A read-only QuickBooks link and a few questions surface what a buyer marks a tile and stone shop down for — how much of the takeoff and bidding only you can do, how tightly you ride a few builders, GCs, or designers and the construction cycle, and whether your certified setters and your callback record survive a change of ownership. Preview is free; $499 for the full memo.
Enter two numbers for an instant Tile & Stone 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.
Tile and stone bids live or die on the takeoff — square footage, waste and pattern factors, substrate prep, waterproofing scope, and the labor hours a particular layout really takes. In most shops that judgment sits entirely with the owner. A buyer treats owner-only estimating as a role to backfill rather than a business that transfers, and discounts hard until the takeoff and pricing method are written down and moved onto someone else.
Installation work tends to flow from a short list of homebuilders, general contractors, and interior designers, all of it tied to the construction and remodel cycle. A buyer prices the risk that one of those relationships re-bids the trade or pauses its projects, and underwrites the next slowdown rather than the current backlog. Heavy concentration plus cyclicality is what drags the multiple toward the floor.
The trade has a well-documented shortage of qualified tile and stone setters, and the people who can hang large-format porcelain, book-match slabs, and waterproof a wet area to standard are genuinely hard to replace. If that capability rests with one or two installers and isn't certified, cross-trained, or under any retention, a buyer prices the risk that the crew — and the quality of the work — leaves when you do.
Lippage, cracked tile from an uncoupled substrate, hollow-sounding sets, and waterproofing failures in showers turn into callbacks, tear-outs, and warranty claims that quietly eat margin and reputation. Without documented adherence to recognized installation standards and a tracked callback record, a buyer assumes the worst and reserves against latent defects they can't inspect at closing.
Each lever is sized for a typical $2m–$4m revenue tile & stone installation contractor, residential remodel + commercial mix — about $350K EBITDA. Same number whether we frame it as “what a buyer discounts” or “what you keep by fixing it.”
Get your steady builders, GCs, and designers onto preferred-installer arrangements and chase a profitable commercial and natural-stone mix that runs on a different cycle than tract housing. Documented, diversified repeat work is the closest a project trade comes to recurring revenue — it spreads cyclical risk and is exactly what a buyer credits as durable rather than re-won job by job.
adds about 0.2–0.4× to your multiple · usually takes 12–24 months
Put a non-owner estimator on a written takeoff-and-pricing method and promote a production manager who schedules crews and holds the field relationships day to day. Lifting the bidding and job oversight off you is the single biggest move that turns a shop dependent on the owner into a business a buyer can operate — and it's what lets the multiple climb toward an EBITDA basis.
adds about 0.4–0.7× to your multiple · usually takes 12–24 months
Clean accrual books with per-job material and labor costing, a documented add-back trail, certified setters whose credentials transfer, and a tracked callback record tied to recognized installation standards let a buyer underwrite the shop with confidence — and protect the price from a re-trade once diligence opens the warranty file.
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 tile and stone installation contractors on. The diagnostic fills the “your business” column from your actual QuickBooks data.
| Metric | Tile & Stone 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 | ~11% | 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 | ~4% / yr | Your data | Beating it can add to your multiple |
| Typical sale multiple | 2.5–4.5× 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.
Tile and stone installation is a fragmented building-finishing trade where buyers separate sharply by size and quality. Individual and SBA-backed buyers acquire owner-run residential shops, often tied to a few builders or one designer pipeline. Regional finishing-trade strategics and lower-middle-market private-equity platforms — many assembling broader interior-finishes groups — roll up shops with diversified relationships, certified-installer depth, and a commercial or natural-stone book. The platforms pay up for an estimating function that survives the owner, a profitable commercial and stone mix, certified setters under retention, and a clean callback record. The memo maps which buyer would look at a shop your size and how each structures 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 Tile & Stone businesses in the $1M–$10M revenue range trade at roughly 2.5× to 4.5× normalized EBITDA, with a typical deal near 3.3×. 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 tile-and-stone valuation begins where a buyer's diligence team begins: your reported earnings, then the normalizing adjustments — owner add-backs, family wages, personal vehicles, one-time items — each tied to a specific QuickBooks transaction, producing normalized EBITDA. Against that we apply a tile-and-stone-specific multiple grounded in recent small-business sale transactions. The factors that move it up or down: how much of the takeoff only you can do, how concentrated you are in a few builders, GCs, or designers and how exposed you are to the construction cycle, your residential-versus-commercial and builder-grade-versus-natural-stone mix, whether certified setters transfer, and your callback and warranty record. Every figure traces back to your books — never a square-foot rule-of-thumb.
Diversified, documented relationships across builders, GCs, and designers instead of one pipeline; a profitable commercial and natural-stone mix over commodity builder-grade tile; a non-owner estimator and production manager running the takeoff and the crews; certified setters whose credentials transfer; clean job-costed books; and a tracked callback record showing the work meets recognized installation standards. 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.