Custom blinds & window treatments
Santa Clara County, CA · name withheld in the free edition Why no names?
Contents
1What you're buying
The dealer seat where the brand pays you.
No franchise fee, no royalty, no ad fund - Hunter Douglas's dealer program is free and pays a volume rebate. A franchisee in this trade pays $89,950 up front plus royalties for a worse seat.
Thirty years on one of the Peninsula's busiest roads.
A one-person dealership selling design consultations, measuring, and made-to-order window treatments to some of the wealthiest homeowners in the country.
Our rebuild came out ABOVE the seller's claim.
Strip out the royalty a benchmark would impose (there is none) and the staff wages (there are none): our normalized view of owner earnings is $203,999 against the $146,325 stated.
2Two ways to own it
The manager case prices one full-time selling seat at $64,900, sized to the owner's actual week. If diligence shows the owner also installs, add subcontract install costs - the listing does not say.
Both ranges are our estimate, not the seller's figure. Each starts at its careful end.
3What the listing doesn't tell you
The business has a name and an address.
We resolved the storefront, its brand program, and two candidate owner names - subscribers get all of it.
The profit number depends where you read it.
Two platforms, two SDEs, 18% apart. The listing mentions neither the other version nor the gap.
Two of 6 findings. The rest are in the full file.
4The price and the verdict
1.7x the seller's SDE; the middle of similar listings is 1.9x.
Based on asking prices, not completed sales. A thin peer set: indicative, not a distribution.
+In the full file
Premium opens these for every deal in this edition and the four before it.
Each one written out, with what would close it before an offer.
What we like and what worries us, then the business, the earnings, the price, the risks and what to do this week.
Resolved by the desk to a name and an address; the original listing and the broker are in the member file. Why no names?
Written from the conditions and the open checks, in the order we would ask them.
What no document we found decides, and the document that would.
Five-year projections per basis with the downside, the scenario workbook, and every check with its evidence.
The name, the three conditions, and the questions for the broker.
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1,000 listings screened, 5 published · Edition No. 7, 12 August 2026. We have no stake in whether any deal closes.