Specialty tank and reservoir cleaning business

A specialised environmental services company working Vancouver Island, the Gulf Islands and remote BC: water quality improvement, reservoir and tank cleaning, sediment removal and disinfection. It was established in 2013 and is held in a corporation.

Its advantage is one process. The company cleans reservoirs and tanks without emptying them, leaving customers roughly ninety percent of their stored water — safer, less disruptive, no expensive refill. More than 73 million litres of water have been saved that way, and it is what the business defends its niche with.

The customer base runs across residential, commercial, institutional, industrial and government clients, 1,313 of them active, and more than half of annual revenue comes from customers who come back. On $241,698 of revenue the business shows $129,127 of seller discretionary earnings and $13,826 of EBITDA, with $71,977 of equipment included at original cost.

Operations are systemised and the owners have already stepped back from the field, hiring administrative support and using trained contractors to do the work. That contractor-based model is also the growth model: the listing points at Google Ads on high-intent search terms, rural Facebook advertising aimed at private water systems, and direct approaches to municipalities, First Nations, parks, ports and property managers. Western and southern Vancouver Island are under-served, some customers are already asking for more than one clean a year, and enquiries arrive from outside the service area altogether — which leaves adding contractors, licensing the process, or expanding into the rest of BC on the table.

One of the owners is eighty and has never pushed the business beyond its home ground, which is the honest reason there is room left. He is retiring. Transition support runs up to a month in total, including up to a week onsite with the owner and the cleaning contractors, and because nobody is working in the field day to day the handover is expected to be straightforward.

The listing is explicit about the money: this is specialised enough that bank financing will want a larger equity injection, and buyers should expect a minimum down payment of about $250,000. Proof of funds comes before any proprietary detail is shared.