A few minutes of read-only financials and a short questionnaire surfaces what a buyer would discount your body shop for — whether the cash flow still holds once your own estimator pay and a market rent on your building are charged against it, how concentrated you are in one insurer's referrals (with no contract behind them), and whether your equipment and certifications are current. Preview costs nothing.
Enter two numbers for an instant Auto Body & Collision 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.
Collision revenue isn't contractually recurring — it rides direct-repair-program referrals. If one carrier sends a large share of the work, with no contract guaranteeing any of it, a buyer treats that as concentration risk, not an annuity. Insurers re-score and de-list shops; a single scorecard change can move a big slice of revenue. The diligence question is blunt: what's your top carrier as a percent of revenue, and does the relationship survive a change of control?
In an owner-operated shop the owner usually writes the estimates and personally holds the DRP relationships. That's key-man risk wearing a uniform: when you leave, the carrier contact and the estimating judgment leave with you unless they're already transferred to a salaried lead estimator. Buyers normalize a real estimator-plus-manager salary out of earnings before pricing the deal, and discount further if the relationships are in your head, not the business's.
Collision real estate is often owner-owned, and the rent is frequently below market or zero on paper, which inflates EBITDA. A buyer re-books a market rent before applying the multiple — which can quietly erase a chunk of earnings — and then negotiates the building separately (buy or long-term lease). Settle the rent normalization and the real-estate structure early so it doesn't reprice the operating business late.
Equipment currency and people are the same risk in different clothes. A dated paint booth, no in-house ADAS calibration, or lapsed I-CAR Gold Class / OEM certifications mean the buyer must re-invest immediately — a markdown. And the labor pipeline is brutal: collision turnover has run high and the trade fills under half its annual technician demand. A shop with tenured, certified techs and current equipment is worth meaningfully more than a re-tooling-and-re-staffing project.
Each lever is sized for a typical single owner-operated shop, ~$2.5m revenue, ~15% owner-and-rent-normalized ebitda — about $400K EBITDA. Same number whether we frame it as “what a buyer discounts” or “what you keep by fixing it.”
Durable, transferable referral volume with no single carrier dominating is the most important de-risk for a DRP-heavy shop. Grow your second and third carrier relationships, win OEM-certified programs, and build customer-pay and fleet work so a buyer isn't betting the business on one insurer's scorecard.
adds about 0.2–0.4× to your multiple · usually takes 12–24 months
Promote or hire a salaried lead estimator and a production manager, and put the carrier relationships in the company's name. When the revenue-critical roles and relationships live in the business, a buyer can apply an EBITDA multiple instead of a key-man-discounted SDE one.
adds about 0.4–0.8× to your multiple · usually takes 12–24 months
A modern paint booth, in-house ADAS calibration, and current I-CAR Gold Class and OEM certifications remove the 'buyer must re-invest day one' discount and unlock premium OEM-certified work. Track your maintenance capex so it's a known number, not a diligence surprise.
adds about 0.2–0.4× to your multiple · usually takes 6–18 months
Strong cycle-time and touch-time KPIs, tenured techs, and clean supplement handling raise buyer confidence and speed insurer AR. Normalize a market rent if you own the building, and settle whether it's in the deal or on a long-term lease, so the operating business isn't repriced late.
adds about 0.2–0.4× to your multiple · usually takes 6–12 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 collision repair shops on. The diagnostic fills the “your business” column from your actual QuickBooks data.
| Metric | Auto Body & Collision Repair benchmark | Your business | What it means |
|---|---|---|---|
| Recurring / contracted revenue | ~10% of revenue | Your data | Higher is better — the top multiple lever |
| Gross margin | ~45% | Your data | Pricing and job-costing discipline |
| EBITDA margin | ~15% | Your data | What flows to the bottom line |
| Healthy customer-concentration ceiling | top customer under 40% | Your data | Above it, buyers price the risk |
| Typical industry growth | ~4% / yr | Your data | Beating it can add to your multiple |
| Typical sale multiple | 3.5–6.5× 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.
The collision buyer pool is tiered, and most single-shop sellers are add-ons. National PE-backed consolidators pay platform multiples for scale: Caliber Collision (Hellman & Friedman), Crash Champions (Clearlake), and Classic Collision (TPG). Public/strategic roll-ups include Gerber Collision under Boyd Group (which closed Joe Hudson's in Jan 2026) and Driven Brands (CARSTAR, ABRA, Fix Auto). They pay up for multi-shop businesses with a management bench and a diversified insurer mix; a single shop is usually an add-on priced on SDE, with real estate handled separately and an earn-out tied to the seller's carrier relationships. The memo maps which pool fits a shop your size.
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.
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Start with the free preview. Pay once — $499 — only when you want the full memo. No subscription, no per-seat pricing.
Most Auto Body & Collision Repair businesses in the $1M–$10M revenue range trade at roughly 3.5× to 6.5× normalized EBITDA, with a typical deal near 5.0×. 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.
Off normalized earnings, not revenue. For a single owner-operated shop, a buyer starts from SDE (your earnings plus add-backs and your salary), subtracts a real replacement cost for the roles you play (estimator plus manager), re-books a market rent if you own the building, and applies a multiple around 2.0–3.5x SDE. Revenue (~0.3–0.55x) is only a cross-check. Multi-shop operators trade higher, on EBITDA.
Because a 2+ location business with a salaried management bench and a diversified insurer mix runs without the owner and slots straight into a consolidator's platform — so it trades on EBITDA (~3.5–6.5x for MSOs, 7–10x+ for true platforms) instead of SDE. A single shop where the owner is the estimator and the DRP contact carries key-man risk that caps the multiple.
Diversify your insurer/DRP mix so no one carrier dominates; hire and document a lead estimator and production manager so the relationships live in the business; keep I-CAR Gold Class and OEM certifications current and your booth and ADAS equipment modern; tighten cycle time; and clean up the books — normalize owner comp and rent now so there are no surprises in diligence.
Sixty seconds. Four numbers. No signup, no email. Just a real answer.