Our Sectors
We Acquire in Five Sectors. All of Them Built on Real Operations.
Superposition only acquires businesses we are equipped to operate. These are the sectors where we have the expertise and the intent to run what we buy.
Sector Focus
Why Sector Focus Matters
Our sector focus reflects what we are equipped to operate, not what is trending. The businesses we pursue share characteristics that make them suited to the Superposition Method: durable cash flow, recurring customers, trained workforces, and owners who built something over decades and want to know it will continue. Here is where we work.
Information Technology and Managed Services
Managed service providers and IT services firms run on contracted, recurring revenue. The business model is the most stable in our acquisition universe: clients pay monthly for technology infrastructure management, security, support, and continuity services they cannot do without. The margins are high, the customer relationships are long, and the businesses are built on contracts and institutional trust rather than individual transactions.
Owners who built managed service practices in the 1990s and 2000s have spent three decades accumulating client relationships, technical processes, and operational systems that most buyers undervalue. They see the customer list. We see the contract depth, the client tenure, and the institutional knowledge that makes those customers stay. Those things are not the same.
The transition is the primary risk in this sector, and it requires planning. When an IT services founder exits, clients notice. The right transition protocol — one that introduces new technical leadership before the sale, not after — is what protects the revenue. We know what that transition looks like, and we plan for it before the deal closes, not after.
Metal Finishing and Surface Treatment
A metal finishing business performs a specified surface treatment on a customer-supplied part and returns it. These businesses do not manufacture components. They sell process expertise — shot peening, heat treating, anodizing, and related services — executed to published standards and documented specifications. The revenue model is service hours billed against defined process parameters. The work is repeatable, verifiable, and does not depend on the owner's judgment on every job.
The customers are in aerospace, defense, automotive, and general industrial manufacturing, and they return because the shop holds the process approvals, employs the trained technicians, and produces the certifications their own quality systems require. A shop that has earned AS9100 registration or Nadcap accreditation has built a defensible position that takes years to replicate. Those approvals are not incidental to the business. They are the business.
This sector is extremely fragmented. Hundreds of independent shops nationally, many founder-owned and approaching succession, with no institutional consolidator operating below the private equity threshold. If you built a surface treatment operation over decades and are thinking about what happens to it when you step back, the question of who takes over — and whether they understand the work — matters more here than almost anywhere else. We understand the work.
Hospitality, Tourism, and Culture
Hotels, event venues, established tourism operations, and cultural institutions represent a category of business where the general manager model is not an aspiration — it is the standard operating structure. Independent properties have been run by professional GMs for as long as the hospitality industry has existed. A capable operator can step in without the founder present and keep the business running from the first week.
Real property is often involved. The owner of a business in this sector is frequently its public face and has earned the right to be concerned about character and continuity after a sale. We do not acquire these businesses to rebrand them or strip what makes them work. An established hotel or venue built its reputation over years of consistent service. We have no interest in dismantling it.
The honest complexity in this sector is capital intensity. Properties require ongoing maintenance, equipment replacement, and seasonal planning that places continuous demands on cash. A seller who has managed that complexity for twenty years should expect a buyer who understands it and has priced it into the deal — not one who discovers it in the first year of operations.
Staffing and Recruiting
Staffing and recruiting businesses produce contracted revenue from client companies that depend on a consistent supply of labor or placement services they cannot reliably source themselves. The clients attach to service quality and delivery consistency — not to the founder personally in the way a client of an accounting firm or law practice does. That distinction is fundamental to how these businesses transfer.
The branch manager model is the standard operating structure in staffing, and it is native to absentee ownership in a way that most businesses are not. The coordinator, the branch manager, and the client relationship are what hold the business together after a founder exits — not the founder's continued presence. We acquire staffing and recruiting firms. We do not acquire accounting firms, engineering consultancies, or management consulting practices, where the founder's credentials and personal relationships are typically the revenue itself.
If you built a staffing or recruiting operation — generalist, industrial, specialty, or executive — and are thinking about your exit, we want to understand what you built and whether it matches what we look for.
Food and Livestock Products — Specialty
Regional specialty food distribution, value-added processing, and specialty production businesses have real assets, established customer relationships, and owners whose identity is often tied directly to what they built. These businesses — regional beverage distributors, specialty meat processors, artisan food manufacturers with established retail or food service accounts — built genuine market positions through product quality, regional depth, or specialty categories that national distributors do not serve well.
This is not commodity food. Commodity processing operations — grain elevators, commodity packing houses, large-scale dairy processing — operate on margins that cannot sustain a leveraged acquisition. The businesses we pursue in this sector are ones that built pricing power through specialty, quality, or customer relationships that are not easily replaced.
Continuity matters here in ways that go beyond the financial statement. Recipes, supplier relationships, USDA and FDA compliance programs, and the institutional knowledge of a long-tenured production team are the assets that make a specialty food business run. A new owner who does not understand that the compliance program is as important as the equipment list will damage the business before the first year is out. We understand it.
Is Your Business in One of These Sectors?
If you built something in one of these areas and you are thinking about your exit, we would like to understand what you built.