Every deal starts the same way: someone sends us a spreadsheet. Revenue, margins, headcount, the usual. And every time, we treat it as the beginning of the conversation, not the end of it.
A spreadsheet tells you what a business made last year. It doesn’t tell you whether the person running the night shift actually knows what they’re doing, whether the machines are held together with duct tape and hope, or whether the owner has a plan for next year or is just hoping things stay the same. Those are the things that decide whether a business is still standing in ten years, and none of them show up in a P&L statement.
We start on the floor, not in the boardroom
Before we talk numbers in any real detail, someone from AMH walks the floor. Not a formal tour with the owner narrating, but time spent actually watching how the place runs on an ordinary day. We want to see how people talk to each other, how problems get solved when something breaks mid-shift, and whether the place feels organized or like it’s held together by a few people who happen to remember where everything is.
You learn more in two hours on a production floor than in two weeks of financial reports. If the machines are well maintained and the workers seem to know exactly what they’re doing without being told twice, that tells us something good. If nobody can explain why a process works the way it does, that’s a flag worth digging into.
Then we look at the people, not just the owner
A lot of manufacturing businesses are built around one person who knows everything and holds it all together. That’s not a bad thing on its own, plenty of great companies start that way, but it becomes a real risk if that person is planning to step back or sell. We spend time with the managers, the longest-tenured employees, and anyone who’d still be running the place if the owner took six months off.
We’re not looking for perfection here. Most businesses we look at have gaps in their leadership bench. What we’re really trying to figure out is whether those gaps are things we can help fill, or whether the whole operation would fall apart without one specific person in the room.
What actually changes our mind
A few things consistently move a deal from “maybe” to “yes” for us:
- The business has a real reason customers keep coming back, not just price.
- Equipment is maintained on a schedule, not just fixed when it breaks.
- At least one or two people besides the owner could explain how the whole operation works.
- The owner is honest about what isn’t working, not just what is.
That last one matters more than people expect. We’d rather hear a straight answer about a problem than a polished pitch that skips over it. The businesses that are upfront about where they’re weak are usually the ones that are easiest to actually help.
