Industry Research Checklist: Evaluate Any Sector Before Buying a Business in Australia (Free Download)
Good market research before buying a business in Australia means understanding the industry before you look at a single business listing. Most buyers get this backwards — they find a business they like, then try to convince themselves the industry is fine. That order of operations costs people a lot of money.
This free checklist gives you a systematic way to evaluate any trade or service sector — plumbing, electrical, cleaning, landscaping, pest control, HVAC, roofing — before you commit to searching within it. Work through it once for each industry you're seriously considering. By the end, you'll either have conviction about the sector or a clear reason to move on.
Why this matters more than most buyers realise
The best businesses in a bad industry are still fighting headwinds every day. The worst businesses in a great industry often stumble through. Industry selection isn't everything, but it's a multiplier on everything else you do.
I've seen buyers fall in love with a specific business — good margins, clean books, friendly owner — and ignore the industry dynamics entirely. In one case, a buyer paid a full-price multiple for a building inspection business six months before a significant regulatory change compressed margins across the entire sector. The business was fine. The timing was not. (He'd have known about the incoming regulation if he'd spent two hours on the Australian Building Codes Board website before he started looking.)
The sectors I watch in Australia — trades and blue-collar service businesses — generally have good fundamentals: recurring demand, high switching costs for customers, limited technology disruption risk, and genuine barriers to entry through licensing and reputation. But not all of them, and not in all geographic markets.
Before you start listing-hunting: spend time on the sector first. This checklist is that exercise.
What's in this checklist
The full checklist (below the gate) covers six evaluation phases:
- Market fundamentals — size, growth trend, cyclicality, and geographic concentration in Australia
- Regulatory and licensing environment — licences required, upcoming regulatory changes, state vs federal differences
- Competitive dynamics — how fragmented the market is, who the major players are, and what it takes to win
- Customer and revenue profile — B2B vs B2C mix, payment terms, contract vs project work, seasonal patterns
- Margin and cost structure — typical gross margins by sub-sector, labour dependency, materials cost volatility
- Technology and disruption risk — what automation is doing to the sector, what's changing in the next 5 years
For a good introduction to how different industries stack up in Australia, the What Type of Business Should I Buy scorecard is worth reading first — it gives you a high-level ranking before you go deep on any single sector.
Once you've done this industry-level work, the next step is evaluating individual businesses within your chosen sector. The Preliminary Business Evaluation Scorecard does that in 30 minutes per business.
These two resources work as a sequence: industry first, then individual business. Both are free. Module 2 of the Playbook covers the full framework for finding profitable businesses to buy.
For more on what makes a sector worth buying into, read how to find a profitable small business to buy and recurring revenue when buying a business — that second one is probably the single biggest factor in whether a service business holds its value across an ownership change.
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