Most package stores sell for ~2.6-5.3x owner earnings (SDE). Your liquor license, your inventory, and whether you still run the register all move the number — see where you land.
Enter two numbers for an instant Liquor & Package Stores ballpark. No signup — the real number comes from your books.
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Can it even move to me, and how long does the state take? A liquor license is location- and state-gated, and a transfer can run through a licensing board, hearings, and waiting periods. A stuck or denied transfer kills the deal outright, so a buyer prices that risk hard until you can show the license is clean, current, and transferable in your jurisdiction.
A buyer scrutinizes your inventory at close: stale beer past its date codes and dead SKUs get marked down or excluded entirely from the valued inventory. Liquor inventory is a big slug of working capital sitting on the shelf, so a store carrying dated, slow-moving stock hands the buyer a markdown lever and a smaller inventory number to pay for.
If the owner is the head clerk plus the buyer plus the compliance officer, a buyer reads it as a job, not a business. The fix is a real store manager and documented ordering — until that's in place the offer sits at the bottom of the SDE band, because a buyer has to charge a market manager wage for the owner's labor before any multiple.
Alcohol is a top-theft, cash-heavy category, so a buyer probes shrink, cash handling, skimming, and unrecorded sales. Unreported cash can't be added back at sale, and weak controls signal both lost margin and an earnings number the buyer can't trust. Tight POS-to-bank reconciliation and a documented shrink rate defend the multiple.
Lottery, ATM, tobacco, and money-order income are often a meaningful slice of a package store's revenue — but those streams may need re-permitting or re-contracting in the buyer's name and don't always transfer cleanly. A buyer discounts ancillary income that's tied to the current owner's permits until continuity is proven.
Each lever is sized for a illustrative single-store operating ebitda (~$2.7m revenue × ~8% normalized); license + real estate are separate swing factors in total proceeds — about $220K EBITDA. Same number whether we frame it as “what a buyer discounts” or “what you keep by fixing it.”
These are the two biggest separable assets in a package-store deal. Owned real estate is valued separately from the operating business, and in quota/license states a transferable license is a scarce, independently valuable intangible — clarifying both, without double-counting the license against cash flow, is what sets total proceeds.
adds about 0.2–0.5× to your multiple · usually takes 12–24 months
Wine and spirits carry higher gross margin than beer, which drags the blend. Moving the mix toward wine and spirits lifts the owner-normalized margin a buyer underwrites — a direct, controllable improvement to the earnings the multiple is applied to.
adds about 0.2–0.6× to your multiple · usually takes 6–18 months
A salaried store manager running ordering, distributor relationships, and compliance proves the store produces without the owner at the register. It's the single biggest move from the bottom of the SDE band toward the operator-EBITDA market.
adds about 0.1–0.3× to your multiple · usually takes 6–18 months
Clearing dated, slow-moving stock and running tight cash and shrink controls protects both the valued inventory number and the trust in your earnings — removing two of the markdown levers a buyer reaches for at close.
adds about 0.1–0.3× to your multiple · usually takes 12–24 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 liquor stores on. The diagnostic fills the “your business” column from your actual QuickBooks data.
| Metric | Liquor & Package Stores benchmark | Your business | What it means |
|---|---|---|---|
| Recurring / contracted revenue | ~15% of revenue | Your data | Higher is better — the top multiple lever |
| Gross margin | ~27% | Your data | Pricing and job-costing discipline |
| EBITDA margin | ~8% | Your data | What flows to the bottom line |
| Healthy customer-concentration ceiling | top customer under 3% | Your data | Above it, buyers price the risk |
| Typical industry growth | ~1.2% / yr | Your data | Beating it can add to your multiple |
| Typical sale multiple | 3.4–9.9× 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.
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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.
The liquor-retail market is large but structurally un-consolidatable at national scale — licenses are location/state-gated (13 control states run spirits sales; license states have moratoriums + population quotas making a transferable license a scarce asset worth thousands to $1M+); that gating is why there's no liquor equivalent of the c-store PE roll-up. The market is dominated by independents and single-state family chains (Total Wine, ABC Fine Wine, Spec's, Binny's); the typical SMB buyer is an individual owner-operator using SBA financing, NOT private equity — so expect a realistic owner-operator pool paying SDE multiples, with the license and real estate the swing factors.
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Most Liquor & Package Stores businesses in the $1M–$10M revenue range trade at roughly 3.4× to 9.9× normalized EBITDA, with a typical deal near 5.1×. 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.
Sometimes — in quota/license states the license is a real, separately-valued asset that can be worth six or seven figures, especially in an asset sale, distress, or an SBA appraisal. But if your price is based on the store's cash flow (an SDE or EBITDA multiple on a going concern already earning on alcohol), the license value is baked into that number. Counting it again on top double-counts and inflates the price.
It depends on size and structure. A small, owner-run single store prices on SDE (~2.6-5.3x), because the buyer is an individual who'll stand behind the register. A multi-store operation with a real management layer prices on EBITDA (~3.4-9.9x), because the management cost is already in the books and there's less owner labor to add back.
Yes — it's the single biggest discount on small stores. If you're the head clerk, buyer, and compliance officer, a buyer charges a market store-manager salary against your earnings and reads the store as a job, not a transferable business. Hiring and documenting a manager is the highest-leverage move you can make on your multiple.
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