Nine sectors known from the inside
The businesses I sell
I sell businesses in every industry. Nine of them I know from the inside, because I have run, built or worked in them. The rest I sell using the same process, the same buyer research and the same discipline.
Nine published seller guides, and the same process for every other industry. Last updated 15 September 2026.
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What businesses does Tony Pope sell?
Businesses in every industry. Nine sectors are known from the inside, through running, building or working in them: e-commerce and retail, transport and logistics, earthmoving and civil, construction and trades, mining services, window furnishings and interiors, toy and gift retail, turf farms, and workplace safety consultancy. Every other industry gets the same process and the same discipline.
- Businesses in every industry are sold. The listed sectors are where the operating background runs deepest, not a limit on what is taken on.
- Sector experience means buyers get spoken to in their own language from the first meeting.
- The fundamentals that set value are the same in every business: normalised earnings, owner dependence, customer concentration, recurring revenue, transferable systems and clean records.
Industries I know from the inside
There are nine industries where I do not need the learning curve. I have run businesses in some of them, worked in senior operational roles in others, and spent years alongside the rest. When an owner in one of these sectors describes their business, I already understand how it makes money, what the pressure points are and what a buyer will ask before they ask it.
That matters more than it sounds. A broker who has to learn your industry during the sale process learns it at your expense, usually in due diligence when a buyer asks something the broker cannot answer.
The nine, and what each one turns on
| Sector | The licence or accreditation question | What moves the price most |
|---|---|---|
| Earthmoving, plant & civil | No QBCC class exists for earthmoving, bulk excavation or civil. Drainage is licensable at any value. | Secured work still to be performed, and fleet condition measured by service meter hours and major component life. |
| Transport & logistics | Heavy Vehicle National Law. Accreditation under the NHVAS does not follow a change of owner on its own. | The split between contracted and spot revenue, lane by lane, and fleet age. |
| Construction & building | A QBCC contractor licence attaches to the legal entity. The Act contains no transfer provision. | The forward order book, work in progress accuracy, and open retentions. |
| Mining services & supply | No single licence. Coal and mineral mines sit under separate Acts with separate inspectorates. | Whether the revenue sits on a contract with a defined scope or on a relationship. |
| E-commerce & retail | No occupational licence. The .com.au domain is licensed rather than owned, under the auDA rules. | Repeat purchase behaviour by cohort, and contribution margin after commission, fees and freight. |
| Window furnishings & interiors | No trade licence as such. Building work valued over $3,300 pulls you inside QBCC licensing. | The remake rate, because it captures measurement, fabrication and supplier accuracy in one number. |
| Toy, gift & hobby retail | No occupational licence. Mandatory product safety standards bind you instead, and an importer is the manufacturer. | Gross margin return on inventory rather than turnover, and how much of the year lands in one quarter. |
| Turf farms | No licence to grow turf. The water is licensed under the Water Act 2000, and usually the variety is too. | Reliable water, plantable hectares, and distance to the delivery market. |
| OH&S consultancy & training | No licence to consult. An RTO is registered by ASQA, and registration cannot move between legal entities. | Recurring retainer revenue against one-off project work, and whether delivery continues without you. |
Each row is a summary of that sector’s full guide, which names the Act, the regulator and the register behind it.
E-commerce & retailRan a national online window furnishings retailer, and co-founded and sold a toy business built to several million a year.
Transport & logisticsTwenty years around trucks, trailers and fleets, and what a financier looks at before your profit.
Earthmoving, plant & civilIndustrial auction and remarketing. Machine hours, condition and the difference between the two.
Construction & buildingThe QBCC licence question comes before the price question, every single time.
Mining services & supplyPrequalification status and safety record price straight into the multiple in this sector.
Window furnishings & interiorsRan one. Custom manufacture, measure and install, and where the revenue ceiling actually sits.
Toy, gift & hobby retailCo-founded one with my wife, built it across store and online, and sold it. I have sat on your side of this.
Turf farmsMy father in law built a turf farm and sold it to his competitors. A sector few brokers have been near.
OH&S consultancy & trainingCertificate IV in Training and Assessment, and safety training systems built from scratch. Including RTO risk.Nine published seller guides. Every other industry gets the same process, the same buyer research and the same discipline. View all seller guides.
What that experience actually is
More than twenty years across industrial auction and remarketing, dealing with heavy plant, earthmoving equipment, trucks and transport fleets, which is where you learn what machinery is genuinely worth as against what a depreciation schedule says.
General management of a national e-commerce window furnishings retailer, running custom manufacture, measure and install, which is where you learn that revenue in that trade is limited by installation capacity rather than sales capacity.
Co-founding a toy retail and wholesale business, building it to several million dollars a year across store and online, and selling it. Which means when I ask an e-commerce owner about their customer acquisition cost trend or whether their supplier agreements survive a change of ownership, those are questions I have had to answer myself.
Work in the workplace health and safety space, and close family exposure to major turf farming operations, which between them cover two very different sectors a lot of brokers have never touched.
Not in one of the nine? That changes nothing
If your business is not in one of those nine, that is not a problem and it does not make you a lesser client. Hospitality, health and allied health, professional services, manufacturing, automotive, childcare, agriculture, franchising, wholesale, fitness, personal services, technology. I sell them.
The fundamentals do not change between industries. Normalised earnings, owner dependence, customer concentration, recurring revenue, transferable systems, clean records and a credible growth story. Those are what a buyer assesses in every business ever sold. What changes is which of them matters most and what the specific questions look like, and that is learnable for any sector with proper preparation.
Where I do not have direct industry experience, I say so, and I do the work to understand your business properly before it goes near a buyer. That is a better answer than pretending expertise I do not have.
What you get either way
The same process regardless of sector. A free confidential market appraisal so you know your number before you decide anything. Preparation work identifying what a buyer will question and what is worth fixing first. Confidential marketing that does not expose you to staff, customers or competitors. Buyer qualification so you are not wasting time on people who cannot complete. And management of the process from first enquiry through due diligence to settlement.
Behind that sits more than twenty years operating inside real businesses, and a buyer search run deliberately rather than left to an advertisement. That work applies to a café as much as it does to an earthmoving fleet.
Not sure whether it is worth asking
You are probably not selling this year. They are twelve months to three years out and want to know where they stand.
That is the single most useful time to ask, because there is still time to change the answer. The conversation is thirty minutes, it costs nothing, and nobody finds out you had it. If the honest answer is that your business is not saleable in its current state, I will tell you that too.
Who you would actually be dealing with
Tony Pope holds Queensland Office of Fair Trading licence 4963575 and is a member of the Australian Institute of Business Brokers.
What sits behind the licence is more than twenty years of operating and asset disposal work. Eight years as a regional sales manager at the world’s largest industrial auctioneer, selling heavy equipment, trucks and machinery through global unreserved auctions across mining, construction, transport and logistics. Two years running national auction and fleet disposal for the Australian market leader in industrial asset remarketing, across a portfolio above $150 million and nine sites. That is where you learn the difference between what a machine is worth and what it fetches.
Then the operator’s side. He and his wife co-founded a toy retail and wholesale business, built it from a home based startup into one of Australia’s largest independent children’s and educational toy retailers carrying over 4,000 SKUs and turning over several million dollars a year, and sold it. He has sat on the seller’s side of due diligence with his own money on the outcome. He then spent two years as general manager of a global made to measure window furnishings retailer, and a year building learning management systems and safety training programs for transport, logistics and construction businesses.
The turf connection is family rather than his own. His father in law spent a working life growing turf in Queensland, built the business to substantial scale on licensed soft leaf buffalo, and sold it to his competitors. Where a sector guide on this site rests on research rather than on having run one, that guide says so in its own words. Construction and mining services both say it plainly. That is a better answer than pretending expertise he does not have.
Shares in a private company are a financial product under the Corporations Act. Tony Pope does not hold an Australian Financial Services Licence and does not give financial product advice. Nothing on this page is a recommendation to buy or sell shares.
Tony Pope is not a registered tax agent and is not a solicitor. This page explains how these things generally work so you can have a better conversation with your accountant and your lawyer. Your contract should be drafted and reviewed by a solicitor.
Questions people ask
3 of the 16 answered in full on the questions page for this topic.
What sectors does Tony Pope sell businesses in?
Every sector. Nine of them have a published seller guide written from operating background: earthmoving and civil, transport and logistics, construction and building, mining services, e-commerce and retail, window furnishings and custom interiors, toy and gift retail, turf farms, and workplace health and safety consultancy and training.
Do I need a broker who has worked in my industry?
Not strictly, but it changes two things that cost money. The first is how quickly a buyer is qualified, because someone who knows the sector can tell a serious enquiry from a tyre kicker in one conversation.
Questions owners ask before they pick up the phone, all 16 of them.
Go deeper
The long form, where it belongs
The full detail is on the pages below, each on its own page.
Check it yourself12 primary sources
Primary sources, none of them affiliated with me and none of them endorsing this site. Where anything here differs from an official source, the official source is right.
The terms that come up in every first conversation8 definitions
Plain definitions of the words a buyer, a financier or an accountant will use, so the first meeting is not spent translating.
A licensed broker’s opinion of the likely selling price of a specific business, supported by comparable evidence. It is not a valuation. A valuation is a formal engagement performed to a professional standard, usually by an accountant, and it is the document a court, a lender or the Australian Taxation Office will want.
Reported profit with the owner’s wage, personal expenses, interest, depreciation and genuine one-off costs added back. It is what a buyer is actually purchasing. Every multiple quoted anywhere is applied to adjusted earnings, never to reported profit, so the two figures are never comparable.
The figure adjusted earnings are multiplied by to reach a price. It is set by how safe and how transferable those earnings are, not by the industry alone. Owner dependence, customer concentration, the quality of the records and the security of forward work move it further than the sector does.
A buyer already operating in your industry, buying capability, capacity, territory, licences or accreditation rather than a job. In eight of the nine sectors on this page, trade buyers pay the top of the range, because they can use what a private buyer cannot.
In a share sale the buyer acquires the company itself, so licences, contracts, registrations and liabilities stay where they are. In an asset sale the buyer acquires the plant, the stock, the goodwill and the contracts, and anything issued to the old entity does not travel. The choice is often decided by a licence rather than by tax.
The share of the business that stops, or degrades, when you leave. It is measured through who holds the customer relationships, who prices the work, who holds the licence or accreditation, and who the staff answer to. It is the single largest downward pressure on a small business price.
The buyer’s verification of everything you have told them, run by their accountant and solicitor against source documents. It is where a price agreed in principle either survives or gets renegotiated. Preparation shortens it, and a short due diligence is worth money.
The Fair Work Act term for what happens to employees when a business changes hands. Where employees transfer, service is generally recognised and accrued entitlements follow, which is a real number on the settlement statement rather than a formality.
Ask what it is worth
Free, in writing, and nobody finds out you asked. Tell me the trade and the suburb and I will do the rest.
Nobody finds out you are selling. This goes to me only, into my own database in Sydney. I will not contact your accountant, your landlord, your bank or your staff, ever, unless you ask me to.
If you would rather not put anything in writing yet, ring 0431 124 128. Prefer to pick a time yourself? Book a time in my diary.
Find out what your business is worth
Whether your industry is one of the nine or not, the first step is the same. Thirty minutes, your real figures, and a straight read on where the business sits today.