Five minutes of QuickBooks read-only and a few quick questions surfaces what a buyer would discount your flooring business for — how much of the selling only you can do, how exposed you are to builders and the housing cycle, and whether your installers are W-2 crews or subs. Preview is free; $499 for the full memo.
Enter two numbers for an instant 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 flooring shops the owner sells the jobs, measures, and quotes. A buyer sees a job, not a transferable business — the selling and estimating relationships are exactly what don't survive a handoff unless you've built a team. A search-fund or SBA buyer discounts hard when the work gets won only by the owner.
Builder and GC work is cyclical and lower-margin, and heavy single-builder concentration is a classic flooring risk — a buyer prices the risk one leaves and underwrites the next housing downturn. A book that's mostly new-construction install gets priced as the more fragile, more cyclical business it is.
If the work depends on subcontractor installers rather than W-2 crews, a buyer prices the risk that the install capability — and the quality — walks. Sub-dependent shops also carry classification and reliability risk that a buyer factors into the offer.
One-time residential install is the least durable revenue in the trade. Without commercial property-management contracts, national-account programs, or repeat-GC relationships, a buyer treats each job as one you have to re-win and prices it below a shop with a contracted commercial base.
Each lever is sized for a typical $2m–$4m revenue flooring contractor, residential + commercial mix — about $350K EBITDA. Same number whether we frame it as “what a buyer discounts” or “what you keep by fixing it.”
Commercial property-management flooring contracts and national-account / multi-site rollout programs turn one-time residential revenue into repeatable, contracted work. It's the clearest way to change the buyer pool — it's exactly the revenue the commercial-flooring consolidators are buying.
adds about 0.3–0.5× to your multiple · usually takes 12–18 months
Hire or promote a sales/operations manager and lead estimator, and put your measure-and-quote method on paper. A flooring business that sells and bids without the owner stops being 'a job,' which is what lets the multiple climb toward the top of the range.
adds about 0.4–0.7× to your multiple · usually takes 12–24 months
Moving from sub-dependent installs toward W-2 crews (where it pays) de-risks capability and quality, and clean accrual books with a documented add-back trail let a buyer trust your margins — together protecting 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 flooring contractors on. The diagnostic fills the “your business” column from your actual QuickBooks data.
| Metric | Flooring benchmark | Your business | What it means |
|---|---|---|---|
| Recurring / contracted revenue | ~12% of revenue | Your data | Higher is better — the top multiple lever |
| Gross margin | ~28% | 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 | ~3.9% / 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.
Flooring spans owner-operated install shops and large commercial installers, and the commercial end is consolidating fast — Diverzify (backed by ACON Investments) combined Shaw Industries' Spectra Contract Flooring and ProSpectra into one of the largest national commercial-flooring installers and continues to tuck in regional players. Buyers range from individual/SBA buyers for residential shops to these commercial platforms and regional strategics. The ones who pay up want commercial and national-account programs, in-house crews, a non-owner sales function, and clean books. 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 Flooring businesses in the $1M–$10M revenue range trade at roughly 2.5× to 5.0× normalized EBITDA, with a typical deal near 3.5×. 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 flooring 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 flooring-specific multiple grounded in recent small-business sale transactions in the trade. The factors that move it up or down: how much of the selling and estimating only you can do, builder/GC concentration and housing-cycle exposure, the share of commercial/national-account vs. one-time residential revenue, whether installers are in-house crews or subs, and customer concentration. Every figure traces back to your books — never a revenue rule-of-thumb.
Commercial property-management and national-account programs, a non-owner sales and estimating function, in-house installer crews, a diversified customer base that isn't hostage to one builder, 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.