A few minutes of read-only financials and a short questionnaire surfaces what a buyer would discount your salon for — starting with the mistake that over-values most salons: counting your own time behind the chair as profit. It normalizes that out, prices the model fork (commission vs booth-rental) and the risk that your stylists and their clients walk, and shows what to fix. Preview costs nothing.
Enter two numbers for an instant Hair & Beauty Salons 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.
If you're the top stylist and clients book you, a buyer isn't buying a salon — they're buying a chair that empties the day you leave. This is the single deepest discount in the trade: your personal book is treated as walk-out risk, not transferable profit, and your own service revenue gets normalized out as a wage. Much of the 'profit' on your books is really your own labor.
Clients follow stylists, not signs. Without retention terms and reasonable non-solicits on your key stylists — and, in a booth-rental salon, without committed renters on real leases — a buyer assumes your best chairs could empty in month one. In a chair-rental model this is the whole deal: they're underwriting whether your renters stay.
If clients don't rebook before they leave and your retail is the typical 3–5% of service revenue, a buyer sees a salon that has to re-win every client every visit — lower, lumpier, harder-to-repeat revenue than a salon rebooking 70%+ with a 10–20% retail attach. Rebooking is the closest a salon has to recurring revenue, and it's the durability number a buyer grades.
A short or expiring lease on a location-dependent business is a repricer — the salon is its address. And if your books blend booth rent, commission services, and retail without separating them, a buyer can't tell what they're buying and assumes the worst. Clarity on the commission-vs-booth-rental model is a diligence gate.
Each lever is sized for a typical single-location commission salon, ~$500k–$800k revenue, owner-normalized sde — about $120K EBITDA. Same number whether we frame it as “what a buyer discounts” or “what you keep by fixing it.”
Drive rebooking toward the 60–80% benchmark using your booking system, and book the next visit at checkout. Rebooking is the closest thing a salon has to recurring revenue and the durability number a buyer grades — far more valuable than re-winning every client every visit.
adds about 0.2–0.4× to your multiple · usually takes 6–12 months
Move from 'owner is the top stylist' toward a salon that runs without you — other stylists carrying the book, a manager running the floor. This is what shifts the basis from 'buying a job' toward a transferable, possibly EBITDA-based business, and it's the biggest lever on price.
adds about 0.3–0.6× to your multiple · usually takes 12–24 months
Most salons capture 3–5% of service revenue in retail; the industry standard is 10–20%. Closing that gap lifts margin and rebooking (retail buyers rebook more), and it's a high-margin line a buyer pays for.
adds about 0.1–0.3× to your multiple · usually takes 3–9 months
Retention and non-solicit terms on key stylists, and a renewed, assignable lease, directly attack the two biggest buyer fears — the book walking and the location disappearing. In a booth-rental salon, convert month-to-month renters to committed terms.
adds about 0.1–0.3× to your multiple · usually takes 1–6 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 salons on. The diagnostic fills the “your business” column from your actual QuickBooks data.
| Metric | Hair & Beauty Salons benchmark | Your business | What it means |
|---|---|---|---|
| Recurring / contracted revenue | ~30% of revenue | Your data | Higher is better — the top multiple lever |
| Gross margin | ~55% | 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 5% | 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 | 2.0–3.5× 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.
For most owner-operated salons the realistic buyer is an individual — an experienced stylist or local operator buying a job-plus-business, often SBA-financed — or a local multi-unit owner adding a location. Strategic and chain consolidation is real but concentrated in specific models: the salon-suite (booth-rental) platform Sola Salon Studios (Radiance Holdings, majority TSG Consumer Partners) franchises suite-rental concepts, and Regis Corporation (Supercuts) is the largest operator. Great Clips and Sport Clips are franchisors that grow by selling franchises, not buying independents. The chain and PE headlines are a different, scaled market — for a single salon the price is an SDE multiple. The memo maps which buyer fits a salon your size.
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.
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Start with the free preview. Pay once — $499 — only when you want the full memo. No subscription, no per-seat pricing.
Most Hair & Beauty Salons businesses in the $1M–$10M revenue range trade at roughly 2.0× to 3.5× normalized EBITDA, with a typical deal near 2.4×. 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.
Most owner-operated salons sell for roughly 1.5–2.5x SDE (seller's discretionary earnings), with the median near 1.9x. The catch: SDE is computed after charging a market wage for your own time behind the chair and for a manager — so the number is often lower than owners expect, because much of the 'profit' was your own labor.
Different, and more sensitive to one thing: whether your renters stay. A booth-rental salon's value is rent income plus a lease, so a buyer underwrites renter tenure, occupancy, and renewal risk. A commission salon with a real team and transferable clientele typically supports a higher multiple because the business owns the client, not the chair-renter.
Yes, more than anything else. If you're the top stylist and the relationships are personal, a buyer treats your book as walk-out risk and your service revenue as a wage, not profit — the single biggest discount in the trade. The fix takes 1–2 years: build other stylists' books, add a manager, and move loyalty from you to the salon brand and team before you go to market.
Sixty seconds. Four numbers. No signup, no email. Just a real answer.