Acquisitions Anonymous - #1 for business buying, selling and operating - Would You Risk Millions on This IV Clinic Franchise?

Episode Date: September 9, 2025

In this episode, the hosts dissect a $12M IV therapy franchise deal in oil-rich Midland, Texas—and uncover a mix of sketchy math, questionable branding, and a saturated niche market.Welcome 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:Verivend is the only platform purpose-built for independent sponsors and private market investors who want to move faster and eliminate friction. From raising capital to returning it, Verivend combines investment management and secure, instant payments—all in one place. Capital calls, deployments, and distributions work like Venmo: one-click, real-time transfers with no transaction limits and automatic reconciliation. Whether you’re raising a single deal or managing a full fund, Verivend gives you the speed and confidence to execute. Explore Verivend at https://www.verivend.com.Heron Finance – build a personalized private credit portfolio for steady monthly income—without the market rollercoaster. In minutes, take a quiz, see your custom plan, and invest in 12+ top-tier funds from managers like Ares, Apollo, and KKR, overseeing $1T+ with loss rates under 0.5%. Higher returns than bonds, lower volatility than stocks—start earning today at https://www.HeronFinance.com.This week’s deal is a $12 million “turnkey wellness empire” in Midland, Texas, offering IV therapy and a newly minted franchise system. With projected 2025 revenues of $2.5M, $710K SDE, and an eyebrow-raising $2.8M EBITDA, the financials don't quite add up—and the team dives in to unpack it all.Key Highlights:- Asking Price: $12M for $710K SDE and $2.8M claimed EBITDA- Location: Midland, TX—high-income, oil-driven market- Business Type: Single-location IV clinic + early-stage franchise- Legal Hurdles: MSO structure needed for compliance, tough for financing- Major Red Flag: Brand offers a “Jesus Shot” and unclear financialsSubscribe 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]

Hey, Michael here, Acquisitions Anonymous, Internet's best podcast about buying and selling small businesses. Today, we reviewed a deal located out in the oil patch of Midland, Texas, that was either priced at four times earnings or nine times earnings. We're not quite sure. So listen to the episode, see what we thought about it, and we had a great time with our guest, Mike Botkin today, terrific and insightful guy.

So here is the episode. Have fun. Well, said acquisitions and honors. Hello, another episode. of acquisitions anonymous. We don't have 100% beers anymore. And thumbs downing on just the plus inventory line. Hey, founders and business owners,

building your company is complicated enough. Your investments shouldn't be. That's where Heron Finance comes in. Heron builds you a personalized private credit portfolio designed to deliver monthly passive income without the roller coaster ride of public markets. Here's how Heron works in three steps. First, you take Heron's short quiz.

Next, see your... customized, diversified portfolio built just for you, then invest and start earning from 12 plus leading private credit funds. Here's the real benefit. With private credit, you typically earn higher returns than bonds with lower volatility than stocks, and you can start seeing income hit your account every month from your Heron portfolio. Heron is an SEC registered advisor. Plus, unlike most private credit platforms, Heron gives you exposure to fund managers with deep expertise, like Aries, Apollo, KKR, and more. These managers oversee over $1 trillion in AUM with a 20-plus year average track record

and loss rates under 0.5%. That's added peace of mind backed by data. Ready to make your money work as hard as you do, start earning passive income from private credit today at heronfinance.com. This is a paid ad and not financial investing or tax advice. Private credit is subject to credit liquidity, an interest rate risk. Past performance does not guarantee future results. The information in this ad is for informational purposes only. Mike, would you like to introduce yourself to our listeners? We are so glad

to have you today. Yeah, no, I appreciate it. Thanks for having me. Yeah, I bought a small landscaping business in late 2020. It was sub a million dollars in revenue. And it was one of those at, you know, at 6 o'clock I'm hoping everyone shows up. Seven o'clock, everyone does show up, 8 o'clock on mowing lawns, throwing rock. 9 o'clock, I'm doing an estimate. 10 o'clock, I'm praying. The guy that asked for a raise is still there at the end of the day. We got really lucky.

He grew out of that. We did six acquisitions, became a top 50 landscaping company in the country. And in 2023, we ended up selling it to a private equity tournament strategic. Yeah. And you're great on Twitter, or X. Yeah. I just try to make fun of males. You left out that you're an aspiring roofing contractor owner.

I do charge Mills a fee every month for the advice that is given. Those invoices because it's just gotten lost in the mail. According to John Wilson this morning, Mills, he went and listed home services businesses, and he rated roofing as the absolute best opportunity to reach $10 million a year the fastest from a cold start. How do you feel about that? Were you insulted?

No, no. I think that there's a lot of people who, believe that that's true and pursue it. I don't know. There's a lot of people who reach 10 million in revenue and roofing. You know how good you've got to be in any sector to reach 10 million bucks as a startup without buying one? I mean, that is, it's an incredible talent that you have to have to do 10 million sales in any home service. I don't care if it's roofing. Lansing, it doesn't matter. It's brutally difficult. I'm going to look. I'm going to Look it up. What percentage of new businesses reach 1 million and 10 million in revenue?

So while you're looking that up, there's like 96,000, maybe it's 97,000 roofing contractors in the U.S. right now. The top 100 list goes to like, I think, goes all the way down from over a billion down to like 18 million, top line. So you've got, you know, the other 96,000 in chains that are below 18 million. It's just highly fragmented. All right. Let me give you these stats. There's 3 million or there's 33 million U.S. small businesses, okay? Only 700,000 are 5.4 million of those have employees.

The rest are just sole operators. 700,000 of those reach revenue above a million, which means of all U.S. businesses, 4 to 9% depending on how the estimate is reach a million. So like you have a one in 20 chance of reaching a million. Then if you want to reach 10 million, to your point, Mike, it's less than 1% of all businesses reach that. The guys that,

and I love, no one loves busting John Wilson's shops more than me, but guys that put that list like, you go do it then. If it's the easiest to make 10 million bucks in and you don't have a $100 million business already, which I don't know if Wilson's plumbing is or is not, but then you go do it.

It is less than 1% of people can do it. Yeah. By another estimate, it's 0.4% reach 10 million. Yeah. That's pretty nuts. That's pretty nuts. Well, speaking of, I have a deal that is not a landscaping deal. Is it okay for us to do a deal that's not a landscaping deal?

Yes. My expertise and intelligence only goes a little bit outside of landscaping. box, so you've got to be careful on that. Mike, you're hitting on why this podcast is good because people don't actually want us to say anything intelligent. They just want us. They just want them. I like it better when we don't.

Yeah, it's like watching a train wreck. They find that fascinating. Actually, a pretty funny thing. Number one feedback we tend to get is people having a level of shock at our analysis of the business being right on. Like, rarely do I hear from people that were totally confused or thinking about it the wrong way. Which is, that's why Mills is here and Heather.

Can I say something about Lansing real quick? Heather, and I think Bill did one. Heather, I don't know what that was a couple months ago. And it was so insightful Heather's comments. And she was so, you know, it's like she's done this before. It was really, really good. And I've actually referred that episode to guys that reach out to me about, should I buy a landscaping business or not?

I actually refer them to that episode. That's awesome. Thank you, Mike. Yeah. That's great. And I have been through a few of those deals before. That's where it came from, absolutely. What is it did the kids say?

Heather makes the cash register go brr. Okay. So this deal is from Biz Buy Sell, our future favorite advertiser. And it lists two amazing, fast-growing companies for sale in Midland, Texas. Do you guys know where Midland is? Yes, I've been there. Yeah, Mills are shaking your head now. It is the, how would you do?

describe it, Mike. Oil pipeline everywhere. If you fly over it, all you see is dirt, flat, and pipes all over it going every which way. Millionaire galore out there. It is filled with money.

It is all oil and high school football. Not much to do. Is that in the Permian Basin, Heather? Yep. Yes. That is. I believe Midland is one of the number one most deaths on a highway in the country is the highway that runs through that, just as a fun fact. Wow.

They actually also fund stat, if you look up GDP per capita in MSAs in the U.S., so GDP grows domestic products, in other words, what's the average economic output per person in an MSA, which is metropolitan statistical area, so just a grouping of cities into one economic bucket. Midland Odessa is like double the number two city. It's like 155,000 per person because it's a lot of the same. because it's all oil coming out of the ground. Yeah, it's fascinating. Okay, so this is apropos

because a lot of those guys out in the oil fields might need this service. So the asking price for this is $12 million. Cash flow is $710,000. Gross revenue is $2.1 million, and EBITDA is $2.8 million. What? Yeah, a little problem there with the math.

Is he getting some zeros somewhere? Evida, yeah. It's not really clear. Cash flow plus revenue equals EBIDA in this case. So anyway, it's $710,000 for a $12 million asking price. So it is an Ivy company, an Ivy franchisor. So it's a turnkey wellness empire for sale with an Ivy Therapy Clinic and scalable franchise brand. The asking price and stuff is stuff I just told you.

The 2025 revenue projected is $2.5 million, and they have sold $2,000. franchise units. It is in the health and wellness industry, and you can step into one of the fastest growing sectors in health and wellness with this rare opportunity to own both a high-performing IV therapy clinic and a full developed franchise brand ready to scale nationally. And here they have a franchise disclosure document for, oh, they won't let me do that without a log in it. ProSource hydration is the name of it. So are you guys familiar with what this business does? IV hydration. I've seen it around town and people get vitamin infusions and or just or just literally hydration. Non-medical, you know, just sort of like discretionary. You want to do this for your health, but not because you need it.

It's not like your doctor prescribed it or anything, usually. I've actually seen this pop up in major metro city, at least Orlando, Miami, Atlanta. and they're usually sent around downtown areas. And kind of the theme is people after a weekend of heavy drinking and all that kind of stuff, shoot over there and get some IV in them to refresh. I've learned something about this from talking to a roll-up, someone who was doing a roll-up in this space and had a lot of these. And most of their customers were actually people who were used.

using it for different illnesses. So they had chronic illnesses and they believe that certain vitamin infusions or whatever were helping them. And so ended up being, they thought it was going to be more in the wellness space and it ended up being more in, you know, assisting people who have chronic illnesses with, you know, kind of alternative treatments with vitamins, basically, which I found very interesting, you know, that the customer, but I think it depends on where it is, to your point, Mike, like if it's in a downtown area or a, or if, If it's in Las Vegas or something, it's kind of trying to attract the hungover crowd. And depending, I know I have one right here in Orange County, not too far from me.

I've never stepped inside it, but I would imagine they're trying to appeal to the wellness crowd. But I think you, there's, I don't think it's the easiest service to sell because, again, you might attract any of those three chronic illness, people who are just trying to promote their wellness or cure their hangover. Yeah. Hey, Michael, what is a Jesus shot? Well, I pulled up their website, and that's what they advertise, is a Jesus shot. So it says, suffering from chronic pain, you can get a Jesus shot today. I'm going to click no for that. And here they have a guy who looks pretty high getting an IV that says,

feel like your best self after visiting our IV clinic at Midland, Texas. Stop by to explore our services list. And, yeah, then they have this, the Jesus shot. The Jesus shot, you can get three times a year. It provides relief from your joint stiffness and aching muscles that are no doubt a result of chronic, result of and chronic inflammation. You may suffer from other health issues as well. With this JS treatment, we seek to provide alternatives to pain pills,

expensive cream solutions, and sometimes surgical treatment for relief for your chronic aches and pains. You get two steroids, a prescription anti-inflammatory, and a B-12. It's interesting. So that's not a technical medicine. cool term. Oh, dear Lord, I hope not. What would cause you as a, and I've never been in one of these either, Heather, what would cause you to go to this versus going to your family doctor and being referred out? Or are they a referral partner?

I'm just trying to think of the psychology of like, hey, I don't feel good. Let's go to the IV clinic versus let's go to the family doctor. it's so like mom i'm i'm gonna he asked hether but i'm gonna weigh in sorry hither i'm interrupting um my mom is an ophthalmologist they go to med school they do cataract surgery like things like that and ophthalmologists really look down on optometrist who only will do like prescription glasses and contacts but they can't do surgery on your eyes they don't know like about glaucoma and cataracts and things like that i mean they know about them but they they don't treat them. To me, this is kind of like a step below your doctor's office or your primary care physician.

And it seems like, so I googled this as you were talking about it, Michael, and this guy was a medic, the person who started it. It is listed, he listed it himself. His name's on there, on Biz by Cell. So he was a medic. And, you know, you can't, I don't think from a regulatory standpoint, Texas will allow anything pretty much. You can build, you can build a skyscraper. You don't have to have a GC license. But I think there is some regulation around who can probably give you an IV, right? So the way it has to work is there has to be, and Heather can overrule me if I quote this incorrectly, there has to be a supervising physician.

So somebody who is overseeing the whole thing, who is licensed by the state to practice medicine in order to do some of this stuff. So they do some gluteide, they do prescription. If it's a prescription medicine, it requires an overseeing doctor. That doctor doesn't even really oftentimes show up there. That doctor may be just getting paid mailbox money to give their license and check in to make sure that the, you know, whoever semi-trained person, whether it's a nurse assistant or whatever, is doing the stuff correctly. And so that's how something like this works. So the medic would have had to have found a doctor to allow him to do this stuff under the doctor supervision.

Same way kind of like the, you know, the urgent clinics work and stuff like that. There is one further kind of clarification there. So most states, and Texas is one of them, requires the entity that does the billing to be owned by that physician, by someone who is licensed to provide those medical services. So you end up with these weird situations. If someone who owns the business does not have that license, they bring in this medical director, but they have to create this pass-through entity that owns, that basically does all the billing. It's really hard for lenders and everybody else to get wrap their brain around because it's just, it becomes a pass-through entity. And frankly, it's just a work around around the regulations, right? It's a way of complying with the regulations.

Is that regardless of insurance or cash pay? That's regardless of insurance or cash pay. What it is, an MSO, that's what I'm describing, a medical service organization, is set up to get to to comply with the regulations that are local, usually. So they're state by state. Sometimes they're even more local than that. but they will typically require the billing entity, the actual business, to be owned by the physician that has the license. And that's where you end up with this workaround setup. And they're tricky and they're kind of expensive to set up.

And they become very difficult to explain to lenders and get lenders comfortable with. Whatever they're doing is like the way that I was thinking about it in my head, the pictures that Michael's flipping through. And I'm sure there's a lot of medical benefits to this. but going to a football camp, going to these big outdoor festivals, going to concerts, I don't know what the teeth have to do with this. You know,

those, you know, being around a college campus, those sort of things are how I view this of kind of industry or field. It wasn't so much the medical benefit of it. Just maybe it's because I associated with the hungover crowd. But it seems like they're doing that. And they do offer memberships.

I didn't really understand the memberships when Michael had it up on the screen of why someone would pay for that. I mean, it's like four shots a month. That seems pretty frequent. Hey, everyone. I just want to tell you that this episode is brought to you by Varevend, which is the only platform purpose built for independent sponsors and private market investors who want to move faster and eliminate friction. Varevend is cool because it combines investment management and secure instant payments into one platform. So that means capital calls, deployments, and distributions. They all work like Venmo.

One-click real-time transfers with no transaction limits and automatic reconciliation. So from raising capital to returning it, Verovan handles it all. Deal marketing, data rooms, KYC and accreditation for your investors, signatures, capital flow, dashboards for your investors, and even fund administration, accounting, and taxes. So whether you're raising a single deal or managing a full fund, VARAVAN gives you the speed and confidence to execute. execute all in one single platform. So you can check it out and learn more at veryvend.com, V-E-R-I-V-E-N-D.com. I talked to my friends who were ER doctors and as younger people,

they would go out and get super hungover and come and work in the ER the next day. And they said they just had a super secret way to fix it every single time. They'd come in 15 minutes early. They'd give themselves an IV of a saline bag and they were like right as rain. like the rest of the day. Like that was the super fix for it. I always remember that. I don't know why. Here's the memberships, Mike, to your point.

Yeah, I mean, they have options on here of $500 a month. So it ranges from, it looks like $50 a month, get you four B-12 shots per month. And then it goes all the way up to $500 a month. But if you're otherwise a healthy person, I don't know that you would pay for this. And that kind of takes me back to what I learned from somebody that was in the space. I think your repeat clients that are paying for that are probably using this to treat some kind of chronic inflammation, you know, joint pain or, you know, maybe they have in multiple sclerosis or something like that and they feel like this helps. But this is people kind of taking their health into their own hands. Maybe they think their doctor doesn't, you know, offer this kind of service and they believe it's helping them. That's what I think, that's who your repeat clients, I think, kind of tend to be in this business.

So, Heather, you, like, I know you have a lot of experience with med spas. Those would be more like, I think there's a little bit of overlap right in the Venn diagram in terms of the, you know, some of the new injections for like weight loss that it seems like this company's doing too. But they don't say anything on here about like, you know, like Botox and things like that. I think of, I associate more with like a med spa. Yeah, this is more like the health space of a med spa and, you know, the other type are usually the aesthetic space, which is usually just comes down to lip filler, like injections, lip filler and Botox type of injections. and it's more about aesthetics, and this one is more about health and wellness, and they're focused on, you know, and there's a whole, you know, there's a whole movement towards people taking wellness, you know, to an extreme these days and measuring everything.

And so you think, you know, that's part of the crowd that they're attracting. In addition to the hungover crowd, which I don't know where they fit into either one of those two, but they seem to be there too. Well, they're in Midland. And think about the guys that work on the oil, you know, the oil rigs and, all the service field guys.

I don't think they're going home at 5 o'clock when their shifts over and drinking orange juice. And they got to, you know, think about, and I highly doubt this was one of the, you know, thesis-sridden plays on it. But, you know, those guys that party hard and need to go back to work the next day. Maybe this is how. Yeah. I'm still blown away by the branding of the Jesus shot. Yeah.

I mean, that's great branding. but it kind of divides you. Not every customer is going to want the Jesus shot. You know what's really interesting about it is when I googled this guy's name, one of the articles that came up was like from a local paper, and it was an article highlighting how he is an atheist and his wife is Catholic and how they make their relationship work. So that was even more perplexing when you pulled up the Jesus shot thing

because I was like, okay, there's mixed signals here. but who knows, people can change over time. What was the franchise fee in there, Michael? It set it on his website. It was 38,000, I thought. And he's selling the franchise. He's trying to sell the location. He has one location and sell the franchise system.

Yeah, so the franchise fee is 38,000, and then there's a smattering of other stuff. 15,000 here, 5070s, like another 70,000 plus a lease. is what you're looking at for $150,000 startup. And let's go back to the front page where it was SDE plus revenue equals EBITDA. I looked at a franchise in the pest control space, and it was my first time looking at a franchisor, and they had a couple of company-owned locations, and their financials, at least this one, and it seems like this one might be similar.

It was pretty messy determining what was company-owned, what was franchisor-based, how they counted revenue, they counted EBDA. What was, it was one of my calls of the broker was this is too complex for my brain to handle. Right, right. So this is,

but literally Mills called it, it's, SDE says 710,000 gross revenue, 2.1 million and then EBITDA 2.8 million. So they literally just added those two numbers. So something's wrong here. If you're really buying 3 million of EBITDA for 12 million bucks, that's not a bad multiple,

but 710 is no good. I think if we try to work backwards into the math of what one of these locations might be doing, the upfront cost is only $200-ish,000. Yeah. I don't. It would be great if they were doing $3 or $4 million in EBITDAB. But I think it's obviously much less. Mm-hmm. The only bull case I see for this is there has been rapid expansion of medspas and tons of consolidation.

The only bull case scenario is the same thing is going to happen. than with IV company. And you would be getting in on the early end. The skeptic in me says, I would not be the lucky one, right, to get in on the early end of something and buying one location, one corporate location, and the franchisor, and then there's two franchisees. There's a reason why people who invest in franchisors do it at certain inflection points in the franchise doors growth, and they don't typically invest at this level.

They typically invest when there's, you know, 10, 15, 20, 25 franchise units because then there's proof of concept. And the churn has kind of worked itself out in the system. So the one thing that's nicer about this versus med spas is most med spa revenue is Botox and fillers. And part of the reason why the med spa industry is so fragmented is because people are very attached to their injector. And so injectors leave and you're very. your moat to competition is pretty limited. But something like this, for IVs, like nobody cares who's giving you the IV,

unless the person gives you the IV is an idiot, which I've had that happen to be in the hospital before. You know, this, this is, you know, you could get more attached to the brand, which I think I like that aspect of it. On the other side, there are a ton of established franchisorce wars in this space and in the med spa space.

This franchise concept is six, seven years too late. This guy should have done. in 2019. Well, he's been around since 2014. That's the other thing, right? Is that you've got a guy who has been at this for 11 years, and it doesn't seem like he's got an escape velocity. Again, why am I the lucky one who's going to be able to achieve that?

Pretty much. So I'm jumping to my conclusion. I'm thumbs up. Yeah, yeah. Let's go there. I don't know there's any other details we need other than, I don't know about you guys, but I really feel like going out to get a Jesus shot tonight. Anybody else?

Raise your hand? How far is Midland from you, Michael? It's like five, six hours. It's almost two-thirds of the way to El Paso, 80% of the way to El Paso. You got to really want it if you're going to go get it. Yeah, El Paso is fun Texas fact for you. El Paso is closer to Los Angeles than El Paso is to Beaumont, which is just east of Houston. Like, that's how far away it is.

It's really far away. Yeah. I did not know that. Yeah. Big state. Big State, crazy people. Okay, so Mills, you're writing a check for this one, or what are you doing? Thumbs down.

I don't even need the India. Heather. Thumbs down, I don't like franchisors in general. For all the reasons, Mills said, and I'm afraid that the IV space is a little more faddish than the Botox has been. So that's my reason. Yeah. Mike?

Yeah, I think I have a similar taste on franchise. and franchisees as Heather does. And I think the more niche you go, the worst luck that I'm going to have. And I think it's okay to be contrarian, but you can only be contrarian if you're right. If you're contrarian and wrong, you're just an idiot.

And it's niche, it's small, it's in a weird location, and it's in a space that I hate. Other than that, you think it's great? Yeah, I mean, I think the 12 million being, he puts on, I don't know if you saw, but he put on there the 12 million's negotiable. It's like...

Yeah, and said it right away. Negotiable. Yeah. No shit, buddy. Yeah. I'm ditto for everything you guys said. Awesome. Mike, you did a great job today.

Thanks. I appreciate it. Very well done. I hope you'll come back in the future. I appreciate you being here. I got to keep Mills humble. So anytime you need me back to keep Mills humble, let me know. Awesome.

All right, everybody. Thanks for being here for this episode. If you enjoyed it, please sign up for our newsletter. We would love to send you emails with random stuff about the deals and maybe you see something you like, or maybe you see something that will be kind of weird like this deal was today.

All right, catch you later. See you next time.