Building on what has been built.
A family holding company formed to acquire one established New England business — and to operate it, in person, for the next thirty years.
One business. Bought once, run for good.
Most owners weighing what comes next get two kinds of offers. A private equity firm will fold the business into a portfolio and manage it from a spreadsheet in another state. A competitor will absorb it, keep the customer list, and cut whatever overlaps — which is usually the people. Both are legitimate outcomes, and for some owners they are the right one. Neither is what most owners describe when you ask what they actually want for the thing they spent thirty years building.
Hecker Family Holdings exists for the owner who wants a third option: a single buyer who moves to where the business is, learns it from the floor up, and stays. We are buying one company — not a platform, not the first of ten — and we intend to still be running it in thirty years. That is the entire strategy. It is not complicated, and it is not a stepping stone to something larger.
That commitment shapes every decision that follows it. There is no fund life, no hold period, and no investor waiting on an exit. Growth has to come from the business getting genuinely better at what it already does, because with a thirty-year horizon there is no other place for it to come from.
Three things we hold to.
Not a mission statement. These are the three commitments an owner or a broker can hold us to during a deal, and hold us to afterward.
Focus
One business, one region, one operator. We are not running a national search while raising a fund on the side. New England is where we live and where we will stay, which means we can be in your building this week rather than on a call from three time zones away. A narrow search is slower for us and better for you: by the time we say a business fits, we have already done the work to know it.
Low ego
The business does not need us to reinvent it. Someone already spent years learning what the customers actually want, which suppliers deliver on time, and which person to call when something breaks at six in the morning. That knowledge is most of what we are buying. Our first job is to learn it, not to replace it — so we will ask a great many questions before we change anything, and we will change less than you expect.
The long game
Every decision gets measured against the version of this business that exists in year thirty, not year three. That rules out the easy moves: deferred maintenance, thin staffing, price increases the market will not forgive twice. It also permits reinvestment that would never survive a five-year clock. Compounding is the only advantage we are counting on, and it does not work if you are planning to leave.
Two audiences, one standard.
Brokers and owners are asking different questions about the same transaction. Here are honest answers to both.
What you can expect from us
- Financing conversations already underway before we ask for an introduction
- A clear yes or no in weeks, with the reasoning either way
- Direct contact with the buyer — no analyst layer, no gatekeeper
- We do not retrade. If diligence matches what you represented, the price holds.
- Confidentiality treated as a condition of the relationship, not a formality
What we commit to for your business
- Your employees keep their jobs and their titles
- Your name stays on the door for as long as you want it there
- A transition on your timeline — three months or three years
- An operator on site, not an owner reviewing a monthly report
- One person to call afterward, who will still be there when you do
to come
About the founder
Nearly a decade in operations and supply chain — as a consultant, as Head of Supply Chain Sourcing at Wayfair, and, earlier, inside manufacturing shops with fewer than ten people on the floor. Most recently responsible for roughly $150 million in annual spend, where the work was less about cutting and more about getting demand, process, and sourcing to line up with each other.
The small shops are what stuck. In a ten-person business a good decision shows up on the floor the same week; in a large one it disappears into a quarterly review. That is the difference that led here — and the reason for buying one company rather than assembling many.
Investment criteria
Starting points, not hard walls. A business sitting just outside these is still worth a conversation — the geography is the one line we hold firmly.
Financial profile
- Revenue
- $[X]M – $[Y]M annually
- SDE / EBITDA
- $[X]K – $[Y]K
- Profitability
- [N]+ consecutive years of positive earnings
- Margin
- [N]%+ SDE as a share of revenue
Revenue quality
- Recurring or repeat revenue
- [N]%+ from contractual, recurring, or repeat-customer sources
- Customer retention
- [N]%+ annual retention preferred
- Revenue stability
- No single year of decline greater than [N]% over the trailing three years
Risk profile
- Customer concentration
- No single customer above [N]% of revenue
- Capital intensity
- Maintenance capital expenditure under [N]% of revenue
- Owner dependence
- [Describe the level of owner involvement you can absorb]
Company profile
- Operating history
- [N]+ years in business
- Employees
- [X] – [Y]
- Management depth
- At least one experienced operational leader below the owner, preferred
- Geography
- New England — Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, and MaineNot a preference. This is where we will be living.
Bracketed values are placeholders. Replace every [N] before this page goes live — a wrong number here costs more introductions than a missing one.
Thinking about what comes next?
A first conversation is confidential and commits you to nothing. Tell us a little about the business and you will hear back from Ethan directly — not from an associate, and not from a form.
Get in touch ethan@heckerfh.com