Five minutes of QuickBooks read-only and a few quick questions surfaces what a buyer would discount your glazing business for — how much of the estimating only you can do, how exposed you are to a few general contractors and the commercial-construction cycle, and the shop-and-fleet replacement bill they'll subtract from cash flow. Preview is free; $499 for the full memo.
Enter two numbers for an instant Glass & Glazing 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 glass shops the owner prices the commercial work, manages the GC relationships, and decides which jobs to chase. Win rate and margin discipline live in that judgment — and if it leaves, bid quality can collapse. A buyer treats owner-only estimating as a job rather than a transferable business and discounts accordingly.
Commercial glazing revenue is project work tied to a handful of general contractors and the nonresidential construction cycle. A buyer prices the risk that one GC relationship lapses and underwrites the next downturn, not the current pipeline. Heavy GC concentration plus cyclicality is the combination that drags a glazing multiple to the floor.
Glass-rack trucks, boom and scissor lifts, and shop fabrication and cutting equipment are expensive, and a buyer normalizes the replacement bill straight off cash flow. Without a documented equipment schedule they assume deferred maintenance — and aging lifts or a worn fleet become a direct deduction from the price.
Glazing is a licensed, height-and-heavy-glass safety-sensitive trade with a thin labor pool. If the field capability rests on one or two lead glaziers, a buyer prices the workers'-comp exposure and the risk that losing a key glazier caps how fast the business can take on work post-close.
Each lever is sized for a typical $3m–$6m revenue glass & glazing contractor, commercial + residential mix — about $500K EBITDA. Same number whether we frame it as “what a buyer discounts” or “what you keep by fixing it.”
Move key accounts onto company service-and-replacement contracts with property managers and building owners, and build the emergency board-up and insurance-glass work that repeats. It's the only durable recurring layer in an otherwise bid-and-build trade, and a buyer credits it directly.
adds about 0.2–0.4× to your multiple · usually takes 12–24 months
Document the takeoff and bidding method, put a non-owner estimator on it, and promote a glazing superintendent who runs the field and holds the GC relationships day-to-day. It removes the owner-dependence discount that caps the multiple on owner-bid shops.
adds about 0.4–0.7× to your multiple · usually takes 12–24 months
Clean accrual books with percentage-of-completion reporting, retainage tracked separately, a documented add-back trail, and transferable bonding capacity let a buyer underwrite cash flow with confidence — 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 glass and glazing contractors on. The diagnostic fills the “your business” column from your actual QuickBooks data.
| Metric | Glass & Glazing benchmark | Your business | What it means |
|---|---|---|---|
| Recurring / contracted revenue | ~15% of revenue | Your data | Higher is better — the top multiple lever |
| Gross margin | ~31% | Your data | Pricing and job-costing discipline |
| EBITDA margin | ~10% | 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 | 2.5–4.5× 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.
Glass and glazing is a fragmented specialty trade where buyers split cleanly by size: individual and SBA-backed buyers acquire owner-operated residential glass and repair shops, while regional strategics and lower-middle-market private-equity platforms roll up commercial glaziers for crews, fabrication capacity, and prequalified bonding standing. The platforms pay up for a commercial-service book that recurs, in-house value-add fabrication that lifts margin, transferable bonding, and an estimating system that survives the owner's exit. A one-time residential repair shop and an owner-bid commercial glazier sit at opposite ends of the range. 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 Glass & Glazing businesses in the $1M–$10M revenue range trade at roughly 2.5× to 4.5× 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 glazing 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 glass-and-glazing-specific multiple grounded in recent small-business sale transactions in the trade. The factors that move it up or down: how much of the estimating only you can do, GC concentration and exposure to the commercial-construction cycle, the shop-and-fleet replacement capex a buyer will normalize, your commercial-service-versus-one-time mix, and whether in-house fabrication and bonding transfer with the business. Every figure traces back to your books — never a revenue rule-of-thumb.
A commercial-service and replacement-glass book that recurs, in-house value-add fabrication that lifts margin over buy-out work, transferable bonding capacity, a glazing superintendent and non-owner estimator in place, diversified GC relationships, and clean percentage-of-completion 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.