Acquire.com or Flippa for a Small Cloud or DevOps Shop?

There's a real difference between a signed retainer that renews automatically and a client who happens to call you back every few months for more work. Buyers, and Acquire.com's verification tools specifically, care about the first kind. If most of your revenue is the second kind, be honest about that in how you present it, since a buyer will find the difference quickly during diligence and trust erodes fast once they do.

A quick test: could you predict next month's revenue closely without checking in with any client first? If the answer is no, most of what you're calling recurring is really repeat business, and it's worth relabeling before a buyer does it for you less generously.

This is usually the deal-breaker for small consultancies. If clients hired the shop because of your specific expertise and every engagement routes through you, a buyer is really buying a job, not a business, and will price it accordingly, often with most of the payment held back as an earnout tied to your continued involvement. A shop with even two or three senior people who can run engagements independently is a fundamentally more sellable asset.

Write down, honestly, what happens to each of your top five clients if you took a month off with no notice. If the answer for most of them is that the relationship would strain or the work would stall, that's the gap a buyer will price into any offer, whether or not you raise it yourself.

Acquire.com's institutional buyers, search funds and strategic acquirers, generally look for enough scale to be worth the diligence effort, which can put a very small shop below their threshold of interest. Flippa's marketplace reaches a wider range of buyer sizes, including individuals looking for a smaller acquisition to run themselves, which is often the more realistic fit for a smaller consultancy.

Acquire.com doesn't charge sellers a commission on a standard listing. Flippa charges a listing fee and a success fee on close. On a smaller deal, run the numbers both ways, because Flippa's percentage fee, even scaled for size, can still be a meaningful chunk of proceeds relative to a modest sale price.

On a modest deal, it's also worth simply asking a couple of individual buyers you already know, other consultancy owners in your network, whether they'd be interested before you pay to list anywhere. A direct sale skips platform fees entirely, though you lose the structure and buyer screening a marketplace provides.

If the honest answer to the dependency question above is that the business can't run without you, it may be worth twelve to eighteen months of deliberately building a second layer of delivery capability before you list anywhere. A buyer will pay meaningfully more for a business that doesn't need you than for one that does, and that gap is usually bigger than any difference in platform fees.

That delay isn't wasted time even if you decide to sell sooner anyway. Documenting your processes and training a second delivery lead makes the business easier to run day to day, whether or not a buyer ever sees the result.

For a shop this size, expect the conversation to center on a base multiple of trailing twelve-month profit with a meaningful portion held back as an earnout tied to your own transition support, often six to twelve months. Treat the headline number as a starting point for negotiation, not the answer, and push to understand exactly what triggers the earnout payment before you sign anything. If a buyer's earnout terms are vague about what counts as a triggering event, get them rewritten in specific, measurable language before you sign, not after a dispute over a missed payment.

Answer these questions before you pick a marketplace:

• Is your revenue tied to signed retainers that renew automatically, or does it only repeat when clients happen to call you back?
• Can delivery run without you, or does every engagement route through you personally?
• Is the business large enough to justify diligence effort from institutional buyers such as search funds and strategic acquirers?
• Have you run the fee math both ways, since a percentage success fee can still take a meaningful chunk of a smaller deal?
• Would twelve to eighteen months of building a second layer of delivery capability raise what a buyer will offer?