was credibility and speed dressed up as volume.
• Wrote the buy box before any deal was in front of the platform, with the reason behind each criterion: EBITDA of $500,000 or more, because diligence cost is roughly fixed per deal; enterprise value under $5,000,000, because seller-note financing gets harder to clear as size grows; margin of 15 percent or more, as a proxy for pricing power; owner-operated for ten years or more; metro Phoenix or within about two hours, so the operator can walk the yard; and a succession or retirement situation. The daily alert screen runs a broadened floor of $250,000 of seller discretionary earnings so a bolt-on is not killed before anyone reads it.
• Ran an overnight multi-agent sweep across eleven listing boards and broker networks with a verification firewall: every row needed a live source link, and a listing on three boards collapsed to one. It produced a ranked list, ten targets with confirmed public financials, and a named contact at each Arizona broker selling trade businesses.
• Sent a one-page buy-side mandate with the box written out, in five variants so no two brokers got the same note, every address validated and every general inbox swapped for a named person. One broker answered two inquiries with sign-the-NDA links within thirty minutes.
• Put every deal on one board the day it arrives, with codenames on any shared surface and seller financials kept in the deal folder only. The screen runs inside twenty-four hours and the analysis inside forty-eight hours of data-room access.
• Tested the platform's eight non-negotiable deal terms, written before the first deal, against the SBA 7(a) operating procedure and its October 1, 2026 revision. Four broke outright: no personal guarantee on the operating partner, no lien on the buyers' own balance sheet, payments capped at half of free cash flow, and a right of offset for a seller's tax exposure. The cure and no-acceleration terms partly broke. The escrow and the entity structure survived. SBA paper was dropped for the first deal, and all seller paper with an interest-only first year became the default, with the seller keeping first position on what he sold.
• Priced five financing structures on one set of inputs for debt-service coverage in a base case with one hired manager and a downside with the estimator and project manager hired, the moment the retiring owners stop estimating. Every structure that amortizes bank-rate debt from day one fails the downside in year one; the all-seller-paper structure with an interest-only first year is the only one that stays above the platform's 1.20x floor.
• Set a December 31, 2026 close ahead of price. Under the SBA's business-expansion category an add-on in the same industry group, made after two full fiscal years of ownership, can be financed at a 1.15x coverage hurdle with the equity injection reduced or waived. A December close opens that window in January 2029; a January 2027 close pushes it to January 2030. A four-week slip costs a year of financing on every add-on.
• Runs the operating read on every target: filed tax returns over the broker's recast, the yard and the crew, trucks counted by odometer and engine replacement, whose name the contractor's license is in, contracted backlog separated from quoted, and the broker's fee on a zero-cash close solved before the structure conversation. Every letter of intent carries one number and a definition beside each term, reviewed by outside counsel as a template.
• Screened and modeled eleven businesses across painting, landscaping, HVAC, plumbing, remodeling and pools, plus a salon-suite portfolio, an AI writing software company and a national general contractor well outside the box, each on the same model with every input listed. Five came out go (one conditioned, one as a bolt-on), two marginal and four pass.

Results

• 128 listings in, 41 through the box, 13 tracked, 11 fully vetted, 5 live.
• Nothing has closed. The first offer is out on a commercial painting contractor inside the box, and the counter is Fowler's to give.
• Brokers began sending listings directly, including some that never reached the public boards, and the program went from a sweep to a seller's table in ten weeks.
• Of the vetted targets declined, more died on the platform's own deal terms and the close date than on reported numbers failing, and full diligence caught what the box was never built to catch: a state tax exposure larger than the price and a customer concentration above the threshold.
• An underwriting doctrine in use on every target: run two-case coverage on the most recent filed year, once with a hired operator and once with Fowler in the seat, and if the deal only covers with him in the seat, that is an operator decision, never a reason to pay a higher multiple.

Public record

• HighTide Capital Group

At a glance