Five minutes of QuickBooks read-only and a few quick questions surfaces what a buyer would discount your concrete business for — how much of the bidding only you can do, how exposed you are to one GC and the building cycle, and the pump-and-truck replacement bill they'll subtract from cash flow. Preview is free; $499 for the full memo.
Enter two numbers for an instant Concrete 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 concrete shops the owner does the takeoffs, prices the jobs, and holds the GC relationships. A buyer sees a job, not a transferable business — and concrete estimating is exactly the institutional knowledge that doesn't survive a handoff unless you've written it down. A search-fund or SBA buyer discounts hard when the company can't bid without you.
Concrete revenue is project work tied to a handful of general contractors and the new-construction cycle. A buyer prices the risk that one GC leaves and underwrites the next downturn, not the current boom. Heavy single-GC concentration plus cyclicality is the combination that pushes a concrete multiple to the floor.
Concrete pumps, mixer and dump trucks, formwork, and power/laser screeds are expensive, and a buyer normalizes the replacement bill straight off cash flow. Without a documented equipment schedule, they assume the worst — and a worn pump or aging truck fleet becomes a six-figure deduction from what they'll pay.
Bonding capacity is a relationship between the current owner and the surety — it largely rebuilds at a change of ownership rather than transferring intact. A buyer who needs bonding for the work you do prices the risk that capacity resets post-close and caps the job size they can take on, until it's re-established.
Each lever is sized for a typical $3m–$6m revenue concrete contractor, flatwork + commercial mix — about $500K EBITDA. Same number whether we frame it as “what a buyer discounts” or “what you keep by fixing it.”
Documented, repeatable relationships with multiple general contractors — plus a growing decorative/stamped/polished and maintenance/sealing mix — make revenue more durable and less commodity than basic flatwork. It's the closest a project trade gets to recurring, 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 estimator and a project superintendent, and put your takeoff and job-costing rules on paper. Moving the bidding and field 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.
adds about 0.4–0.7× to your multiple · usually takes 12–24 months
Clean accrual books with job-level cost tracking, a documented add-back trail, and a clear picture of bonding capacity and working capital let a buyer underwrite the business 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 concrete contractors on. The diagnostic fills the “your business” column from your actual QuickBooks data.
| Metric | Concrete benchmark | Your business | What it means |
|---|---|---|---|
| Recurring / contracted revenue | ~8% of revenue | Your data | Higher is better — the top multiple lever |
| Gross margin | ~25% | Your data | Pricing and job-costing discipline |
| EBITDA margin | ~11% | 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 | ~4% / yr | Your data | Beating it can add to your multiple |
| Typical sale multiple | 2.5–5.0× 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.
Concrete is a fragmented, cyclical trade drawing growing private-equity attention — specialty subcontractors were a large share of construction-services PE deals, and platforms are rolling up concrete and surface-services businesses for scale and self-perform capacity. Strategics and larger contractors buy for crews, equipment, and bonding capacity; individual and SBA-backed buyers buy owner-operated flatwork shops. The platforms pay up for repeat-commercial relationships, a higher-margin specialty mix, transferable bonding, and a superintendent-run organization. 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 Concrete businesses in the $1M–$10M revenue range trade at roughly 2.5× to 5.0× 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.
A concrete 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 concrete-specific multiple grounded in recent small-business sale transactions in the trade. The factors that move it up or down: how much of the estimating only you can do, GC concentration and exposure to the building cycle, the pump-and-fleet replacement capex a buyer will normalize, your decorative/specialty mix, and whether bonding capacity and a superintendent transfer with the business. Every figure traces back to your books — never a revenue rule-of-thumb.
Repeat commercial-GC relationships institutionalized beyond the owner, a higher-margin decorative/specialty mix, a documented modern fleet, transferable bonding capacity, a project superintendent and lead estimator in place, 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.