Five minutes of QuickBooks read-only and a few quick questions surfaces what a buyer would discount your drywall business for — how much of the bidding only you can do, how exposed you are to one GC and the construction cycle, and the quality of your backlog and WIP. Preview is free; $499 for the full memo.
Enter two numbers for an instant Drywall 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 drywall shops the owner does the takeoffs, prices the work, and holds the GC relationships. A buyer sees a job, not a transferable business — drywall estimating and the relationships behind it are exactly what don't survive a handoff unless documented. A search-fund or SBA buyer discounts hard when the company can't bid without you.
Drywall is project work tied to a handful of general contractors and the new-construction cycle, and construction volume has recently softened. A buyer prices the risk one GC leaves and underwrites the next downturn, not the current backlog. Heavy single-GC concentration plus cyclicality pushes the multiple to the floor.
Backlog quality and accurate work-in-progress accounting are critical valuation factors in drywall. If a buyer can't see a profitable, real backlog and a clean WIP schedule — over/under-billings reconciled — they discount for the uncertainty and the risk that reported earnings don't hold.
A skilled-taper/finisher labor shortage means your crew is both an asset and a risk. A buyer prices the chance your best finishers or your superintendent leave at close, and discounts a shop whose capability is concentrated in a few people without retention agreements.
Each lever is sized for a typical $2m–$5m revenue drywall contractor, commercial + residential mix — about $400K 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 — and a steady commercial tenant-improvement (TI) book — make revenue more durable than speculative new-residential work. It's the closest a project trade gets to recurring, and it's what a buyer credits beyond a single year's backlog.
adds about 0.2–0.4× to your multiple · usually takes 12–24 months
Promote or hire a lead estimator and a superintendent, and put your takeoff and job-costing rules on paper. Moving the bidding and field oversight off your shoulders turns 'buying the owner' into 'buying a business' — and is what lets the multiple climb.
adds about 0.4–0.7× to your multiple · usually takes 12–24 months
Clean percentage-of-completion books with reconciled WIP and a documented add-back trail, a profitable signed backlog, and a clear bonding picture let a buyer trust the earnings — which protects 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 drywall contractors on. The diagnostic fills the “your business” column from your actual QuickBooks data.
| Metric | Drywall benchmark | Your business | What it means |
|---|---|---|---|
| Recurring / contracted revenue | ~8% of revenue | Your data | Higher is better — the top multiple lever |
| Gross margin | ~22% | 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 | ~3% / 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.
Drywall is a fragmented, cyclical finishing trade now drawing private-equity attention — PE-backed platforms (e.g., the AVALT/VantEdge-backed drywall roll-ups) and large specialty contractors are consolidating regional shops, and distributor-side consolidation (L&W Supply) is active too. Buyers range from individual/SBA buyers for owner-operated shops to these finishing-trade platforms and regional commercial contractors. The ones who pay up want repeat-GC and commercial-TI relationships, a profitable backlog with clean WIP, transferable bonding, retained finishers, 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 Drywall 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 drywall 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 specialty-trade multiple grounded in recent small-business sale transactions. The factors that move it up or down: how much of the estimating only you can do, GC concentration and construction-cycle exposure, backlog quality and WIP accuracy, bonding capacity, and skilled-finisher retention. Every figure traces back to your books — never a revenue rule-of-thumb.
Repeat commercial-GC and tenant-improvement relationships beyond the owner, a profitable signed backlog with clean WIP accounting, transferable bonding capacity, retained skilled finishers and a superintendent, 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.