Hook up your QuickBooks (read-only) and answer a few quick questions — you'll see the service-plan recurring revenue a buyer pays up for, the new-construction or builder concentration they'll discount, and the equipment-replacement story they expect you to have ready. Preview is free; $499 for the full memo.
Enter two numbers for an instant Plumbing 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 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.
Each lever is sized for a typical $2m–$3m revenue plumbing contractor, residential service-heavy — about $400K EBITDA. Same number whether we frame it as “what a buyer discounts” or “what you keep by fixing it.”
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.
adds about 0.3–0.5× to your multiple · usually takes 12–18 months
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.
adds about 0.4–0.6× to your multiple · usually takes 12–24 months
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.
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 plumbing contractors on. The diagnostic fills the “your business” column from your actual QuickBooks data.
| Metric | Plumbing benchmark | Your business | What it means |
|---|---|---|---|
| Recurring / contracted revenue | ~25% of revenue | Your data | Higher is better — the top multiple lever |
| Gross margin | ~32% | Your data | Pricing and job-costing discipline |
| EBITDA margin | ~11% | Your data | What flows to the bottom line |
| Healthy customer-concentration ceiling | top customer under 25% | Your data | Above it, buyers price the risk |
| Typical industry growth | ~4% / yr | Your data | Beating it can add to your multiple |
| Typical sale multiple | 2.5–8.0× 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.
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.
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 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, blending recent lower-middle-market closings, main-street marketplace sales, and academic M&A survey data.
Plumbing valuation runs the same path a buyer's QoE team will run — and we pre-empt every step. The owner add-backs, family wages, personal vehicles, and one-time items come off your reported earnings first, each adjustment tied to a specific QuickBooks transaction. The resulting normalized EBITDA gets a plumbing-specific multiple grounded in recent trade transactions — lower-middle market for larger shops, Main Street for sub-$1M EBITDA. What moves the multiple in plumbing specifically: service-plan recurring revenue %, the service-versus-new-construction mix, GC or home-builder concentration, and your equipment-replacement story for vans, jetters, and sewer cameras. Numbers trace to your books — no revenue rules-of-thumb.
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.
Sixty seconds. Four numbers. No signup, no email. Just a real answer.