A few minutes of read-only financials and a handful of questions surfaces what a buyer would discount your refrigeration business for — how much of the top line is recurring service and PM contracts versus one-time install, the grocery- and restaurant-chain concentration they'll probe, and the EPA-608 technician depth and truck-fleet bill they weigh. Preview is free; $499 for the full memo.
Enter two numbers for an instant Commercial Refrigeration 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 refrigeration shops the owner is the one who commissions the rack systems, diagnoses the hardest compressor calls, and holds the chain relationships. A buyer treats that as buying your hands and your contacts rather than a transferable business — if the diagnostic skill and the accounts leave with you, the service promise collapses. Owner-as-lead-tech is the single biggest haircut applied to this trade, and certified refrigeration techs are too scarce to backfill quickly.
If a single grocery, restaurant, or convenience chain makes up an outsized share of revenue, a buyer prices the risk that it re-bids its national service or slows store growth — and that the account knows it's load-bearing and can squeeze you on price. Some conservative SBA lenders cap how much of one customer they'll underwrite at all, so heavy chain concentration pulls the value toward the floor.
Buyers pay the most for the recurring book — service and preventive-maintenance agreements with 24/7 emergency coverage that survive a change of ownership, sticky because a down cooler is spoiled inventory and a health-code failure. If most of your top line is one-time install and time-and-material break-fix, a buyer treats it as harder to repeat and prices it below a competitor with a deep contract base.
A financial buyer normalizes maintenance capex up to replacement and assumes a service-truck and recovery-tooling refresh in the first year or two — money straight off the cash flow they're buying. The EPA AIM Act shift to low-GWP A2L refrigerants adds a real diligence question about whether your tooling and stock are already compliant. Without a documented fleet schedule and an A2L-ready answer, they assume the worst.
Each lever is sized for a typical $3m–$5m revenue commercial refrigeration contractor, install + recurring service/pm mix — about $500K EBITDA. Same number whether we frame it as “what a buyer discounts” or “what you keep by fixing it.”
Put every walk-in, rack system, reach-in, and ice machine you install or repair onto a scheduled PM agreement, and price a real 24/7 emergency-service tier as contracted revenue rather than ad-hoc favors. Because refrigeration failure is food-safety-critical, that recurring book is the most durable revenue you have — it's the highest-leverage play a refrigeration owner has, and it lifts the multiple buyers across every type will pay.
adds about 0.4–0.7× to your multiple · usually takes 12–24 months
Develop a bench of EPA-608-certified technicians who can commission racks and diagnose compressors without you, and promote a service manager who dispatches, quotes, and holds the chain accounts on real field-service software. Moving the lead-tech work and the selling off your shoulders is what turns 'buying the owner' into 'buying a business' — and it's what lets the multiple climb toward an EBITDA basis.
adds about 0.3–0.6× to your multiple · usually takes 12–24 months
Segment the books so the recurring service-and-PM share is visible and provable, cost parts and refrigerant per job, keep a per-asset service-truck and recovery-tooling schedule with an A2L-ready answer, and document every add-back. Clean records and a documented, compliant fleet let a buyer underwrite the business confidently 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 commercial refrigeration contractors on. The diagnostic fills the “your business” column from your actual QuickBooks data.
| Metric | Commercial Refrigeration benchmark | Your business | What it means |
|---|---|---|---|
| Recurring / contracted revenue | ~30% of revenue | Your data | Higher is better — the top multiple lever |
| Gross margin | ~35% | Your data | Pricing and job-costing discipline |
| EBITDA margin | ~14% | 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 | ~5% / yr | Your data | Beating it can add to your multiple |
| Typical sale multiple | 3.5–6.0× 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.
Commercial refrigeration is a fragmented install-and-service trade, and the buyer pool splits by what you've built. Owner-operated, install-weighted shops where the owner is the lead tech sell mostly to individual and SBA-backed buyers acquiring a job they intend to grow. As a book tilts toward recurring service and PM contracts, diversified chain accounts, and a manager-run organization with EPA-608 technician depth, it attracts regional strategics and the private-equity-backed commercial mechanical-service platforms — the consolidators that prize exactly that recurring model, of which Service Logic (acquired by Bain Capital and Mubadala in December 2025) is the scale reference. The full memo maps which buyer looks at a company your size and how each structures a 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 Commercial Refrigeration businesses in the $1M–$10M revenue range trade at roughly 3.5× to 6.0× normalized EBITDA, with a typical deal near 4.5×. 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 refrigeration valuation starts where a buyer's QoE team starts: your reported earnings as the baseline. From there come the normalizing adjustments — owner pay above market, personal trucks, family wages, one-time refrigerant-price spikes — each tied to a specific QuickBooks transaction, producing your normalized earnings. Against that we apply a multiple grounded in recent commercial mechanical-service small-business sale transactions, the closest published proxy for the trade. What moves it up or down: how much of the diagnostic work and selling only you can do, your grocery- and restaurant-chain concentration, the recurring service-and-PM versus one-time-install mix, the truck-fleet and recovery-tooling capex a buyer will normalize, and whether EPA-608-certified techs transfer. Every figure traces back to your own numbers.
A deep book of service and preventive-maintenance contracts with 24/7 emergency coverage, a diversified account mix instead of one or two chains, EPA-608-certified technician depth beyond the owner, a service manager who dispatches and holds the accounts, an A2L-ready fleet and tooling answer for the refrigerant transition, and clean, segmented books that prove the recurring share. 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.