Five minutes of QuickBooks read-only and a few quick questions surfaces what a buyer would discount your janitorial business for — how durable your cleaning contracts really are, the concentration on your biggest buildings, and the labor-compliance and turnover questions a diligence team always opens. Preview is free; $499 for the full memo.
Read-only QuickBooks access. We never share with brokers or buyers.
A buyer's diligence team runs this analysis on every deal. Here's what they look for in a commercial cleaning business — and the diagnostic tells you exactly where you stand on each, from your own books.
In owner-run janitorial shops the building managers know the owner, not the company. If you personally hold the key relationships, do the walkthroughs, and handle the escalations, a buyer sees a book of business that can churn the day you leave. A PE-backed platform can absorb you under its own account managers, but an SBA-financed individual buyer is underwriting whether those contracts renew without you — and discounts hard for it.
Commercial cleaning revenue often concentrates in a few large accounts. Once any single customer clears ~12–15% of revenue, a buyer prices the risk that it leaves on the next bid cycle — and that the account knows it's load-bearing and can squeeze your rate. Some SBA lenders cap how much single-customer revenue they'll underwrite at all.
Cleaning contracts that cancel on 30 days' notice read as fragile revenue. Buyers pay materially more for multi-year agreements with auto-renewal and documented retention — clean, diversified books with 90%+ retention reach the top of the range, while month-to-month subcontractor books sit near the bottom. The contract terms themselves, not just the revenue, move the multiple.
Janitorial is a labor business, and diligence digs into it: high crew turnover, overtime and wage-and-hour exposure, worker classification, and I-9/E-Verify documentation. Unaddressed, these become price-reducing findings — or indemnity and holdback demands — in a buyer's quality-of-earnings and HR review.
Each lever is sized for a typical $3–4m revenue commercial cleaning contractor, ~10–12% ebitda margin — about $400K EBITDA. Your actual number depends on your books — the diagnostic computes it from your real QuickBooks data.
Converting month-to-month accounts to 2–3 year agreements with auto-renewal is the most direct way to lift how a buyer prices your revenue. Durable, contracted revenue with documented retention is what separates a 6–7x book from a 3–4x one.
Promoting account managers and area supervisors who own the client relationships, walkthroughs, and escalations turns 'buying the owner' into 'buying a business that runs without them.' For janitorial specifically, that is the single biggest haircut to remove.
Margins in commercial cleaning are thin and labor-driven. Lowering turnover, optimizing crew routing and stop density, and standardizing supply purchasing lifts EBITDA — and a documented, compliant payroll process removes a diligence flag at the same time.
Typical impact ranges based on observed pricing differentials between owner-dependent and buyer-ready commercial cleaning contractors in the $300K–$3M EBITDA band — blended from lower-middle-market transaction data, sub-$50M M&A databases, and observed consolidator pricing conventions. Directional, not a guarantee. Your business varies.
The KPIs that move buyer multiples the most. The diagnostic fills the “Your business” column from your actual QuickBooks data.
| Metric | Janitorial & Commercial Cleaning median | Your business | What it means |
|---|---|---|---|
| Recurring / contracted revenue | 75% of revenue | Your data | Higher is better — the top multiple lever |
| Gross margin | ~30% | 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 | 3.0×–7.0× 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.
The full memo is delivered as three files, so you can read it, edit it, and model with it.
A polished, forwardable ~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.
Commercial cleaning and building services is one of the most actively consolidated service sectors in the country — investors like its recurring, contracted revenue, deep fragmentation, and route-density economics. Strategic acquirers ABM Industries and Aramark consolidate at the national level; private-equity-backed platforms such as Pritchard Industries, The Facilities Group, and Marsden roll up regional operators in the $1–10M-EBITDA range. Smaller owner-operated books typically transact to SBA-financed individuals or neighboring operators expanding their footprint. The memo maps which buyer types would actually look at a company your size and how each tends to structure the deal.
Read-only sign-in through Intuit. We ingest your transaction-level data — every revenue line, expense, vendor, and customer — and run the same EBITDA normalization a buyer's diligence team would. About 5 minutes.
Seven short questions on the things a buyer asks that QuickBooks can't answer — your role, your team, your top relationships. Not the basis of the analysis; just the context that lets the workup hold up in diligence. About 3 minutes.
Your buyer-readiness score, normalized EBITDA, value range, and top red flags — computed from your real transactions, not your survey answers. Instantly, no signup.
The full QoE-style workup as PDF, Word, and a live Excel model. Then dig deeper in the interactive dashboard: ask the AI assistant follow-ups grounded in your books, record voice or video context, and share a scoped view with a specific buyer.
The $499 memo is the core QoE workup: normalized EBITDA with every add-back documented to the transaction, the buyer-side issues a diligence team will raise, and a defensible value range tied to recent transactions in your trade. Delivered as PDF, editable Word, and a live Excel model.
A formal QoE from a CPA firm runs $25,000–$75,000 and adds proof-of-cash testing, tax exposure review, and a working-capital peg we don't include. What we do build is the same questions your buyer's QoE team will ask, answered from your own books — at the price that makes sense before you've signed an LOI.
Free preview first. Pay only when you want the full memo.
Trade-specific questions for commercial cleaning contractors, plus the most common site-wide questions. For the full FAQ see /faq.
Most Janitorial & Commercial Cleaning businesses in the $1M–$10M revenue range trade at roughly 3.0× to 7.0× 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. The range blends recent lower-middle-market closings, main-street marketplace sales, and academic M&A practitioner survey data.
Commercial cleaning is a labor-driven, contract-based business, and the valuation reflects that. We start where a buyer's quality-of-earnings team starts — your reported earnings — then normalize for owner add-backs, family wages, personal vehicles, and one-time items, each tied to a specific QuickBooks transaction. The result is your normalized EBITDA, against which we apply a cleaning-specific multiple grounded in recent transactions. The factors that move your multiple up or down: how much revenue is on multi-year contracts versus month-to-month, customer concentration on your largest buildings, contract retention, and whether the business survives the owner stepping back. Smaller owner-operated shops are often valued on SDE; larger contract books move to an EBITDA multiple. Every figure traces back to your books.
Multi-year contracts with auto-renewal and 90%+ retention, a diversified customer base (no single building dominating), an account-management layer so the company isn't the owner, clean and compliant labor records, and healthy route density. The diagnostic scores where you sit on each and shows what moving up would be worth.
It's the first thing a buyer stress-tests. Once a single account passes ~12–15% of revenue, buyers price the risk it leaves on the next bid and may structure part of the price as an earnout or holdback tied to that account renewing. The fix is deliberate diversification before you list, plus locking that account into a longer term — both of which the memo lays out.
The free preview is instant once your QuickBooks is connected. The full $499 memo is delivered within 24–48 hours.
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 a buyer or broker unless you choose to share it. You have complete control.
When you do want to share, you build scoped share links that show specific buyers or advisors only the parts of your memo you want them to see (verified financials, customer mix, your add-back defense — anything you mark as hidden stays hidden). Buyers verify by email before they can open the link, and you see every time they open it, every question they ask the assistant, and every download.
You can disconnect QuickBooks and delete everything at any time, and the deletion is real (revoked tokens, removed extracted data, purged memo artifacts).
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 from a few survey numbers. If you're on QuickBooks Desktop, the cleanest path is exporting to QBO before running the diagnostic; we're working on direct support.
Think of it as a light Quality of Earnings report. A formal QoE from a CPA firm runs $25,000–$75,000 and adds proof-of-cash testing, tax exposure review, and a working-capital peg we don't include. What we do build is the core QoE workup: normalized EBITDA with every add-back documented to the transaction, the buyer-side issues a diligence team will raise (concentration, owner-dependence, recurring-revenue mix, capex coverage), and a defensible value range tied to recent transactions in your trade. The same questions your buyer's QoE team will ask, answered from your own books — at the price that makes sense before you've signed an LOI.
Yes — two ways. The free preview shows your real numbers from your actual books (you'll see the readiness score, the value range, and the top buyer-side issues before any payment). And the sample dashboard at /showcase shows the full interactive experience using illustrative data, so you can see exactly what the paid memo looks like end-to-end.
Connect QuickBooks, answer a few quick questions, and see your buyer's-eye preview — no signup, no email.
Start your diagnosticEach industry page covers the same buyer-grade research — the metrics, the consolidators, the benchmarks for that trade.