Five minutes of QuickBooks read-only and a few quick questions surfaces what a buyer would discount your painting business for — how much of the work only you can estimate and sell, how thin the recurring book is, and the crew-hour leakage hiding in your job costs. Preview is free; $499 for the full memo.
Enter two numbers for an instant Painting 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.
Most painting owners do all the estimating and personally win every job. If the bidding, the pricing instinct, and the repeat-customer relationships live in your head, a buyer is purchasing a job, not a business — and discounts hard for it. A search-funder or SBA-backed individual buyer is underwriting whether the phone keeps ringing after you leave; this is the single biggest haircut in the trade.
Painting is project work — you re-win the year every January. Without recurring commercial-maintenance painting, HOA, or property-management repaint contracts, a buyer treats each dollar as one they have to re-earn and prices it below a shop with a contracted base they can bank on.
Exterior work stalls in cold and wet months, so painting revenue is lumpy. A buyer normalizes the seasonal swing and underwrites the trough, not the peak — and any year propped up by one big project gets discounted as non-repeatable unless you can show a smooth, diversified book.
If a couple of commercial GCs or property managers make up an outsized share of revenue, a buyer prices the risk that one leaves — and that the account knows it's load-bearing. A single customer above ~20% of revenue routinely triggers escrows, earnouts, or a walk.
Each lever is sized for a typical $1.5m–$3m revenue painting contractor, repaint + light-commercial mix — about $300K EBITDA. Same number whether we frame it as “what a buyer discounts” or “what you keep by fixing it.”
Recurring commercial-maintenance painting, HOA, and property-management repaint programs turn one-off project revenue into a contracted base. It's the highest-leverage move a painting owner has — it smooths the off-season, changes which buyers will look at you, and lifts the multiple across every buyer type.
adds about 0.3–0.6× to your multiple · usually takes 12–18 months
Promote or hire a sales-estimator and move your bidding playbook — markup rules, production rates, walk-the-job checklist — onto them in writing. A painting business that wins work without the owner stops being 'a job,' which is what lets the multiple climb toward the top of the range.
adds about 0.4–0.7× to your multiple · usually takes 12–24 months
Every buyer runs a quality-of-earnings review. Clean accrual books with a documented add-back trail and job-cost history let them trust your margins — which protects the price you've already earned from a mid-diligence 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 painting contractors on. The diagnostic fills the “your business” column from your actual QuickBooks data.
| Metric | Painting benchmark | Your business | What it means |
|---|---|---|---|
| Recurring / contracted revenue | ~10% of revenue | Your data | Higher is better — the top multiple lever |
| Gross margin | ~45% | Your data | Pricing and job-costing discipline |
| EBITDA margin | ~13% | 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 | ~3.8% / 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.
Painting is consolidating from several directions. National franchise platforms (CertaPro Painters, backed by FirstService Brands; Five Star Painting under Neighborly) acquire and convert established shops; private-equity-backed home-services roll-ups buy for crews and recurring commercial relationships; and regional operators buy for route density and a repeat-customer book. Individual and SBA-financed buyers compete for owner-operated residential shops. Each underwrites your business differently — 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 Painting businesses in the $1M–$10M revenue range trade at roughly 2.0× to 4.5× normalized EBITDA, with a typical deal near 3.0×. 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 painting 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 jobs — each tied to a specific QuickBooks transaction, producing your normalized EBITDA. Against that we apply a painting-specific multiple grounded in recent small-business sale transactions in the trade. The factors that move it up or down: recurring commercial/repaint contract share, how much of the estimating and selling only you can do, GC and property-manager concentration, seasonality, and the crew-hour discipline in your job costs. Every figure traces back to your books — never a revenue rule-of-thumb.
Recurring commercial-maintenance and repaint contracts, a non-owner estimating and sales function, a diversified customer base, clean books, and a year-round work mix that doesn't crater in the off-season. 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.