Your competitor might be your best buyer — they already understand what you’ve built and can pay for what they can’t replicate. They’re also the one buyer who profits from the conversation even if the deal dies. Here are the five mistakes contractors make selling to a competitor, and the staged-disclosure process that prevents every one of them.

Construction is one of the biggest ESOP industries in the country, and the pitch is compelling — legacy, tax advantages, employee ownership. But ESOPs carry costs and constraints the brochures skip. Here’s an honest side-by-side against a third-party sale, and a framework for deciding which exit actually fits you.

Nearly half the buyers in construction M&A are now private equity groups running a roll-up playbook. This field guide explains how platforms and add-ons actually work, why PE pays more for management depth and recurring revenue, and why answering that unsolicited call without competition is the most expensive mistake an owner can make.

Three very different groups buy construction companies, and they don’t pay the same way or dig the same way in due diligence. Here’s how individual SBA buyers, strategic acquirers, and private equity groups each value a contractor — and how to figure out which pool your company is actually built for.

Buyers evaluate a construction company through a remarkably consistent lens: can the cash flow survive the owner’s exit? This 7-point self-audit walks the exact checklist buyers run — financials and WIP, customer concentration, owner dependence, crew stability, safety record, equipment condition, and pipeline quality — so you can grade your company before a buyer does it for you.

The sale price is not the number that matters — the after-tax wire is. For equipment-heavy construction companies, depreciation recapture, purchase price allocation, and structure decisions made (or skipped) before listing can swing what you keep by six figures. Here are the five tax mistakes contractors make on the way out, and when to get your CPA involved.

Buyers default to asset sales. Sellers prefer stock sales. In most industries that tug-of-war is about taxes and liability — but in construction, licenses, bonding, and contract continuity can flip the logic entirely. Here’s how the structure decision actually works, and how to use it as a negotiating lever instead of a concession.

: In most states, a contractor license attaches to a person, not the company — so it doesn’t ride along when you sell. This playbook covers the three transition paths every deal uses, walks Florida’s qualifying agent rules as the worked example, and explains why unprepared license transitions quietly kill contractor sales.

Surety bonds don’t follow the company when you sell — they were underwritten to you. This field guide covers what happens to bonded jobs that are still running at closing, what sureties want to see in a buyer, and why raising bonding in month one protects your price instead of shrinking it.