Five minutes of QuickBooks read-only and a few quick questions surfaces what a buyer would value your water treatment dealership for — how much of the recurring rental and service base actually transfers, how much of the selling only you can do, and how install-heavy versus recurring your book really is. Preview is free; $499 for the full memo.
Enter two numbers for an instant Water Treatment 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.
Water-treatment sales are won by an in-home water test and demo, and in most dealerships the owner runs that close. When conversion depends on the owner in the room, a buyer sees lead flow and a close rate that can fall off after the sale — and prices the owner-dependence rather than the brand.
The rental and service book is the valuation engine — but a buyer will read the fine print. Do the rental and service-plan contracts legally assign on a sale? What are the renewal and churn rates, and how tenured is the base? A recurring book that doesn't transfer cleanly, or that churns, gives back most of the premium it looks like it should earn.
If revenue is mostly one-time equipment installs with a thin recurring tail, a buyer prices it closer to a lumpy project business than a route business. The whole reason this trade can earn a route-business multiple is the recurring salt, filter, service, and rental revenue — a thin recurring mix forfeits that.
Dealer and franchise relationships carry territory rights, exclusivity, and assignment terms that can restrict who you can sell to or require approval. A buyer will want the agreement reviewed early, and any transfer restriction or termination right is a structural risk they'll factor into both price and deal structure.
Each lever is sized for a typical $2.5m–$5m revenue water-treatment dealer, install + rental/service mix — about $500K EBITDA. Same number whether we frame it as “what a buyer discounts” or “what you keep by fixing it.”
Attach a service or salt-delivery plan to every install, convert one-time customers onto rentals and plans, and shift the mix toward a majority-recurring book. Moving from install-weighted toward route-style recurring is the single change that repositions a dealer from project-trade pricing toward the top of the band.
adds about 0.5–1.0× to your multiple · usually takes 12–24 months
Build and train a sales and service team, document the test-and-demo sales process, and add stickier commercial and light-industrial accounts. It removes the owner-dependence discount and adds durable recurring revenue that a single residential channel can't.
adds about 0.3–0.6× to your multiple · usually takes 6–18 months
Quantify rental count, monthly recurring revenue, renewal and churn rates, and deferred-revenue obligations, and confirm contracts assign on sale. A recurring book a buyer can actually underwrite — and that demonstrably transfers — is what unlocks the premium over a project trade. Clean add-backs round it out.
adds about 0.2–0.4× 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 water treatment dealers on. The diagnostic fills the “your business” column from your actual QuickBooks data.
| Metric | Water Treatment benchmark | Your business | What it means |
|---|---|---|---|
| Recurring / contracted revenue | ~40% of revenue | Your data | Higher is better — the top multiple lever |
| Gross margin | ~50% | 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 12% | Your data | Above it, buyers price the risk |
| Typical industry growth | ~5.5% / 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.
Water treatment sits apart from the project trades because of its recurring engine — rentals, salt and filter delivery, and service plans — and buyers price that accordingly. A dominant national franchised consolidator has rolled up dealers for decades, the major equipment manufacturers run independent-dealer networks that buy and combine territories, and recurring-services private equity is drawn to dense, contract-backed books. Individual and SBA-backed buyers acquire smaller, install-weighted dealerships at the low end. What separates a route-business multiple from a project-trade one is the depth and transferability of the recurring base. The memo maps which buyer would actually look at a dealership 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 Water Treatment 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 water-treatment 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 items — each tied to a specific QuickBooks transaction, producing your normalized EBITDA, with the recurring rental and service base quantified separately. Against that we apply a trade-specific multiple grounded in recent small-business sale transactions. The factors that move it up or down: how deep and transferable the recurring rental and service book is, how much of the selling only the owner can do, the install-versus-recurring mix, and any manufacturer or franchise transfer restrictions. Every figure traces back to your books — never a revenue rule-of-thumb.
A deep, tenured, transferable rental and service-plan base, a sales process that closes without the owner, a higher recurring-versus-install mix, stickier commercial accounts, documented MRR and churn, and clean books. 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.