Five minutes of QuickBooks read-only and a few quick questions surfaces what a buyer would discount your appliance-repair business for — how dependent you are on a single warranty network, how thin the margins on that work run, and whether dispatch and the key accounts run without you. Preview is free; $499 for the full memo.
Enter two numbers for an instant Appliance Repair ballpark. No signup — the real number comes from your books.
We answer each one from your books first — so you fix the story before a diligence team writes the number.
If most of your work is assigned by a single home-warranty company or warranty network, you don't pick your customers and you don't set your reimbursement — the payer does. A buyer treats single-payer dependence as the dominant risk in this trade: lose or get squeezed by that one relationship and the business changes overnight. Diversification away from it is the central value question.
If you run dispatch, hold the commercial and property-management accounts, and are the senior diagnostician, a buyer sees key-man risk, not a transferable business. A documented service manager who dispatches and holds accounts without you is the strongest signal that the company survives your exit.
Warranty-network jobs come at negotiated, fixed reimbursement, so gross margin compresses toward the parts-heavy low end — and you often front parts and labor while waiting on the payer. A buyer prices both the thin margin and the working capital tied up in truck-stock parts and slow warranty receivables.
Break-fix residential work is one-call-and-done. Without commercial and property-management service accounts or maintenance agreements, a buyer treats each job as one you have to re-earn through advertising — and prices it below a shop with contracted, repeatable demand.
Each lever is sized for a typical $800k–$1.5m revenue appliance-repair company, residential + commercial mix — about $160K EBITDA. Same number whether we frame it as “what a buyer discounts” or “what you keep by fixing it.”
Adding commercial and property-management service accounts and growing profitable out-of-warranty (retail) work reduces single-payer dependence and lifts margin at the same time. It's the move that most directly answers a buyer's biggest concern about the trade — and it's what shifts the multiple.
adds about 0.2–0.5× to your multiple · usually takes 12–18 months
Promote a service manager / dispatch lead with authority over scheduling and the commercial relationships, and document the dispatch and diagnostic playbook. An appliance-repair business that runs without the owner opens the broader buyer pool where the higher multiples are set.
adds about 0.3–0.6× to your multiple · usually takes 12–24 months
Clean accrual books that separate warranty from out-of-warranty margin, with a documented add-back trail and a handle on parts-inventory and warranty receivables, let a buyer trust the numbers — which protects the price you've already earned from a mid-diligence re-trade.
adds about 0.1–0.3× to your multiple · usually takes 3–6 months
Typical impact ranges blended from lower-middle-market transaction data, sub-$50M M&A databases, and observed consolidator pricing in the $300K–$3M EBITDA band. Directional, not a guarantee — your memo computes your actual numbers from your books.
The metrics buyers grade appliance-repair companies on. The diagnostic fills the “your business” column from your actual QuickBooks data.
| Metric | Appliance Repair benchmark | Your business | What it means |
|---|---|---|---|
| Recurring / contracted revenue | ~25% of revenue | Your data | Higher is better — the top multiple lever |
| Gross margin | ~45% | Your data | Pricing and job-costing discipline |
| EBITDA margin | ~13% | Your data | What flows to the bottom line |
| Healthy customer-concentration ceiling | top customer under 20% | Your data | Above it, buyers price the risk |
| Typical industry growth | ~3% / yr | Your data | Beating it can add to your multiple |
| Typical sale multiple | 2.5–4.5× EBITDA | Your data | Where the bidding starts; the levers above move you up |
Benchmarks are blended industry composites, service businesses $1M–$10M revenue, 2026-Q1 — directional, not a precise bar. Your memo measures you against your own books. Connect QuickBooks to fill in your numbers →
The diagnostic arrives as formats you can actually use, plus a private, scoped link to share a curated package with a specific buyer — you decide, card by card, what they see.
A branded slide deck, ready to present — for the buyer meeting, the lender, or the board.
A written diagnostic that holds up with buyers, yours to edit — plain-English summary, how we rebuilt your real earnings, every add-back listed.
Live formulas, not a dead printout — the path from raw profit to your real number, plus the cash-tied-up scenarios a buyer can stress-test.
Appliance repair is a fragmented, mostly owner-operated trade where the parts supply chain (Marcone, Encompass) and warranty networks (American Home Shield, Asurion) shape the economics. Buyers are largely individuals and search funds using SBA financing for local shops, plus franchise systems like Mr. Appliance (a Neighborly brand) and regional operators consolidating territory. The ones who pay up want diversification away from a single warranty payer, profitable out-of-warranty work, manager-run dispatch, and a strong first-time-fix rate. The memo maps which would actually look at a company your size and how each tends to structure the deal.
Read-only, through Intuit. We never write to your books. About 5 minutes.
Just what the books can’t show — agreements, key accounts, who runs the crews.
Buyer-readiness score, normalized EBITDA, value range and top flags — instantly.
The full engine, all three deliverables, the dashboard and the buyer deal room.
Start with the free preview. Pay once — $499 — only when you want the full memo. No subscription, no per-seat pricing.
Most Appliance Repair businesses in the $1M–$10M revenue range trade at roughly 2.5× to 4.5× normalized EBITDA, with a typical deal near 3.3×. Smaller, owner-dependent shops sit at the low end; larger, manager-run businesses with recurring revenue reach the top. Your actual number depends on your books — that's what the diagnostic computes, blending recent lower-middle-market closings, main-street marketplace sales, and academic M&A survey data.
An appliance-repair valuation begins where a buyer's QoE team begins: your reported earnings as the starting line. From there, the normalizing adjustments — owner add-backs, family wages, personal vehicles, one-time items — each tied to a specific QuickBooks transaction, producing your normalized EBITDA. Against that we apply a multiple grounded in recent small-business sale transactions for service-repair trades. The factors that move it up or down: how dependent you are on a single warranty network, the out-of-warranty vs. warranty margin mix, commercial and property-management account diversity, whether dispatch runs without you, and your first-time-fix rate. Every figure traces back to your books — never a revenue rule-of-thumb.
Diversification away from a single warranty network, a profitable out-of-warranty mix, commercial and property-management accounts, manager-run dispatch, a strong first-time-fix rate, and clean books. The diagnostic scores where you sit on each and shows what moving up would be worth.
Sixty seconds. Four numbers. No signup, no email. Just a real answer.