Five minutes of QuickBooks read-only and a few quick questions surfaces what a buyer would discount your demolition and wrecking business for — how much of the bidding and disposal pricing only you can do, how tied you are to a few GCs and developers, the asbestos and hazmat liability they'll diligence, and the heavy-iron and high-reach replacement bill they'll subtract from cash flow. Preview is free; $499 for the full memo.
Enter two numbers for an instant Demolition 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 demo shops the owner scopes the takedown, prices the disposal and tipping fees, estimates the abatement, and decides the means-and-methods from experience. That judgment is exactly the institutional knowledge that doesn't survive a handoff unless it's documented and moved onto a repeatable estimating method. A search-fund or SBA buyer discounts hard when the company can't bid a wrecking job without you.
Demolition revenue is hard-bid project work tied to a handful of general contractors and developers, and demand follows their construction pipeline. A buyer prices the risk that one relationship re-bids the trade or its pipeline slows, and underwrites the next downturn rather than the current backlog. Concentration plus cyclicality is what pushes the multiple toward the floor — though a steadier interior/selective-demo book softens it.
Demolition runs into asbestos, lead, and other hazardous materials, governed by EPA NESHAP pre-demolition inspection and notification rules and OSHA abatement standards. A buyer probes your permitting history, abatement certifications, disposal-manifest trail, and any open environmental or safety violations. Undisclosed exposure — a missed asbestos survey, a citation — is a re-trade waiting to happen; a clean, documented compliance record is a real credit.
Excavators, high-reach demolition machines, the attachment fleet — shears, pulverizers, grapples, breakers — skid steers, and dump trucks are six- and seven-figure assets, and a buyer normalizes the replacement bill straight off cash flow. Without a documented equipment schedule they assume the worst, and a worn high-reach or a cracked shear becomes a six-figure deduction from what they'll pay.
Each lever is sized for a typical $3m–$6m revenue demolition & wrecking contractor, structural + interior/selective-demo mix — about $450K EBITDA. Same number whether we frame it as “what a buyer discounts” or “what you keep by fixing it.”
Get your best GCs and developers onto master subcontract agreements, grow the interior/selective-demolition work for commercial fit-outs and property managers that runs on a steadier facilities cycle, and capture the scrap and salvage stream deliberately. It's the closest a hard-bid wrecking trade gets to recurring, and it lifts both durability and the multiple.
adds about 0.2–0.4× to your multiple · usually takes 12–24 months
Put a non-owner estimator on the takeoff, document the means-and-methods and disposal/abatement pricing rules, and promote a superintendent who runs the engineering survey, sequences the takedown, and holds the GC relationships. 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 and recorded scrap revenue, a documented add-back trail, a per-asset heavy-iron and attachment schedule, and a clean asbestos/NESHAP permitting and disposal-manifest record let a buyer underwrite the business with confidence — and protect the price from a mid-diligence re-trade over hidden environmental exposure.
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 demolition & wrecking contractors on. The diagnostic fills the “your business” column from your actual QuickBooks data.
| Metric | Demolition benchmark | Your business | What it means |
|---|---|---|---|
| Recurring / contracted revenue | ~5% of revenue | Your data | Higher is better — the top multiple lever |
| Gross margin | ~25% | 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 | ~4.5% / yr | Your data | Beating it can add to your multiple |
| Typical sale multiple | 3.0–6.0× 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.
Demolition is a fragmented, equipment-intensive, cyclical trade drawing rising consolidation interest as infrastructure, data-center, and reshoring build-out lifts demand. Individual and SBA-backed buyers acquire owner-operated residential and small-commercial wrecking shops; regional heavy-construction contractors and lower-middle-market platforms roll up commercial operators for high-reach fleet, abatement capability, and GC relationships. The ones who pay up want diversified GC and developer relationships, abatement run to NESHAP and OSHA standards, a steadier interior/selective-demo book, a documented modern fleet, and a superintendent-run organization. The memo maps which buyer 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 Demolition businesses in the $1M–$10M revenue range trade at roughly 3.0× to 6.0× normalized EBITDA, with a typical deal near 4.0×. 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.
A demolition 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, scrap cash, one-time disposal spikes — each tied to a specific QuickBooks transaction, producing your normalized EBITDA. Against that we apply a demolition/site-prep multiple grounded in recent transactions, where the equipment base often sets a floor. What moves it up or down: how much of the bidding and disposal pricing is yours alone, GC/developer concentration and the construction cycle, the heavy-iron capex a buyer normalizes, asbestos and environmental exposure, your interior/selective-demo mix, and whether skilled operators and certifications transfer. Every figure traces back to your books — never a revenue rule-of-thumb.
Repeat-GC and developer master relationships beyond the owner, environmental and abatement capability that commands premium pricing, a steadier interior/selective-demolition book, a documented modern high-reach and attachment fleet, recorded scrap and recycling revenue, a clean safety and NESHAP compliance record, retained skilled operators, a superintendent and non-owner estimator in place, and clean books. The diagnostic scores where you sit on each and shows what moving up would be worth.
Often, on a per-revenue basis it reads as steadier. Structural wrecking is lumpy, hard-bid, and tied to the new-development cycle, while interior and selective demolition — commercial fit-outs, retail rollouts, property-manager strip-out — runs on a facilities cycle with smaller, more repeatable jobs and lighter equipment. A buyer credits a meaningful interior/selective book as a diversifier that softens the cyclicality of a pure structural shop, so the mix between them is one of the things the diagnostic weighs.
Sixty seconds. Four numbers. No signup, no email. Just a real answer.