Five minutes of QuickBooks read-only and a few quick questions surfaces what a buyer would pay up for — and discount — in your restoration business: how much of the work is high-margin mitigation, how concentrated your referral sources and TPA programs are, and how clean the insurance-AR is. Preview is free; $499 for the full memo.
Enter two numbers for an instant Restoration 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.
Restoration runs on relationships — with adjusters, agents, TPAs, and property managers who send the work. If those live with you personally, a buyer sees the pipeline walking out the door at close. The active consolidators pay the most for a referral engine that keeps producing without the founder; an owner who is the rainmaker is the biggest discount in the trade.
If a single third-party-administrator program or referral source drives an outsized share of jobs, a buyer prices the risk it changes terms or drops you — TPAs control dispatch, pricing, and documentation. Concentration in one program is the dominant risk a restoration buyer underwrites.
Water mitigation runs 60–80% gross margin; reconstruction runs 10–15%. A book weighted to rebuild work is priced well below a mitigation-weighted one — buyers pay up for the high-margin, fast-cycle mitigation revenue, not the thin, slow reconstruction tail.
Carriers and TPAs pay slowly, so restoration AR runs long, and Xactimate-documented claims that aren't clean get short-paid or disputed. A buyer normalizes slow, contested receivables and discounts a book where the claim documentation and collections aren't tight.
Each lever is sized for a typical $2m–$5m revenue restoration company, mitigation + reconstruction mix — about $700K EBITDA. Same number whether we frame it as “what a buyer discounts” or “what you keep by fixing it.”
Broadening the adjuster, agent, TPA, and commercial-account base — and weighting the book toward high-margin water/mold mitigation plus priority-response agreements with property managers — makes revenue more durable and more profitable. It's the single clearest path to the multiples the consolidators pay.
adds about 0.3–0.5× to your multiple · usually takes 12–18 months
Build a business-development and production-management layer so the adjuster/TPA relationships and the job pipeline run without you. A restoration business that keeps producing referral flow after the founder steps back opens the broad PE buyer pool where the top multiples are set.
adds about 0.4–0.7× to your multiple · usually takes 12–24 months
Tight Xactimate documentation, disciplined claim collections, clean accrual books, and a documented add-back trail let a buyer trust the earnings and the receivables — which protects the price 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 restoration companies on. The diagnostic fills the “your business” column from your actual QuickBooks data.
| Metric | Restoration benchmark | Your business | What it means |
|---|---|---|---|
| Recurring / contracted revenue | ~25% of revenue | Your data | Higher is better — the top multiple lever |
| Gross margin | ~55% | Your data | Pricing and job-costing discipline |
| EBITDA margin | ~18% | 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 | ~5% / yr | Your data | Beating it can add to your multiple |
| Typical sale multiple | 3.0–7.0× 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.
Restoration is one of the most actively consolidated trades in the country. PE-backed national platforms — SERVPRO, BELFOR, BluSky, and First Onsite among them — acquire established operators aggressively, buying smaller shops in the ~4–6x EBITDA range and building platforms that trade at 8–12x. Franchise systems (PuroClean, Paul Davis), regional strategics, and individual/SBA buyers round out the pool. The platforms pay up for a high-margin mitigation mix, diversified referral sources, TPA-program participation, IICRC-certified depth, and a business that runs without the owner. 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 Restoration businesses in the $1M–$10M revenue range trade at roughly 3.0× to 7.0× normalized EBITDA, with a typical deal near 4.5×. 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 restoration 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 storm spikes — each tied to a specific QuickBooks transaction, producing your normalized EBITDA. Against that we apply a multiple grounded in recent restoration transactions, a consolidation-hot trade. The factors that move it up or down: the high-margin mitigation vs. low-margin reconstruction mix, referral-source and single-TPA concentration, insurance-AR quality and aging, IICRC-certified depth, and whether the referral engine runs without you. Every figure traces back to your books — never a revenue rule-of-thumb.
A high-margin mitigation mix, diversified referral sources and TPA-program participation, clean and well-collected insurance-AR, IICRC-certified depth, a manager-run referral and production engine, and 24/7 response across water/fire/mold. 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.