Connect QuickBooks, answer 7 questions, and get a buyer's-eye valuation built from your actual books — what your business is worth, what a buyer would argue down, and what to fix first. The free preview takes minutes; the full memo is $499.
Read-only access to your books. We never share with anyone.
A buyer's diligence team runs this analysis on every deal. Here's what they look for in a HVAC business — and the diagnostic tells you exactly where you stand on each, from your own books.
If you hold the key customer relationships, do the estimating, or run dispatch personally, a buyer sees risk, not a business. A private-equity platform can slot you under its own management — but a search-funder or SBA-backed individual buyer is underwriting whether the company survives your exit, and they discount hard for it. This is the single biggest haircut applied to a trades business.
HVAC buyers pay the most for contracted, renewable revenue — spring/fall maintenance plans that survive a change of ownership. If most of your top line is one-off install and break-fix work, a buyer treats it as harder to repeat and prices it lower than a competitor with a deep service-agreement base.
If your top handful of accounts make up an outsized share of revenue, a buyer prices the risk that one leaves — and that the account knows it's load-bearing and can squeeze you on price. Some conservative SBA lenders cap how much of a single customer they'll underwrite at all.
A financial buyer normalizes maintenance capex up to the replacement level and assumes a service-van and equipment refresh in the first year or two — money that comes straight off the cash flow they're buying. Without a documented fleet age and replacement schedule, they assume the worst.
Moving existing customers onto recurring service plans is the highest-leverage play most HVAC owners have. It raises the multiple buyers across every type will pay, and it compounds — a larger recurring base also lifts the floor under a slow quarter.
Promoting a lead tech/estimator and an ops or dispatch lead — and moving your top customer relationships onto them — turns 'buying a job' into 'buying a business.' That shift is what lets the multiple climb toward the top of the range.
Every buyer runs a quality-of-earnings review. Clean accrual books with a documented add-back trail let them trust your normalized earnings — which protects the price you've already earned from a mid-diligence re-trade.
The KPIs that move buyer multiples the most. The diagnostic scores your business against each, computed from your actual books.
Benchmarks are blended industry composites (lower-middle-market transaction data, trade-association reports, main-street marketplace insights), service businesses $1M–$10M revenue, 2026-Q1. Directional, not a precise bar — your memo measures you against your own books.
The full memo is delivered as three files, so you can read it, edit it, and model with it.
A polished, forwardable 5–10 page memo you can hand to a buyer, a lender, or your accountant the same day.
The same memo as an editable working copy, so you can adapt the story as your business changes.
A working model — EBITDA bridge, add-back schedule, working capital, financeability — with real formulas you can flex.
HVAC is one of the most actively consolidated trades in the country. Private-equity-backed platforms acquire established shops as add-ons and can pay up when the business runs without its owner; independent sponsors and search funds buy owner-operated shops they intend to professionalize; and regional strategics buy for route density and crews. Each underwrites your business differently — the memo maps which would actually look at a company your size and how each tends to structure the deal.
Sign in through Intuit. Read-only — every call we make is a read, never a write. About 5 minutes.
Quick context a buyer would ask about that your books don't show. About 3 minutes.
Your buyer-readiness score, normalized EBITDA, value range, and top red flags — instantly, no signup.
The full memo and all three deliverables, delivered within 24–48 hours.
The $499 memo bundles a documented add-back defense, a quality-of-earnings-style workup of the issues a buyer's team raises, and three deliverables (PDF, Word, Excel).
A formal Quality of Earnings from a CPA firm runs $25,000–$75,000 and adds proof-of-cash testing we don't do. This is the owner-facing version — the same questions, answered from your own books, at a price that makes sense before you've sold. We won't pretend it's more than that; the honesty is the point.
Most HVAC businesses in the $1M–$10M revenue range trade at roughly 3.0× to 8.0× normalized EBITDA, with a typical deal near 5.0×. 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. The range blends recent lower-middle-market closings, main-street marketplace sales, and the Pepperdine Private Capital Markets Report.
The same way a buyer's diligence team does: we start from your real earnings, normalize them for owner add-backs and one-time items, and apply a defensible EBITDA multiple grounded in recent lower-middle-market and main-street HVAC transactions. We don't guess off a revenue rule of thumb — every number ties back to your QuickBooks data.
Recurring maintenance-agreement revenue, a business that runs without the owner, a diversified customer base, clean books, and a documented fleet/equipment plan. The diagnostic scores where you sit on each and shows what moving up would be worth.
Yes, at launch. We connect to QuickBooks Online read-only to build the analysis from your actual transactions — that's what makes it buyer-grade instead of a guess. QuickBooks Desktop, Xero, and FreshBooks are on the post-launch roadmap.
No — and we won't claim it is. A formal QoE from a CPA firm runs tens of thousands of dollars and includes proof-of-cash testing we don't do. This is the owner-facing version: it bundles a defensible valuation, a documented add-back defense, and a quality-of-earnings-style workup of the same issues a buyer's team will raise — so nothing in real diligence surprises you.
The free preview is instant once your QuickBooks is connected. The full $499 memo is delivered within 24–48 hours.
That's the best time to run it. The issues buyers attack — owner dependence, thin recurring revenue, customer concentration — take 6 to 24 months to fix. Seeing them now is what lets you go to market once, from strength, instead of discovering them mid-diligence.
Yes. We connect to QuickBooks read-only — every call we make is a read, never a write. Your data is encrypted, never used to train AI, and never shared with brokers or buyers. You can disconnect QuickBooks and delete everything at any time.
Connect QuickBooks, answer 7 questions, and see your buyer's-eye preview — no signup, no email.
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