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 (residential churn, customer concentration, route density), 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 landscaping business — and the diagnostic tells you exactly where you stand on each, from your own books.
Pure residential mow-and-blow shops are the lowest-multiple type of landscaping business. Residential customers churn (move, switch on price, DIY), there's no contract continuity, and revenue is seasonal. Commercial maintenance contracts (HOAs, office parks, retail centers) with 3-year terms are what raise the multiple. If your revenue is 80%+ residential, a buyer prices the discount hard.
Commercial property managers consolidate spend across 8-15 buildings each. Landing one is a win, but losing one is catastrophic — and the property manager knows it. If your top PM relationship represents 25%+ of revenue, a buyer prices the retention risk AND the pricing leverage the PM has at renewal. Most landscaping shops are unaware how concentrated their PM relationships have become.
If you write the bids, drive the equipment scheduling, and hold the top commercial relationships personally, a buyer sees risk rather than a business. Landscaping is uniquely owner-driven because the seasonal start-of-spring sales push (March-May) often runs entirely through the owner. Without an Operations Manager + Account Manager separating the owner from day-to-day, search-fund and PE buyers discount hard for it.
Revenue per crew-hour is the efficiency metric a buyer cares most about in landscaping. Sub-$75/hr for residential or sub-$100/hr for commercial signals route inefficiency — too much windshield time between stops, undersold day routes, crews returning to the yard mid-day. The fix is route-optimization software (Aspire, Service Autopilot, LMN) — but if you haven't built the data, the buyer assumes the worst.
Most landscaping shops in the South and Midwest rely on H-2B visa workers or labor-broker relationships. This is institutional knowledge — application timing, housing, return-rate patterns — that often lives only with the owner. If your seasonal-labor recruiting depends on a single relationship or undocumented workflow, a buyer prices labor-disruption risk into the deal.
3-year commercial maintenance contracts (HOAs, office parks, retail centers) with annual price escalators are the highest-multiple revenue type in landscaping. Mature commercial-heavy shops trade at the top of the range; residential-only shops trade at the bottom. The path is structured PM outreach with case studies and quarterly site visits — not waiting for inbound.
Snow contracts (per-push, seasonal, or per-inch) provide off-season recurring revenue when landscaping is dormant. Mature landscaping shops in snow markets target 25-40% of annual revenue from snow services. The buyer pool treats snow capability as a critical year-round revenue smoother — and PE consolidators specifically look for it.
Landscaping requires both a Production-side (Operations Manager — runs crews, scheduling, equipment) and a Commercial-side (Account Manager — owns PM relationships, renewal pricing, enhancement upsells) leadership layer to be buyer-ready. Owner-operators who conflate these get priced at the bottom of the range.
Route-optimization software (Aspire, Service Autopilot, LMN) typically delivers 10-20% crew-hour productivity gain within 6 months. The data also becomes the proof of operational maturity in your data room — a documented $100/hr commercial route map is what a buyer credits as the floor, not the average.
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.
Landscaping has been one of the most actively consolidated SMB service categories since 2019, led by both public consolidators (BrightView, TruGreen) and private PE-backed roll-ups (Yellowstone Landscape, Heartland Landscape Partners, Monarch Landscape, regional consolidators across most major metros). The biggest activity is in commercial maintenance with $1-5M EBITDA — that's the most-bought tier. PE platforms pay up for businesses with commercial-contract concentration, route density, snow capability (in cold markets), and a Production Manager + Account Manager layer. Search funds and independent sponsors compete in the same band for shops they intend to professionalize. The memo maps which buyer types fit 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 Landscaping businesses in the $1M–$10M revenue range trade at roughly 1.6× to 4.6× normalized EBITDA, with a typical deal near 2.6×. 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 seasonal-labor accruals, separate revenue by service line (commercial maintenance, residential, enhancement, irrigation, snow), and apply a defensible EBITDA multiple grounded in recent SMB landscaping transactions. We don't guess off a revenue rule of thumb — every number ties back to your QuickBooks data.
Commercial maintenance contracts as % of revenue (60%+ is the bar), enhancement attach rate, snow capability in northern markets, an Operations Manager + Account Manager layer separating the owner from day-to-day, and documented route density (revenue per crew-hour). The diagnostic scores where you sit on each and shows what moving up would be worth.
Yes, but at a lower multiple than a commercial-maintenance shop. The buyer pool for residential-only is mostly individual SBA-financed buyers and small regional consolidators, and the multiple sits at the bottom of the trade range. The lever is to start landing commercial-maintenance contracts (HOAs are usually the easiest entry) for 12-24 months before going to market — even moving from 0% to 30% commercial materially lifts the multiple.
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 things buyers discount in landscaping — residential dependence, missing Operations Manager, low commercial-contract penetration — 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.
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