Five minutes of QuickBooks read-only and a few quick questions surfaces what a buyer would discount your masonry business for — how much of the bidding only you can do, how exposed you are to one GC and the construction cycle, and the scaffolding-and-forklift bill they'll subtract from cash flow. Preview is free; $499 for the full memo.
Enter two numbers for an instant Masonry 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.
In most masonry shops the owner does the takeoffs, prices the work, and holds the GC relationships. A buyer sees a job, not a transferable business — masonry estimating and the relationships that feed it are exactly what doesn't survive a handoff unless documented. A search-fund or SBA buyer discounts hard when the company can't bid without you.
Masonry revenue is project work tied to a handful of general contractors and the commercial/residential building cycle (industry revenue can fall in a down year). A buyer prices the risk that one GC leaves and underwrites the next downturn, not the current pipeline. Heavy single-GC concentration plus cyclicality pushes the multiple to the floor.
Mast-climbers, scaffolding, forklifts/telehandlers, mixers, and saws are real capital, and a buyer normalizes the replacement bill off cash flow. Without a documented equipment schedule, they assume the worst — aging gear becomes a deduction from what they'll pay.
A skilled-mason labor shortage means your crew is a real asset and a real risk. A buyer prices the chance your best masons or your superintendent leave at close, and discounts a shop whose capability is concentrated in a few people without retention agreements.
Each lever is sized for a typical $2m–$5m revenue masonry contractor, commercial + residential mix — about $400K EBITDA. Same number whether we frame it as “what a buyer discounts” or “what you keep by fixing it.”
Documented, repeatable relationships with multiple general contractors — plus a higher-margin hardscape and masonry-restoration/tuckpointing mix, including scheduled repointing programs for commercial property managers — make revenue more durable and less commodity than new-construction bricklaying.
adds about 0.2–0.4× to your multiple · usually takes 12–24 months
Promote or hire a lead estimator and a superintendent, and put your takeoff and job-costing rules on paper. Moving the bidding and field oversight off your shoulders is the biggest lever to turn 'buying the owner' into 'buying a business' — and what lets the multiple climb.
adds about 0.4–0.7× to your multiple · usually takes 12–24 months
Clean WIP-based books with a documented add-back trail, a clear bonding-capacity picture, and stay agreements on your key masons and superintendent let a buyer underwrite the business with confidence and protect the price from a re-trade.
adds about 0.1–0.3× to your multiple · usually takes 3–6 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 masonry contractors on. The diagnostic fills the “your business” column from your actual QuickBooks data.
| Metric | Masonry benchmark | Your business | What it means |
|---|---|---|---|
| Recurring / contracted revenue | ~8% 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 20% | Your data | Above it, buyers price the risk |
| Typical industry growth | ~3% / yr | Your data | Beating it can add to your multiple |
| Typical sale multiple | 2.0–4.5× 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.
Masonry is a fragmented, cyclical specialty trade. Buyers are mostly individual and SBA-backed buyers for owner-operated shops, regional commercial contractors buying for crews and bonding capacity, and — increasingly — PE-backed specialty-trade platforms adding masonry and restoration capability as contractor consolidation accelerates. The ones who pay up want repeat-commercial relationships, a higher-margin hardscape/restoration mix, transferable bonding, retained skilled crews, and a superintendent-run organization. The memo maps which would actually look at a company your size and how each tends to structure the deal.
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.
Start with the free preview. Pay once — $499 — only when you want the full memo. No subscription, no per-seat pricing.
Most Masonry businesses in the $1M–$10M revenue range trade at roughly 2.0× to 4.5× normalized EBITDA, with a typical deal near 2.8×. 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 masonry valuation begins where a buyer's QoE team begins: your reported earnings as the starting line. From there, the normalizing adjustments — owner add-backs, family wages, personal vehicles, one-time items — each tied to a specific QuickBooks transaction, producing your normalized EBITDA. Against that we apply a masonry-specific multiple grounded in recent small-business sale transactions in the trade, which sits toward the lower end of the trades range given its commodity, cyclical nature. The factors that move it up or down: how much of the estimating only you can do, GC concentration and construction-cycle exposure, the scaffolding/forklift capex a buyer will normalize, your hardscape/restoration mix, bonding capacity, and skilled-crew retention. Every figure traces back to your books.
Repeat commercial-GC relationships institutionalized beyond the owner, a higher-margin hardscape and restoration/tuckpointing mix, transferable bonding capacity, retained skilled masons and a superintendent, and clean books. The diagnostic scores where you sit on each and shows what moving up would be worth.
Sixty seconds. Four numbers. No signup, no email. Just a real answer.