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, 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 plumbing business — and the diagnostic tells you exactly where you stand on each, from your own books.
If you hold the key accounts, price the jobs, or run dispatch yourself, a buyer sees risk rather than a business. A private-equity platform can absorb you under existing management — but a search-funder or SBA-backed individual is underwriting whether the company survives your exit, and discounts heavily for it. It's the largest single haircut on a trades business.
Buyers pay more for predictable, renewable revenue — service-plan memberships, priority-service agreements, recurring commercial maintenance — than for one-off emergency calls. A book that's mostly break-fix reads as harder to repeat, and gets priced below a shop with a real membership base.
If a few accounts — or a couple of general contractors and home builders — drive most of your revenue, a buyer prices the risk of losing one. New-construction-heavy plumbers are especially exposed: that revenue is cyclical and relationship-dependent, and buyers know it.
Vans, jetters, and sewer cameras wear out. A financial buyer normalizes maintenance capex to the replacement level and assumes a refresh bill early in the hold. Without a documented equipment age and replacement plan, they assume the worst and take it off the cash flow they're paying for.
Converting your customer base to membership and priority-service plans is the highest-leverage move most plumbing owners have. Every buyer type pays more for contracted, renewable revenue, and a larger recurring base steadies your numbers between big jobs.
A promoted lead plumber/estimator and an ops or dispatch lead — with the top customer relationships moved onto them — converts an owner-operated shop into a business a buyer can run after you leave. That's what carries the multiple toward the top of the range.
Shifting weight from cyclical new-construction toward recurring service and repair de-risks the revenue, and clean accrual books with a documented add-back trail protect your earnings from a quality-of-earnings haircut in diligence.
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.
Plumbing has drawn heavy private-equity roll-up interest alongside HVAC, especially residential service-and-repair shops with recurring revenue. PE-backed platforms buy add-ons and pay up for owner-independent operations; independent sponsors and search funds buy operator-led shops to professionalize; regional strategics buy for crews and coverage. The memo maps which buyer types fit a business your size and how each structures a 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 Plumbing businesses in the $1M–$10M revenue range trade at roughly 2.5× to 8.0× normalized EBITDA, with a typical deal near 5.0×. 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. The range blends recent lower-middle-market closings, main-street marketplace sales, and the Pepperdine Private Capital Markets Report.
The way a buyer's diligence team does: we normalize your real earnings for owner add-backs and one-time items, then apply a defensible EBITDA multiple grounded in recent lower-middle-market and main-street plumbing transactions. Nothing is guessed off a revenue rule of thumb — every figure traces back to your QuickBooks data.
Recurring service-plan revenue, a business that runs without the owner, a diversified customer and referral base, a healthy service-vs-new-construction mix, and clean books. The diagnostic scores each and quantifies the upside of moving up.
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. 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 costs tens of thousands and includes proof-of-cash testing we don't do. This is the owner-facing version: a defensible valuation, a documented add-back defense, and a quality-of-earnings-style workup of the same issues a buyer will raise — so real diligence holds no surprises.
The free preview is instant once QuickBooks is connected. The full $499 memo arrives within 24–48 hours.
Now is the right time. The things buyers discount — owner dependence, thin recurring revenue, builder concentration — take 6 to 24 months to fix. Finding them now lets you go to market once, prepared, instead of discovering them in the middle of a buyer's diligence.
Yes. We connect to QuickBooks read-only — every call 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 and delete everything anytime.
Connect QuickBooks, answer 7 questions, and see your buyer's-eye preview — no signup, no email.
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