Selling Your Chimney and Hearth Business? Here’s What Buyers Want to See
Selling Your Chimney and Hearth Business? Here’s What Buyers Want to See
Taylor Hill
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Publication Note: The Fire Time Magazine appreciates the opportunity to republish this article, which was originally released on the FutureNow Marketing website. It is reprinted here with permission from Taylor Hill. Further use, duplication, or distribution is prohibited without the author’s written permission.
You spent years, maybe decades, building a chimney and hearth company that throws off real cash and has a name people trust. Now you’re thinking about selling, or you’re already in conversations with a buyer. And like most owners at this stage, you’re looking at the P&L and asking what you can trim to make the numbers look as clean as possible.
For a lot of owners, marketing is the first thing on the chopping block. It feels like a cost you can finally cut.
But that’s exactly backwards. When you’re preparing to sell, especially to private equity or a roll-up, marketing stops being an expense and starts becoming one of the highest-leverage moves you can make. Here’s why.
You’re Not Selling Your Past—You’re Selling Your Future
Buyers aren’t paying you for the revenue you already collected. They’re paying for the revenue they believe is still in the tank—the growth they think they can keep going after you hand over the keys. Everything in a deal comes down to one question in the buyer’s head: “How confident am I that this keeps growing without the current owner?”
Marketing is how you answer that question with evidence instead of a promise.
”Marketing is the lifeblood in the residential services industry, and when evaluating a partnership, it is important that a company has proven it can consistently generate both organic and paid leads that convert into sweeps and inspections that ultimately translate into long-term customer relationships. A strong marketing history, which includes durable SEO, strong Google reviews, disciplined paid search, clear service-area coverage, and visibility into lead quality and conversion, gives us confidence that the business has a scalable growth engine and is ready to take on additional investment.”
—Branson Tibbs and Rhett Hogan, Co-Founders, Village Partners Group and Chimney Collective
Private Equity Buys Predictability and Growth—and They Will Ask You to Prove It
At some point in the process, a buyer is probably going to look you in the eye and ask some version of this question: “What’s your marketing plan? Walk me through how you’re going to hit these numbers.”
If your answer is “we get most of our work from referrals and the phone just rings,” that’s a red flag to buyers—not because referrals are bad, but because referrals walk out the door with you. There’s no system they can take over.
If instead you can hand them a real marketing plan from a reputable, established agency—one that shows where the leads come from, how they’re tracked, and how the business is set up to grow year-round—you’ve done something powerful.
You’ve removed risk from their side of the table.
And in a deal, removing the buyer’s perceived risk is the same as raising your price. Buyers pay more, and argue less, for a business that comes with a documented engine they can simply keep running.
Removing the buyer’s perceived risk is the same as raising your price.
The Earn-Out (Where Bad Marketing Gets Genuinely Expensive)
Most deals these days don’t pay you everything up front. A big chunk of your money is tied to an earn-out—you hit (or exceed) agreed-upon revenue and profit targets in the year or two after the sale, and you get paid the rest. Miss those targets and your payout shrinks, sometimes dramatically.
This is the part owners underestimate. If you cut your marketing to tidy up the books before closing, and your lead flow quietly dips, you don’t just lose a little. You can lose a life-changing piece of your own payout.
Run the math. Say you trim a few thousand dollars a month in marketing to “save money” heading into a sale—call it $40,000 a year. That feels responsible. But if that cut causes you to come up short on an earn-out target, you could forfeit a hundred thousand dollars or more of money that was already half-promised to you. You saved the $40k only to lose six figures.
Looked at that way, strong marketing during your earn-out isn’t a cost at all. It’s cheap insurance on the biggest check you’ll ever cash.
The Other Things Buyers Quietly Care About
Beyond the growth story and the earn-out, smart buyers are scoring you on a few things most owners never think about:
- Owned, Transferable Assets: Buyers want to know the business owns its growth—the website, the Google Business Profile, the reviews, the rankings, the domain, the customer data. If your “marketing” is really just your personal reputation and your cell phone, there’s nothing for them to buy and nothing that transfers. A built-out marketing presence is an actual asset on the table.
- Decision-Making for Long-Term Growth: Buyers watch your recent decisions very closely. If you’ve run the business one way for years and then suddenly start trimming and cost-cutting right before a sale, sharp buyers notice, and it tells them you stopped operating like an owner who plans to be around. That signals the numbers they’re looking at may be propped up for the sale rather than built to last, and it makes them wonder what else got quietly cut. Running the business as if you’re never selling is, ironically, what makes it most valuable when you do.
“Cutting marketing to improve your P&L ahead of a private equity acquisition is definitely a bad idea. Sophisticated PE firms know exactly what healthy, growing companies spend on marketing—and more importantly, what it will cost to grow the company again after acquisition. While marketing spend doesn’t directly earn you a higher multiple, slashing it raises immediate red flags. Buyers will see right through squeezed numbers and recognize them for what they are: a short-term cosmetic fix that creates a long-term problem. You would never want to artificially reduce your marketing budget just to reach a better EBITDA. It signals poor management discipline and ultimately hurts your valuation more than it helps.”
—Mark Stoner, Founder, Ashbusters
- Independence From You: The more the business runs without the owner, the more it’s worth. A documented marketing system that generates leads on its own is proof the company isn’t just you in a truck with a good reputation.
- Clean, Believable Numbers: When the buyer’s team digs into the details, they want to see lead sources, tracking, and reporting that tell a consistent story. “We think it’s working” loses deals. Clear attribution wins them.
- A Brand Worth Keeping: Your reputation and reviews are equity. Buyers who see a strong, well-managed brand see something they can scale across other locations—not something they’ll have to rebuild from scratch.
The Timing Mistake Almost Everyone Makes
Here’s the trap: Buyers care most about your trailing 12 to 24 months—the most recent stretch of performance. You cannot flip marketing on the month before you sell and expect it to show up in the numbers that matter. By then it’s too late to influence the trend they’re seeing.
The owners who sell well started building the growth story a year or two before they ever talked to a buyer. So the right time to get your marketing right isn’t when the offer is on the table. It’s now, while you still have runway to put real, growing numbers on the board.
The right time to get your marketing right isn’t when the offer is on the table. It’s now.
Why This Hits Harder in the Chimney and Hearth Trades
Chimney and hearth is exactly the kind of business getting consolidated right now, and it carries a few traits buyers scrutinize hard. The work is seasonal, so buyers want reassurance the phone doesn’t go quiet for half the year. Demand leans heavily on repeat customers and referrals, which is great—until buyers realize those relationships are tied to you. And most companies in the space have never built a real, year-round lead engine, which means the few that have stand out dramatically in a buyer’s eyes.
That’s your opening. A chimney and hearth company that can show consistent, marketing-driven growth across the whole calendar is rare—and rare is what commands a premium.
Our Experience With Private Equity
At FutureNow Marketing, we don’t just understand what buyers want in theory. We’ve sat on the other side of it, repeatedly, with our own clients.
We’ve had clients get acquired—by private equity groups, roll-ups, and strategic buyers—and a telling thing happens almost every time: The new owners keep us on. They look at the marketing engine driving the business they just bought, they look at how it’s tracked and reported, and they decide the smartest move is to leave it running rather than rip it out. In a transition where buyers are usually cutting and consolidating vendors, getting kept is the loudest endorsement there is.
Then it goes a step further. Those same buyers start bringing us their other acquisitions. When a PE group owns six or eight companies in a space, the last thing they want is six or eight different marketing approaches they have to babysit. They want a partner who already speaks their language and delivers a consistent playbook across the whole portfolio.
The reason is simple: We’re already built for the way private equity operates. PE doesn’t want vague reassurance and a monthly “things are going well” email. They want defined strategies, clear attribution, and reporting that ties marketing spend directly to leads, booked jobs, and revenue—and that’s how we run accounts, not because a buyer asked us to, but because that’s the standard we hold ourselves to from day one.
So when you bring us in before a sale, you’re not handing buyers an unknown. You’re handing them a marketing partner they may very well already recognize—one who produces the reports they ask for, hits the kind of numbers they underwrite their deals against, and makes their life easier the moment they take over. For a buyer weighing risk, that familiarity is worth a lot. And for you, it’s one more reason the business looks like a clean, low-risk acquisition instead of a project.
The Bottom Line
Whether you sell in 12 months or five years, the marketing you build now does double duty. It grows the business you still own today, and it raises the price—and protects the payout—on the business you’ll eventually sell. Cutting it to dress up the P&L is one of the most expensive “savings” an owner can make.
If you’re heading toward an exit and you want a marketing plan you can confidently put in front of a buyer—the kind that builds their trust, supports your valuation, and protects your earn-out—that’s exactly what we do at FutureNow. Let’s build it before you need it.
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Taylor Hill
Taylor Hill is the vice president of the Chimney & Hearth Division at FutureNow Marketing.
