Acquisitions Anonymous - #1 for business buying, selling and operating - This Horse Transport Company Makes $100K - But Is It Worth It?

Episode Date: August 5, 2025

In this episode, the hosts explore the quirky but profitable world of UK horse transport, debating whether buying a relocatable horse taxi business in Essex is a dream job or a low-moat risk.Business Listing – https://uk.businessesforsale.com/uk/leading-horse-transport-business-in-essex-relocatable.aspx?_gl=1*h95f4p*_gcl_au*NTg0MzkzNDA3LjE3NTAxOTMyNzk.*_ga*MTc5NjA0MjU0LjE3NTAxOTMyNzk.*_ga_1G1NGBELLP*czE3NTAxOTMyNzgkbzEkZzAkdDE3NTAxOTMyODAkajU4JGwwJGgxODE4MzM1MDM1Welcome to Acquisitions Anonymous – the #1 podcast for small business M&A. Every week, we break down businesses for sale and talk about buying, operating, and growing them.💰 Sponsored by:OpenPhone – The smarter phone system built for startups and modern teams. Keep work and personal calls separate, manage everything in one app, and stay connected from anywhere. https://www.openphone.com/Acquisition Lab – A step-by-step program that guides entrepreneurs through buying a business. Get expert advice, tools, and a vetted community to accelerate your acquisition journey. https://www.acquisitionlab.com/This week’s deal is a leading horse transport business based in Essex, UK, with £200K–£500K in revenue and £100K–£250K in profit. With five employees, relocatable operations, and repeat clients in the equestrian industry, it’s pitched as a turnkey opportunity for a serious horse lover or operator.Key Highlights:- Price: £200K–£500K with £100K–£250K in net profit- 100% relocatable equine transport business based in Essex, UK- Industry relies heavily on trust, relationships, and animal handling skills- Ambiguous asset base—unclear if trucks/lorries are included- Potential for premium positioning or even media content playSubscribe to weekly our Newsletter and get curated deals in your inboxAdvertise with us by clicking here Do you love Acquanon and want to see our smiling faces? Subscribe to our Youtube channel. Do you enjoy our content? Rate our show! Follow us on Twitter @acquanon Learnings about small business acquisitions and operations. For inquiries or suggestions, email us at [e-mail]

Welcome to Acquisitions Anonymous, Internet's number one podcast about buying and selling small businesses. Today, myself, Travis Jameson of Capital Pad, and horse lover, Heather Anderson of Vizzo Capital, went through and talked about a deal that I found fascinating because I was trying to find a deal that Heather would love. So stay tuned and understand if she liked it or learn if she didn't. Here you go. have 100% beers anymore. And thumbs downing on just the plus inventory line. So many founders and operators still use their personal number to talk to customers.

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Heather, what's new with you in Southern California? Well, it's hot here. It's gotten hot, but what's new is I'm just cranking away on loans, and we just hit our 100th loan funded, since we started. So 100 loans in two years. Congratulations. That's amazing. It's pretty fine. Is the mean size of your loans higher, bigger or smaller than the mean for SBA in general?

It's higher in general. I mean, you know, there's a lot of really small loans where they're just working capital loans in the general program. When you're doing business acquisitions, it tends to skew the average a bit higher. So our average is closer to about $3 million loan size. And the true average is probably somewhere south of a million, you know, in the whole program. Yeah. So you're funding pretty much those like typical four or five million dollar searcher deals day and day out. That is right. Yeah. The kind of plain vanillas are our specialty. We do some smaller ones here and there. We'll even do some of those peri-pissue deals sometimes, but, you know, most of it's right down the middle, like a million, seven-fifty to a million of

EBITDA companies. So the, the U.S. is doing about, like, let's say, 5,000 SBA loans a year, right? Just business acquisition. Just business acquisition? And that's only about 20% of the program. The other 80% of the program is startups such as franchises, like franchise development, and existing businesses using working capital or buying real estate or equipment. Wow.

So, and then all of your loans are business acquisition, 100%. All of mine are business acquisition. So if you just did your hundredth of that, that means you're potentially on a run rate to do 200 this year because we're about halfway through the year. Yeah, we are on a very good run rate at the moment. So yeah, probably close to that, if not that. There's an outside chance you hit 5% of the total SBA market this year. Yeah, I was looking at it. The first year, I think we were at like 2.5% and I thought, well, that's actually a number. It's a real. That's incredible.

You're going to become the SBA. It's just going to be you. Yeah, I want to, well, I think that the service is needed. I think that, I think that. That's why it's working, why it's popular, is that this is not an easy loan to get. This is not an easy analysis to do. Working capital is not just, you know, DSCR. There's a whole lot that people need assistance with. And so I think that's why it's so popular. And that's why we send people to you.

I don't know how to do this stuff. It's tough. Yeah, it is. Not easy. A guy did an advisory call with me yesterday, and he's looking up buying a moving business. And he asked me a very specific question about SB. I was like, oh, I know the lady you need to call. send them my way please i was like i i could give you a high level recommendation but in terms of

because i think one of the things that makes sba so typical for a lot of people when i talk to them is the goalposts are always moving and the rules are always changing so he was asking me about okay how would you do this how would you structure this in in order to deal with potential downside risk and i was like okay well here's how i would do it but like like the sba rules and regulations and the laws behind it are changing so quickly, you know, that's where you need to work with Heather to help that stuff. You have to know the latest. And it's not just the SBA rule latest, the banks shift their credit preferences around. You know, what's okay in one six-month period, the next six-month period, nobody wants that. They want it structured a different way. So it's an

ever-evolving, you know, set of rules and set of conditions that you have to meet. Do you have a specific example of that? Yeah. I mean, the amount of equity that has to come from the person giving a personal guarantee. At one time when banks were more aggressive, they could let somebody get almost all of it from investors if they had the right kind of investors. And now they're saying, you know, either 51% of their own liquidity, their own assets, or 15% of the total amount of equity has to come from the person running the day to day who's giving the personal guarantee. Now, that's not an SBA rule. That's credit, you know, guidance.

That seems like a lot for some of these deals. It can be. Yeah. You know, I kind of feel like they're all in regardless. If they're taking this SBA debt, like there's no escaping. Yeah, it's a PG. Yeah, you're not escaping. So whether they have the capital or not, but I don't know, makes the banks fall heavy. I agree. I agree. But those attitudes from the banks and the SBA, they shift. And that's one of the more recent shifts that we've seen.

All right. Speaking of shifting things around, let me pitch you on this deal. Oh, my gosh. I'm so excited. I can't believe. All right. So this is the leading horse transport business in Essex, UK, and it is relocatable and for sale. So do we need to first figure out where the heck Essex UK is? Well, I know where UK is, but I don't know where Essex is. Well, if you're going to transport horses, you're going to have to move. It's relocatable. It's relocatable.

No, that would be. It is northeast. You can live in California. Right. It is Uber rural northeast London. So if you go northeast up the M11 towards Kilmsford, that's where it is. One of our UK listeners is yelling at the machine right now

for me mispronouncing the name because it's actually Shubbersberger. All right. All right. So this is the leading horse transport business in Essex, UK. The asking price is 200 to 500,000 pounds. turnover is 200 to 500,000 pounds, which I think translates to American English as revenue, and net profit is 100 to 250,000 pounds.

So in theory, they're making 100 to 200-ish, and their revenue is 300 to 500-ish, and they're asking somewhere around just what their revenue is. It's an established and trusted business for sale, and it's an exceptional opportunity to acquire a well-established and highly reputable equine, transport business. With a strong client base and a proven track record of excellence, this business is known for his professional, reliable, and safe, horse transportation services across the UK and

beyond. Operating with a modern, well-maintained fleet, this company ensures the highest standards of welfare and efficiency, making it a trusted source for owners, breeders, and equestrian professionals. The company benefits from repeat business, solid industry relationships, and a strong brand presence, making it an ideal investment for an equestrian enthusiast or business-minded individual, looking to enter our expanding this lucrative sector. With growth potential and an established reputation, the sale represents a turnkey business in the thriving equine industry. Serious, horse lover, inquiries only.

Currently located in Essex, you could have bigger lorries, which is what they call trucks over there, and more lorries as well as franchise possibilities. It's the biggest business of their size within the county and surrounding areas. Most competitors are much smaller operations with a singular horse box. They want to go into their selling because they want to go into the building of horse boxes full-time

and they have potential synergy with this business, the business for sale for ongoing builds. They have five employees and it's been around for eight years and they are willing to support you once you own the business, which you can run from home, Heather. And it says San Diego slash SoCal right here. Yeah, sure. Okay.

So, Travis, what did these guys do? Do you understand? They move horses. they put them in a nice fancy trailer with a big truck, and then they transport them from show to show or from field to field or barn to barn. I don't know exactly what all. Yeah, it's a horse taxi.

Is that right, Heather? Yeah, it's a horse taxi. And, you know, don't know whether it serves the racing industry, which is big in the UK, and it is also big here. But, you know, it could be show horses, you know, where it's, it would be interesting to know what kind of horses, like kind of what niches, what kind of customers they serve, That's what it is. It's horse trailers, you know, large ones, I'm sure, and smaller ones. You know,

you've got two horse trailers and then they get longer and longer from there and you can have, you know, 16 horses in a big, a big truck. But that's what they do. And it is not easy. It's not like transporting boxes of things. You have to get a horse to walk onto the trailer. And they don't always want to do that. So there are horses who take a little bit of special care to kind of get them to step up onto a trailer and you have to really know what you're doing. Your drivers have to know what they're doing. And I would imagine to own this business, you have to know your way around horses really well and horse people, which are crazy. They're known to be. So what is, I mean, I routinely here in Texas see cattle being cattle and

sheep and even horses being trailered around the place. I mean, it's interesting to me that more of these farmers don't have their own hauling operations. It seems like, If you're going to have a couple hundred thousand pounds tied up in farming and even potentially the horses, because horses are not cheap last I checked, like having a trailer and a pickup truck is kind of like that's what every rancher seems to have in Texas. Is that or is that just a weird thing here, Heather? Are you ready to take a leap into business ownership but you don't know where to start? Well, look no further than Acquisition Lab, the premier resource for entrepreneurs seeking to buy

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And when you do, be sure to tell them the Acquisitions Anonymous podcast sent you. Where trailers are expensive, right? Are they dedicated ones versus like a cattle trailer? Maybe I'm wrong. They're not that. I mean, they are expensive depending on how fancy you want to make it. But I think the problem is it's like anything else. You need a specialist if you're moving a lot of horses, a lot of different places.

So they're probably serving not just the person who owns two horses. Like I had two horses. I had a two horse trailer and a truck. And yes, I did all my own transportation, but I also didn't take my horses very often. And so, sure, I could manage it myself. But if I'm running a barn, a show barn where I've got, you know, 25 horses and they're going to different shows or I need bigger trailers, you know, I might want to outsource that. So I think it's like anything else, you outsource it to a specialist and it just makes your

operation a little bit easier. That's why I kind of tend to also think they might be serving the racing industry because that's something very typical that the racing industry would do. is hire haulers to take their horses to the various tracks and places they have to go. So, Travis, what are I buying here? So this is actually what I've been looking at in the background. I think maybe I've said this before, like, you know, a CapitalPad, we kind of try to avoid the companies that are essentially just a website and some SEO, or that can be disrupted

by that. I kind of feel like that's what this is. Like, you're getting some relationships, maybe a website, and they don't even think doesn't even mention the trailer or the trucks or anything like that. I don't know what you're buying. And I did take a, you know, I'm an SEO guy, so I took a look at that. Like, you could rank number one for like horse transport services. And I don't know, I could do it in probably a weekend.

This isn't like an overly complicated thing for all my SEO geeks out there. Like the top ranking side is like a DR9. So essentially nothing. It doesn't seem like there's much to it. it unless this is like very heavily dependent on relationships. And I'm not convinced of that. I think it is somewhat, it is relationship dependent in my opinion just because that's kind of the way the whole horse world works.

You know, you have your vet that you like. And even though there's other vets to choose from, that's the one you trust. And then you have the same thing with a ferry or the guy that does the shoeing and the, you know, so it is a, it's a high trust industry. And I think there is, you know, even with the transport, there's probably relationships really matter because the horse. can get hurt. Like I said, they're not easy always to load and unload. And so, and you need, you know, a good driver. So I think there's probably a customer list here is what you're getting.

And you're right. I don't know. I'm not clear on whether you're getting those lorries, those trucks. I'm going to use the word turnover now, by the way, when I miss my clients. What is the turnover in this business? And they're going to look at me very confused. But I'm going to feel sophisticated when I asked that. But I think that you're not getting a whole lot other than maybe those, the customer list and maybe a website. So it seems like this might be obviously a terrible thing for a lot of people to buy. But for the right person who's just like a horse lover, doesn't understand any marketing, doesn't have the relationships, likes the industry, doesn't mind looking for like a high paying job. Like, I don't know.

You can probably buy this thing pretty cheap. Like, yeah, buy yourself a nice job in an industry you love. That could make sense. Well, and if you want to live out in rural Essex, I think that's something to be thought about here, right? Like, this person lives out in Jameth or wherever that is, like middle of nowhere. Like, that's where you're probably going to have to live with this thing, because, you know, I think Bill and I talk about this a lot.

If you own a cleaning company, at some point, you will stick your hand into a toilet, right? That's just how it works. And if you own this company at some point, you will be driving a horse down the road because everybody in your company gets the flu, right? And so I think that's part of this thing. Probably why it doesn't, you know, it's not costing that much is you are realistically buying yourself a job

and you've got to move out to nowhere in the UK. I didn't think, I didn't get the impression there were any employees. I feel like it was just five. It's a five. Oh, did. I missed that. Okay. Yeah. I was kind of surprised too.

And it could be contract employees and something like this, you know. It could just be drivers. It's a guy, you know. Hey, what you doing Thursday? Yeah. I think you could carve out a pretty cool niche for a business like this if you became renowned as the folks who are like, we get your horse there safely. Like that's what matters. Because, I mean, horses are not cheap and people have a ton of money invest in them.

And then they also have relationship with the horses. So it's kind of like, you know, baby transport. Like you don't want something to go wrong with your baby. And I think that's a cool niche that something like this could basically have premium pricing power if they did. I think you're on to something really. I'm looking at the competitors, like all the UK horse transport places. None of them start with saying, we'll get your horse there safely and happily. It's just, you know, it looks like you're ordering a moving quote or something like that.

When your horse absolutely positively has to get there on time, you call horse X. Sorry, that joke's only going to make sense to be bold enough to remember FedEx advertisements. I remember. That's why I love you, Heather. You're the best. All right. So, where are you guys on this one? Heather, well, you're an obvious yes, so we'll skip you.

Yeah, I'm just kidding. This is the dream. As long as I don't have to drive them. I don't really want to drive the truck because it's nerve wracking. But I think, yeah, living out in the rural UK and spending time with horse people, sounds great. I'm buying it. I hate sunshine.

I love it. You don't see the sun out there. For the right person who's a horse nerd and wants to live in Chalmouth, I think it'd be totally cool. I also think this would, you know, we've talked about this in a few of our episodes, especially where Mills last week, you weren't here, Travis, but Mills wanted to buy a cattle farm, a dairy farm out in Romania. And I was like, what are you doing, bro? Like, seriously. But I told him that would be great if he went to Netflix and turned it into a reality show. I think it would totally win.

And I think a couple of young people buying this horse transport business could kill it with a cool YouTube set of series. Totally new Clarkson's farm or something like that. Totally. Yeah, Mills's Dairy Farm. Well, I watch it. Heather, do you watch the guy who does like the hoof, like the hoof GP and the hoof doctor? My friend who does not have horses was telling me how she loves watching that. I'm like, what?

You're watching someone trim the horse. horses, hooves. She goes, yeah, I love watching it. Travis, have you seen these guys? So I didn't know what existed until she told me. I haven't seen the show. I mean, my uncle's in his 70s and still a farrier. Yeah. His thighs are the size of tree trunks from doing this for 30 years. It turns out to be incredible YouTube and TikTok content because every one of his patients follows a narrative arc. and so he's kind of like a doctor for these horses feet. So he comes in and there's like this setting of the scene

and a discovery of what's going on. Then you start to see these anticipation of stuff. And then he like gets in there and he finds there's like this huge blood puschule like in the thing. And then he has to like resolve it. And so then there's this tension. Like it really turns into like this beautiful, perfect social media thing. I can't believe that that has become entertainment because I would have never thought,

but that is interesting. People are desperate for narrative. If it follows the hero's journey, people will watch it. Just watch every single video that people like. It's hero's journey. Totally that way. But to your point, you're putting this idea of a Netflix show with buying a business together. Somebody's got to do it.

Now I feel like that is such a smart idea, actually, for someone to do. If they have the right connections to get the show going, and like it has to be from, ideally from before we even close the deal. Like, wouldn't that be a great show? Yeah. I think this would be fantastic, actually. especially with the searcher industry booming and you buy it and you buy hopes, you get your ass handed to you for the first year and then work your way out of it.

Oh, that sounds great. So, Travis, you watch Clarkson's Farm. How much of the reason that that show works do you think is because Jeremy Clarkson is just really, really entertaining? Or do you think it's like the setting or what do you think is making that show work? I've seen like 45 minutes of it and I just think he's really, really entertaining. He's just really funny, but also like it's some, you know, city guy, again, getting his ass handed to them on there. It's great.

I think it's great. Have you seen any of those, Heather? No. It's pretty good. I remember he's kind of a little chauvinny, chauvinisticy, whatever it is. So it doesn't get show. He's a lot of things. It doesn't get show to my house.

Yeah, okay. Entertainment. We don't watch it over here. I grew up on a farm. I learned early. I don't want that. It's hard. People live their lives and then fantasize like,

oh, I'm going to buy this farm and then live this great life. No, don't do it. No. Suburvy is great. Yeah, good for them. All right, so it sounds like we're all like not for us, but... Except for me. Except for Heather.

I'm moving. All right, bye. All right. If you enjoyed this episode, please tell a friend about the podcast. We enjoy making these and we would also enjoy more people watch them. So we'll see you next time. Thanks everybody for being here.