Five minutes of QuickBooks read-only and a few quick questions surfaces what a buyer would discount your cabinet and millwork shop for — how much of the designing and bidding only you can do, how tied you are to a few builders and the building cycle, and the CNC-and-shop-equipment replacement bill they'll subtract from cash flow. Preview is free; $499 for the full memo.
Enter two numbers for an instant Cabinetry & Millwork 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.
In most cabinet shops the owner draws the casework, runs the takeoff, and prices every job from experience. That design-and-quoting judgment is the institutional knowledge that doesn't survive a handoff unless it's documented and moved onto real shop software like Cabinet Vision or Microvellum. A search-fund or SBA buyer discounts hard when nothing ships — and nothing is bid — without you at the bench.
Cabinetry revenue usually leans on a handful of production builders, general contractors, or designers, and it rises and falls with kitchen remodels and commercial fit-outs. A buyer prices the risk that one builder re-sources its casework or pauses its starts, and underwrites the next slowdown rather than today's backlog. Heavy single-relationship concentration plus cycle exposure is what drags the multiple toward the floor.
CNC routers, panel and beam saws, edgebanders, wide-belt sanders, and a spray-and-finishing line are expensive machines, and a buyer normalizes the replacement bill straight off cash flow — this trade carries far more shop iron than an install-only contractor. Without a documented equipment schedule they assume the worst, and an aging router or a tired finishing line becomes a five-to-six-figure deduction from the price.
Experienced bench cabinetmakers, CNC operators, and finishers are in short supply, and the capability to hold tolerances and finish quality often lives with one or two people. If that craft knowledge isn't cross-trained or documented, a buyer prices the risk that the shop's quality — and its certified workmanship — walks out the door at close.
Each lever is sized for a typical $3m–$5m revenue custom-cabinet & millwork shop, residential + commercial-casework mix — about $450K EBITDA. Same number whether we frame it as “what a buyer discounts” or “what you keep by fixing it.”
Put your best production builders, general contractors, and kitchen and interior designers onto documented repeat-relationship terms, and add a commercial-casework line — store fixtures, healthcare and institutional millwork — that runs on a different cycle than residential remodels. It is the closest a fabrication trade gets to recurring revenue, and it lifts both margin and the multiple.
adds about 0.2–0.4× to your multiple · usually takes 12–24 months
Promote or hire a lead designer-estimator on real shop software and a production manager who runs the CNC floor and the finishing line. Getting the drawing, the takeoff, and the shop oversight off your shoulders is the single biggest lever to turn 'buying the owner' into 'buying a business' — and it's what lets the multiple climb toward an EBITDA basis.
adds about 0.4–0.7× to your multiple · usually takes 12–24 months
Clean accrual books with job-level material and labor costing, a documented add-back trail, a per-machine equipment schedule, and clear tracking of customer deposits and work-in-process let a buyer underwrite the shop with confidence — and protect the price 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 custom-cabinet & millwork shops on. The diagnostic fills the “your business” column from your actual QuickBooks data.
| Metric | Cabinetry & Millwork benchmark | Your business | What it means |
|---|---|---|---|
| Recurring / contracted revenue | ~10% of revenue | Your data | Higher is better — the top multiple lever |
| Gross margin | ~35% | Your data | Pricing and job-costing discipline |
| EBITDA margin | ~12% | Your data | What flows to the bottom line |
| Healthy customer-concentration ceiling | top customer under 25% | 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.
Custom cabinetry and architectural millwork is a fragmented fabrication trade where most shops are owner-run and sub-$5M in revenue. Larger commercial-millwork manufacturers with $2M-plus of EBITDA draw private-equity and regional-manufacturer consolidation interest, building scale and self-perform fabrication capacity. Strategic and larger-shop buyers acquire for CNC capacity, a trained bench, and builder and GC relationships; individual and SBA-backed buyers acquire owner-operated residential shops. The acquirers paying up want a diversified relationship book, a commercial-casework mix, documented CNC capacity, certified workmanship, and a floor that runs without the founder. The memo maps which would look at a shop your size and how each structures 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 Cabinetry & Millwork businesses in the $1M–$10M revenue range trade at roughly 2.5× to 4.5× normalized EBITDA, with a typical deal near 3.5×. 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.
A cabinetry 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 lumber cost spikes — each tied to a specific QuickBooks transaction, producing your normalized EBITDA. Against that we apply a cabinetry-specific multiple from recent small-business sale transactions, proxied from carpentry/woodworking and small-manufacturer data where no pure-play set exists. The factors that move it: how much designing and estimating only you can do, builder and designer concentration, build-cycle exposure, the CNC-and-shop capex a buyer normalizes, your custom-versus-commercial mix, and whether skilled cabinetmakers transfer. Every figure traces back to your books — never a revenue rule-of-thumb.
A diversified book across builders, general contractors, and designers, a profitable commercial-casework mix that diversifies off residential remodels, documented CNC capacity and shop throughput, certified workmanship (AWI Quality Certification Program or KCMA), a lead designer-estimator and production manager in place, and clean books with WIP and deposits tracked. 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.