A few minutes of read-only financials and a handful of questions surfaces what a buyer would discount your generator business for — how much of the top line is contracted preventive-maintenance and monitoring versus one-time install, how lumpy your install revenue looks across calm and storm years, and whether your factory-authorized dealer standing and certified techs transfer at sale. Preview is free; $499 for the full memo.
Enter two numbers for an instant Standby Generators 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 generator shops the owner walks the home, runs the load calculation, picks the transfer switch and the fuel sizing, and closes the sale. That judgment is the institutional knowledge that doesn't survive a handoff unless it's written down and moved onto a non-owner salesperson. A search-fund or SBA buyer discounts hard when the company can't quote or close without the owner in the room.
A standby generator has to be serviced on a schedule to hold its warranty and to actually start when the grid drops — so a book of annual preventive-maintenance agreements and remote-monitoring subscriptions is the stickiest revenue you can build. If most of your top line is one-time install and ad-hoc repair, a buyer treats it as harder to repeat and prices it below a shop with a deep, renewing contract base.
Generator demand surges with hurricanes, ice storms, and grid outages and goes quiet in calm years, so a single boom season overstates the run-rate. A buyer normalizes install revenue across calm and storm years and underwrites the quiet ones — and a business built around the last big storm, with a thin recurring book underneath, gets priced for the lull, not the peak.
Factory-authorized status with Generac, Kohler Power, Cummins, or Briggs & Stratton drives your pricing, warranty work, and lead flow — and it often lives with the owner personally. Manufacturers can require the new owner to re-qualify, and EGSA-certified or licensed-electrician techs are scarce. If the dealer agreement and the certifications don't clearly transfer, a buyer prices the risk that the lead pipeline and the warranty work walk at close.
Each lever is sized for a typical $2m–$4m revenue standby-generator install & service company, residential + light-commercial mix — about $350K EBITDA. Same number whether we frame it as “what a buyer discounts” or “what you keep by fixing it.”
Attach an annual PM agreement to every install at the sale, price remote monitoring (Generac Mobile Link, Kohler OnCue) as a recurring subscription, and build a light-commercial book on code-driven NFPA 110 test schedules. Because a standby unit must be serviced to hold warranty and to start on demand, that contracted book is the most durable revenue you have — it smooths the storm cycle and lifts the multiple buyers across every type will pay.
adds about 0.4–0.7× to your multiple · usually takes 12–24 months
Put a non-owner salesperson on a documented load-sizing method, promote a service manager who dispatches and runs the annual PM schedule, and make sure the manufacturer certifications and dealer relationship sit with the company and named staff. Moving the selling, the sizing, and the dealer standing off the owner is what turns 'buying the owner' into 'buying a business' — and it's what lets the multiple climb toward an EBITDA basis.
adds about 0.3–0.6× to your multiple · usually takes 12–24 months
Segment the books so the install, repair, PM, and monitoring shares are each visible and provable, normalize the storm-driven spikes across several years, keep a per-asset service-van and load-bank schedule, and document every add-back. Clean, segmented records and a documented fleet let a buyer underwrite the business confidently 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 standby generator contractors on. The diagnostic fills the “your business” column from your actual QuickBooks data.
| Metric | Standby Generators benchmark | Your business | What it means |
|---|---|---|---|
| Recurring / contracted revenue | ~30% of revenue | Your data | Higher is better — the top multiple lever |
| Gross margin | ~32% | Your data | Pricing and job-costing discipline |
| EBITDA margin | ~12% | Your data | What flows to the bottom line |
| Healthy customer-concentration ceiling | top customer under 25% | Your data | Above it, buyers price the risk |
| Typical industry growth | ~5% / yr | Your data | Beating it can add to your multiple |
| Typical sale multiple | 3.5–6.0× 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.
Standby generators is a fragmented install-and-service trade riding a long grid-reliability tailwind, and the buyer pool splits by what you've built. Owner-operated, install-weighted shops where the owner is the salesperson sell mostly to individual and SBA-backed buyers acquiring a job they intend to grow. As a book tilts toward contracted preventive-maintenance and remote-monitoring revenue, a light-commercial base on mandated test schedules, and a manager-run organization with certified-technician depth, it attracts regional strategics and the private-equity-backed electrical- and mechanical-service platforms that prize exactly that recurring model. The full memo maps which buyer would 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 Standby Generators businesses in the $1M–$10M revenue range trade at roughly 3.5× to 6.0× normalized EBITDA, with a typical deal near 4.5×. 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 generator valuation starts where a buyer's diligence team starts: your reported earnings as the baseline. From there come the normalizing adjustments — owner pay above market, personal trucks, family wages, one-time storm-season overtime — each tied to a specific transaction in your books, producing your normalized earnings. Against that we apply a multiple grounded in recent electrical- and mechanical-service small-business sale transactions, the closest published proxy for the trade. What moves it up or down: how much of the selling and sizing only you can do, how lumpy install revenue looks across calm and storm years, the contracted maintenance-and-monitoring share versus one-time install, and whether your dealer standing and certified techs transfer. Every figure traces back to your own numbers.
A deep, renewing book of preventive-maintenance agreements and remote-monitoring subscriptions, a light-commercial base on code-driven test-and-maintenance schedules, install revenue diversified so it doesn't ride a single storm season, manufacturer authorization and EGSA-certified techs held beyond the owner, a non-owner salesperson and a service manager who dispatches without you, and clean, segmented books that prove the recurring share. 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.