Work record / Capital / HighTide Capital

HighTide Capital: my job is to make the no come fast

HighTide Capital Group is a buy-and-build platform in Arizona, still looking for its first close. I run operations and integration, which means I source, screen and diligence every deal, and I am the one who would run the company the Monday after we buy it.

The seat

My seat is Operations and Integration Lead, and I have held it since 2025 through HighTide Capital Group, with Common Ground as the flagship. The platform has a capital partner who holds capital and structure and is the registered broker. I operate. I guarantee personally as the operator, and I take no transaction fee.

What I was brought in to decide

HighTide Capital Group was formed in 2025. It buys owner-operated trade-services companies in Arizona and holds them. The trades are painting, HVAC, plumbing, electrical, landscaping, excavation and glazing.

The seller we look for is in his sixties. The contractor's license is in his own name, he has no successor, and his business is worth real money only while he is still in it. Most sellers are owners and brothers who have cash sitting inside the corporation and no pressing reason to sell. On every deal, then, our real competitor is the status quo.

Anything the platform buys passes through me for sourcing, screening and diligence, and I write its operating plan. If we close, I run the business. The capital partner owns capital and structure. Any outside raise goes through a licensed placement advisor.

What we did

• I started by finding the actual constraint. Within two hours of Phoenix, twenty-seven brokers sell trade businesses, and their boards refill every week. A first-time buyer lacks a reason for a broker to bring it an offer ahead of a strategic buyer's. The problem was credibility and speed, wearing the costume of volume.
• I wrote the buy box before any deal had reached the platform, and gave the reason for each line. EBITDA of $500,000 or more, because diligence costs about the same on every deal. Enterprise value under $5,000,000, since seller-note financing gets harder to clear the larger a deal is. Margin of 15 percent or more, as a stand-in for pricing power. Ten years or more of owner operation. The business sits in metro Phoenix or about two hours out, so the operator can walk the yard. Last, the seller faces a succession or retirement situation. The screen behind the daily alert runs on a wider floor of $250,000 in seller discretionary earnings, so no bolt-on is rejected before someone reads it.
• We ran a multi-agent sweep overnight across eleven listing boards and broker networks, behind a verification firewall. Each row needed a live source link, and a listing posted on three boards counted once. It gave us three things: a ranked list, ten targets whose public financials were confirmed, and a named person at each Arizona broker that sells trade businesses.
• We sent a one-page buy-side mandate with the box spelled out. There were five variants, so no two brokers received the same note. Every address was validated and every general inbox was replaced with a named person. One broker replied to two inquiries within thirty minutes, each with a link to sign the NDA.
• Each deal goes on one board the day it arrives. Any shared surface uses codenames, and seller financials stay in the deal folder. We screen within twenty-four hours, and the analysis follows within forty-eight hours of getting into the data room.
• The platform has eight non-negotiable deal terms, written before the first deal. I tested them against the SBA 7(a) operating procedure and the revision dated October 1, 2026. Four of them failed outright. They were: the operating partner gives no personal guarantee; nothing is liened on the buyers' own balance sheet; payments never exceed half of free cash flow; and we can offset against a seller's tax exposure. The cure term and the no-acceleration term failed in part. The escrow and the entity structure held up. For the first deal we dropped SBA paper. Our default is now paper from the seller alone, interest-only in year one, and the seller keeps first position on what he sold.
• Five financing structures got the same set of inputs from me, and I priced each for debt-service coverage. One case was the base, with a single hired manager. The other was a downside with the estimator and project manager hired, which is what happens once the retiring owners stop estimating. Every structure that pays down bank-rate debt starting on day one breaks in the downside case in its first year. Only the seller-paper-only structure, interest-only in year one, stays over the platform's 1.20x floor.
• I fixed the close for December 31, 2026 and ranked that above price. Here is why. The SBA has a business-expansion category. Once we have owned for two full fiscal years, an add-on in the same industry group qualifies to be financed at a 1.15x coverage hurdle, and the equity injection can be reduced or waived. Close in December and that window opens in January 2029. A close in January 2027 pushes it to January 2030. Slip four weeks and every add-on loses a year of financing.
• I run the operating read on every target. I take the filed tax returns over the broker's recast. I look at the yard and the crew, and count trucks by odometer and engine replacement. I check whose name the contractor's license is in, separate contracted backlog from quoted work, and solve the broker's fee on a zero-cash close before anyone talks structure. Each letter of intent has one number, with a definition beside every term, and outside counsel has reviewed it as a template.
• We screened and modeled eleven businesses in painting, landscaping, HVAC, plumbing, remodeling and pools. We also looked at a portfolio of salon suites, an AI writing software company and a national general contractor, all well outside the box. Every one went through the same model, with each input listed. The verdicts: five go, one of those conditioned and one as a bolt-on; two marginal; four pass.

Results

• So far: 128 listings came in. Of those, 41 cleared the box, 13 are tracked, 11 are fully vetted and 5 are live.
• Nothing has closed. Our first offer is out to a commercial painting contractor inside the box. The counter is mine to give.
• Brokers started sending listings straight to us, some of which never reached the public boards. In ten weeks the program went from a sweep to a seat at the seller's table.
• Among the vetted targets we declined, more fell to the platform's own deal terms and the close date than to reported numbers that failed. Full diligence also found two things the box could never screen for. One was a state tax exposure larger than the price. The other was customer concentration over the threshold.
• I run an underwriting rule on every target. Run coverage on the latest filed year twice, first with a hired operator and then with me in the seat. If the deal covers only with me in the seat, that is a decision about the operator, and it is never a reason to pay a higher multiple.

The lesson

More listings were never the constraint. A pipeline with no deadline never becomes a schedule.

Public record

• HighTide Capital Group

Firm record

Common Ground keeps its own account of this engagement: HighTide Capital on the Common Ground wiki.

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