BrightView Holdings: Attractive, But Not As Attractive As It Initially Looks

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Every investor has their own area, or areas, of interest. For me though, the most interesting thing is finding a company with a unique business model that you cannot come across by looking at any other or most any other firm. So you can imagine my excitement when I stumbled across BrightView Holdings (NYSE:BV), an enterprise that specializes in providing commercial landscaping services in the US. Some investors may not view this as a particularly appealing space to plan. But the fact of the matter is that management has done well to grow revenue over the past few years. Admittedly, its bottom line results have been less than ideal. But because of how cheap shares are at this moment, I think that it makes for a decent ‘buy’ prospect to consider.

A unique player

When I think about the commercial landscaping space, the first thing that comes to mind is that it must be dominated by small local firms that have established themselves as trustworthy service providers over the years. This assessment is pretty spot on. After all, in this $83 billion market, BrightView Holdings considers itself to be the largest player. But despite this, it boasts a market share of only 2.5%. The firm claims that it is roughly 6 times larger than the next largest commercial landscape competitor in the market. In total, in 2021 at least, it was estimated that there were over 600,000 enterprises providing landscape maintenance services across the nation. Around 75% of these are classified as sole proprietors. Although this is the case, it presents a remarkable opportunity for companies to grow and consolidate operations, creating massive efficiencies as they do so.

Before we get in any further, we should touch on precisely what BrightView Holdings does for its clients and how it operates. In total, the company has a network of over 290 branches that it operates through that are spread across 34 states. Through these branches, the company runs two distinct operating segments. The first of these is the Maintenance Services segment. Based on data …

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