Five minutes of QuickBooks read-only and a few quick questions surfaces what a buyer would discount your coating business for — how much of the quoting and selling only you can do, how dependent you are on paid lead-gen and a residential garage mix, and the coating-failure callback risk they'll probe before they trust the margin. Preview is free; $499 for the full memo.
Enter two numbers for an instant Epoxy Flooring 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 coating shops the owner runs the in-home or on-site quote, reads the slab, prices the system, and closes the job. That judgment — which prep method, which coating chemistry, how to price square footage against substrate condition — is the part that doesn't survive a handoff unless it's documented and moved onto real quoting tools. A search-fund or SBA buyer treats an owner-only sales-and-estimating engine as a job, not a business, and discounts it hard.
Coating revenue often rides paid lead-gen and a few referral sources rather than an owned brand or repeat book. A buyer prices the risk that customer acquisition costs climb or a single channel dries up — and a business whose pipeline depends on this quarter's ad spend, not a durable demand engine, reads as fragile. Concentrating demand in one paid channel pulls the multiple toward the floor.
Resinous coatings fail when the slab isn't profiled, ground, or moisture-tested correctly — bubbling, peeling, and delamination that come back as warranty callbacks months later. A buyer reads your callback and re-coat-warranty history as a direct read on prep discipline, and an undocumented quality-control process around moisture testing and surface prep becomes an assumed liability they subtract from the price.
One-time residential garage floors are competitive, lead-gen-hungry, and rarely repeat. A buyer pays more for an industrial and commercial mix — warehouses, food-and-beverage plants, healthcare, and retail — where coatings are spec'd, re-coat cycles recur, and a single facility can become a multi-year account. A pure-residential shop with no commercial relationships sits at the lower end of the range.
Each lever is sized for a typical $1.5m–$3m revenue epoxy/resinous-coating contractor, residential garage + commercial/industrial mix — about $300K EBITDA. Same number whether we frame it as “what a buyer discounts” or “what you keep by fixing it.”
Win warehouse, manufacturing, food-and-beverage, and retail accounts where resinous floors are spec'd and re-coated on a cycle, and put facility and property-management customers on scheduled maintenance and re-coat programs. It is the closest a coating trade gets to recurring revenue, it diversifies away from one-time garage work, and it lifts both margin and the multiple.
adds about 0.3–0.5× to your multiple · usually takes 12–18 months
Promote or hire an estimator and an operations manager, move the quoting and system-selection rules onto paper and into your CRM, and put the commercial relationships on the team. Taking the sales-and-bidding engine off your own shoulders is the single biggest lever to turn 'buying the owner' into 'buying a business' — and it is 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 material and labor costing, a documented add-back trail, and a written surface-prep and moisture-testing protocol with a callback log let a buyer trust both the earnings and the durability of the work — and protect the price from a mid-diligence re-trade or a callback-driven holdback.
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 epoxy & resinous flooring contractors on. The diagnostic fills the “your business” column from your actual QuickBooks data.
| Metric | Epoxy Flooring benchmark | Your business | What it means |
|---|---|---|---|
| Recurring / contracted revenue | ~8% of revenue | Your data | Higher is better — the top multiple lever |
| Gross margin | ~40% | 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 | ~6% / yr | Your data | Beating it can add to your multiple |
| Typical sale multiple | 2.8–5.0× 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.
Epoxy and resinous floor coating is a fragmented, fast-growing trade where the garage-coating segment has drawn franchise and consolidation interest, while the industrial and commercial segment attracts specialty-trade acquirers. Regional operators and franchise networks buy for crews, territory, and brand; individual and SBA-backed buyers buy owner-run residential coating shops. The acquirers that pay up want an industrial/commercial-contract mix with re-coat work, demand that isn't hostage to one paid lead channel, a documented prep-and-quality process that keeps callbacks low, and an estimator and operations manager running the business without the founder. 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 Epoxy Flooring businesses in the $1M–$10M revenue range trade at roughly 2.8× to 5.0× normalized EBITDA, with a typical deal near 3.8×. 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 coating-business 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 multiple grounded in recent small-business sale transactions in the specialty-flooring trade. The factors that move it up or down: how much of the selling and estimating only you can do, how dependent the pipeline is on paid lead-gen, your residential-garage versus industrial/commercial mix, your coating-failure and callback record, and whether an estimator and operations manager transfer with the business. Every figure traces back to your books — never a revenue rule-of-thumb.
An industrial and commercial contract book with recurring re-coat and maintenance work, demand sources broader than one paid ad channel, a documented surface-prep and moisture-testing process that keeps callbacks low, a non-owner estimator and operations manager 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.