When a service business is sold, the seller does not determine the price, the buyer does. Customer relationships are loosely held in the transportation business. When presented with a customer list, you may not need to buy the business at all. The customers can be gained by offering the first two loads free if you are willing to offer that deal as a loss leader. There is nothing secret about a customer list. It takes little effort to figure out who ships freight in a given community and who to contact about it. If a customer list is worth anything at all, it is worth only what someone else is willing to pay; which would be very little, I believe. Nor would driver retention be somethign to count on if a business was sold. Turnover in trucking is high even without the business being sold. And you may not want the drivers the previous owner hired anyway.
I have to disagree with this. Carriers buy other carriers all the time. If the carrier being sold happens to be non-asset based there is not a lot of tangible assets to be sold other than real estate and. office equipment. I'm sure that some of those carriers may be on the brink of bankruptcy and willing to sell at a minimal price, but not all. In recent history (last few years), we have Exress-1, Conway Now and NLM sold. I'm sure that each of those fetched price much higher than the value of their tangible assets.
Those carriers and NLM (a freight brokerage) had more to offer the buyer than tangible assets. They had a solid customer base, an established fleet of contractors, office personnel and senior management on place to run the business.
I do believe that intangible assets have value. I believe that the correct accummulation of intangible assets is worth far more than the tangible assets of company.
On a MUCH smaller level, I personally bought a truck and trailer once from a lady whose husband had been killed in ATV accident. The job he was working with the truck came with the sale. The customer was onboard with arrangement and I paid about 20% more for the equipment than it was actually worth to get the customer. I had a second truck at the time which was struggling to stay busy. Within a month's time both trucks were running steady for that customer. The job lasted for over a year and proved to be well worth the extra money that I paid over and above the actual value of the tangible assets.
