Five minutes of QuickBooks read-only and a few quick questions surfaces what a buyer would discount your gutter business for — how much of the work only you can estimate and sell, how thin the recurring book is, and how dependent the protection sales are on paid lead-gen. Preview is free; $499 for the full memo.
Enter two numbers for an instant Gutters 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.
Most gutter owners measure, quote, and close every job personally. If the estimating instinct and the builder relationships live in your head, a buyer is purchasing a job, not a business — and an SBA-backed or search-fund buyer discounts hard for it. It's the single biggest haircut in the trade.
Install and gutter-guard work is one-and-done — you re-win the year every January. Without recurring cleaning/maintenance plans or protection service agreements, a buyer treats each dollar as one you have to re-earn and prices it below a shop with a contracted base.
The gutter-protection model is marketing-heavy — if most leads come from paid advertising, a buyer underwrites that cost as permanent and tests what happens to volume when ad spend stops. Revenue that only exists while you're renting customers is priced as more fragile than demand from repeat customers and referrals.
Gutter demand rises and falls with rain, snow, and new-construction activity. A buyer normalizes the seasonal and cyclical swing and underwrites the trough — and a year propped up by one big builder or a single storm gets discounted as non-repeatable.
Each lever is sized for a typical $1m–$2.5m revenue gutter contractor, install + protection mix — about $250K EBITDA. Same number whether we frame it as “what a buyer discounts” or “what you keep by fixing it.”
Seasonal gutter-cleaning maintenance plans and protection service/warranty agreements convert one-and-done project revenue into a contracted base. It's the clearest way to change the buyer pool — the recurring-cleaning thesis is exactly what has drawn private equity into the segment.
adds about 0.3–0.6× to your multiple · usually takes 12–18 months
Promote or hire a lead estimator and put your measure-and-quote method on paper — pricing by linear foot and guard type, the on-site close process. A gutter business that quotes and wins work without the owner stops being 'a job,' which is what lets the multiple climb.
adds about 0.4–0.7× to your multiple · usually takes 12–24 months
Buyers run a quality-of-earnings review on every deal. Accrual books that split install, guard, repair, and cleaning margin — backed by a documented add-back trail — let a buyer trust the numbers and keep a mid-diligence re-trade from clawing back the price.
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 gutter contractors on. The diagnostic fills the “your business” column from your actual QuickBooks data.
| Metric | Gutters benchmark | Your business | What it means |
|---|---|---|---|
| Recurring / contracted revenue | ~8% 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 15% | Your data | Above it, buyers price the risk |
| Typical industry growth | ~4% / yr | Your data | Beating it can add to your multiple |
| Typical sale multiple | 2.0–4.5× 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.
Gutters sit inside an active home-services consolidation. Gutter-protection platforms — LeafFilter, now part of Gridiron Capital-backed Leaf Home, which merged with Erie Home — scaled the category, and recurring-cleaning specialists like Ned Stevens (Ned's Home) have built PE-backed platforms on subscription gutter cleaning. Franchises such as The Brothers That Just Do Gutters (Evive Brands) and regional strategics buy for crews and route density, while individual and SBA-financed buyers compete for owner-operated install shops. 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 Gutters businesses in the $1M–$10M revenue range trade at roughly 2.0× to 4.5× normalized EBITDA, with a typical deal near 3.0×. 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 gutter 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 jobs — each tied to a specific QuickBooks transaction, producing your normalized EBITDA. Against that we apply a multiple grounded in recent small-business sale transactions for gutter and adjacent specialty-trade contractors. The factors that move it up or down: how much of the estimating and selling only you can do, any recurring cleaning/maintenance or protection-service revenue, dependence on paid lead-gen for guard sales, builder concentration, and weather/seasonality. Every figure traces back to your books — never a revenue rule-of-thumb.
Recurring cleaning and gutter-protection service plans, a non-owner estimating and sales function, demand that isn't hostage to paid advertising, a diversified install + protection + repair + cleaning mix, 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.