When people ask why Verde Peak only acquires businesses in Arizona, they usually expect a story about market analysis. The honest answer comes first: Arizona is home. We were raised here, we came back here after the military, and we intend to be buried here. But sentiment alone doesn't justify concentrating everything we own in one state. The numbers do — and after acquiring and operating businesses here rather than just studying them, we believe the case is stronger than even we understood when we started.
We are no longer speculating about what it's like to buy a business in Arizona. In September 2025, we acquired Rite-A-Way Garage Doors & Gates, a ten-year-old essential services company in the Phoenix metro. In 2026, we partnered with Watson's Hat Shop in Cave Creek, one of the finest custom hat makers in the country. What follows is what we've learned — about the state, and about how to buy well within it.
The Tailwinds
People keep coming. Arizona added roughly 97,000 residents between mid-2024 and mid-2025 — about 266 people per day — and has added nearly 1.3 million people since 2011, a 20 percent increase. Maricopa County ranked first in the nation for net migration between 2023 and 2024. The state's population now stands around 7.6 million, and roughly 97 percent of its growth since 2020 has come from people choosing to move here. That last figure matters most. Birth rates rise and fall everywhere; migration is a referendum. Every year, hundreds of thousands of Americans look at the whole country and pick Arizona.
For the businesses we buy, population growth is not an abstraction. Every family that moves here needs a garage door serviced, a home maintained, clothes tailored, and a hundred other ordinary things done well. The companies that provide them are levered to the state's growth without needing to predict which technology wins the future.
Capital keeps coming, too. The most visible example: TSMC announced in July 2026 an additional $100 billion investment in its Phoenix operations, bringing its total Arizona commitment to $265 billion — ten fabs, two advanced packaging facilities, and an R&D center. Since 2020, Arizona has attracted more than 70 semiconductor expansions representing over $314 billion in investment, the most of any state. We don't buy semiconductor companies and never will. But investment at that scale doesn't stay inside the fence line. It becomes construction contracts, commercial buildings with gates and doors, high-wage households, suppliers, and service demand rippling through every trade in the Valley. When the largest manufacturing investments in American history land in your backyard, the businesses that keep the backyard running get busier.
The state stays out of the way. Arizona's 2.5 percent flat income tax is among the lowest in the nation, its regulatory posture is famously light, and its courts and licensing regimes are navigable by ordinary businesspeople without armies of counsel. None of this makes a bad business good. All of it makes a good business easier to run.
And the quietest tailwind of all: a generation of owners is retiring. Arizona is home to more than 600,000 small businesses, and a large share of their founders are approaching the end of their working lives without a succession plan. Here is the collision that defines our opportunity: demand for essential services is rising with the population, while the supply of experienced owners is falling with the calendar. Somebody must own these companies for the next thirty years. We think it should be people who live here, answer their phones, and plan to hold — which is to say, we think it should be us, and owners like us.
How We Buy — What Experience Changed
Our original methodology had four parts: understand the landscape, clarify objectives, build relationships, and conduct due diligence. Having now closed on the other side of that framework, we'd keep all four — and we'd describe each one differently.
Understanding the landscape is a residency, not a research project. We used to talk about studying market trends and industry analyses. We still do that. But the insight that actually led us to our first acquisition didn't come from a report; it came from living here — from knowing which trades were slammed, which neighborhoods were building, and which industries had reputations that outran their marketing. Market research tells you what happened. Being from a place tells you what's happening.
Objectives narrow with experience. We began with broad criteria and refined them the expensive way: by evaluating dozens of businesses that weren't right. Today the filter is sharp. We look for profitable, durable, essential companies — the kind that get called at 6 a.m. when something breaks — with real reputations, tenured teams, and owners who care what happens after they leave. We pay fair prices for good companies. We do not pay any price for perfect ones, because perfect ones don't exist.
Relationships are the market. The best Arizona businesses rarely appear on listing sites. They change hands through trust — a broker who knows you close, an attorney who knows you keep your word, a seller who tells his golf partner that the buyers did what they said they would do. Our first acquisition taught us that a seller isn't choosing a price so much as choosing a successor. We won our deal partly on terms, but mostly on the promise that the name stays on the truck and the team stays on the payroll. We've kept that promise, and in a state that still operates like a small town, keeping it is the best deal-sourcing strategy we have.
Due diligence is where love of the deal goes to die — on purpose. Before we owned a business, "rigorous due diligence" was a phrase. Now it's a memory of long nights inside financial records, customer lists, licensing requirements, and equipment histories. We verify earnings rather than accept them, we call customers, and we assume the numbers are wrong until proven otherwise — not because sellers are dishonest, but because small-company books are written for tax season, not for buyers. The discipline has cost us deals we wanted. It has never cost us a deal we should have done.
To these four we would now add a fifth, which only ownership can teach: the acquisition is the starting line. Everything that determines whether a purchase was wise happens after the wire clears — the systems you build, the people you develop, the standards you hold when nobody is checking. We spend far more time operating than acquiring, and that is exactly the ratio our investors and our sellers should want.
The Point
Arizona is growing in people, capital, and ambition, while quietly aging in ownership. That combination — rising demand for essential businesses, shrinking ranks of those prepared to run them — is the opportunity Verde Peak was built for. We are not visitors to this market testing a thesis. We are owners in it, with our names on the licenses and our neighbors as our customers.
If you own an Arizona business you've spent a lifetime building and have started wondering what comes next, we'd welcome the conversation. We plan to buy and hold, not turn and burn.
