A few minutes of read-only financials and a short questionnaire surfaces what a buyer would discount your agency for — the share of revenue on real retainers vs one-off projects, the concentration on your top accounts, and how much of the business is still just you. It also strips media pass-through out of your numbers so you're priced on net revenue, the way a buyer will. Preview costs nothing.
Enter two numbers for an instant Marketing & Advertising Agencies 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 your top one or two accounts carry the company, a buyer prices the risk one leaves — and a retainer only counts if it actually renews. Above ~20% from a single client draws a 1.5–2x discount, and top-3 above ~25% is a flag. Buyers verify logo retention (>90%) and net revenue retention (>95%) before they treat your retainers as recurring rather than re-win-every-year revenue.
If you hold the key client relationships, pitch the new business, and are the creative or strategic face clients hired, a buyer is acquiring relationships that can walk out the door at close. This is the single biggest haircut on a people-business and the difference between an EBITDA business and an SDE job. Search-funder and SBA-backed individual buyers discount it hardest.
A project-heavy book is treated as harder to repeat and prices a full 1.0–2.0x EBITDA below a retainer-heavy peer — that's the ~60%-recurring line. Even a strong year of project wins reads as lumpy, not durable, because the revenue has to be re-won every engagement.
In a people-business the team is the inventory — key account leads or creatives leaving at close is a transfer risk. And an agency with no defensible niche (an industry vertical, a channel specialty, or a proprietary method) competes with everyone and commands the floor of its band; a specialist commands the premium and is a cleaner bolt-on for a platform buyer.
Each lever is sized for a typical small agency, ~$2m net revenue, ~20% owner-normalized ebitda — about $400K EBITDA. Same number whether we frame it as “what a buyer discounts” or “what you keep by fixing it.”
Move suitable project clients onto fixed-fee monthly retainers (audit plus reporting plus ongoing execution). Crossing the ~60% recurring line is worth roughly 1–2x EBITDA and smooths cash flow — the single biggest swing inside the band.
adds about 0.4–0.8× to your multiple · usually takes 12–24 months
Move top-account relationships and new business onto an account director and a new-business lead, so the book stays if you're gone in 12 months. This is the move that turns an SDE job into an EBITDA business.
adds about 0.5–1.0× to your multiple · usually takes 18–36 months
A clear vertical or channel/method specialty earns a higher multiple than a generalist shop and makes the agency a cleaner bolt-on for a platform buyer — which widens the buyer pool and lifts the price.
adds about 0.2–0.5× to your multiple · usually takes 6–18 months
Stay bonuses, non-solicits, and cross-training on major accounts reduce the key-person discount; documented >90% logo and >95% revenue retention turns 'retainers' into provable recurring revenue a buyer pays for.
adds about 0.2–0.4× to your multiple · usually takes 6–18 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 marketing agencies on. The diagnostic fills the “your business” column from your actual QuickBooks data.
| Metric | Marketing & Advertising Agencies benchmark | Your business | What it means |
|---|---|---|---|
| Recurring / contracted revenue | ~60% of revenue | Your data | Higher is better — the top multiple lever |
| Gross margin | ~55% | Your data | Pricing and job-costing discipline |
| EBITDA margin | ~20% | Your data | What flows to the bottom line |
| Healthy customer-concentration ceiling | top customer under 10% | Your data | Above it, buyers price the risk |
| Typical industry growth | ~12% / yr | Your data | Beating it can add to your multiple |
| Typical sale multiple | 4.5–8.0× 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. 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.
Agency M&A runs on three tiers, set by your size and recurring/niche profile. Listed holding companies — WPP, Omnicom, Publicis, and Stagwell — acquire scaled specialists ($5M+ EBITDA) as bolt-ons. PE-backed digital/performance roll-ups are the most active buyers of SMB agencies: Tinuiti (New Mountain), Power Digital (Court Square), Wpromote (ZMC), and BarkleyOKRP (Keystone), among 40+ PE-owned platforms. Strategic and individual buyers — adjacent agencies, search funds, SBA-backed individuals — buy sub-$1M-EBITDA shops. Below ~$1M EBITDA you're an add-on; $1–3M is the entry band for sponsor platforms; the headline 8–12x multiples belong to the platforms doing the buying, not a single owner-operated agency. The memo maps which pool fits an agency 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.
Read-only, enforced in our code: every call we make to QuickBooks is a read. Nothing leaves unless you choose to share it.
Disconnect or delete anytime. Read our privacy policy →
Start with the free preview. Pay once — $499 — only when you want the full memo. No subscription, no per-seat pricing.
Most Marketing & Advertising Agencies businesses in the $1M–$10M revenue range trade at roughly 4.5× to 8.0× normalized EBITDA, with a typical deal near 5.5×. 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, blending recent lower-middle-market closings, main-street marketplace sales, and academic M&A survey data.
A small, owner-run agency is usually priced on SDE at roughly 2.0–3.5x; a scaled, retainer-heavy, specialist agency with a management layer is priced on owner-normalized EBITDA at roughly 4.5–8x, with the very top of the market (8–12x) reserved for $5M+-EBITDA agencies with years of double-digit growth and a deep niche. The number is set off your own net revenue, normalized EBITDA, recurring mix, and concentration — not a generic calculator.
Net revenue — your agency income after media/ad-spend pass-through. If you run client ad budgets through your books, those budgets are not your revenue, and any buyer or lender strips them out before applying a multiple. Pricing off gross billings is the single most common way agencies overstate their value.
A lot. Crossing roughly 60% recurring retainer revenue is the line between commodity project work and premium pricing, and is worth on the order of 1.0–2.0x more EBITDA than an otherwise-identical project-based shop — provided the retainers renew (buyers verify >90% logo and >95% revenue retention before treating them as recurring).
Sixty seconds. Four numbers. No signup, no email. Just a real answer.