Five minutes of QuickBooks read-only and a few quick questions surfaces what a buyer would discount your waterproofing and foundation-repair business for — how much of the selling only you can do, how dependent the business is on paid lead flow, and the lifetime-warranty obligations a buyer will reserve against. Preview is free; $499 for the full memo.
Enter two numbers for an instant Waterproofing 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.
In most waterproofing and foundation-repair shops the owner runs the in-home consultation and closes the job. When the owner is the sales engine, a buyer sees revenue that walks at the closing table — not a transferable book. This owner-as-closer dependence is the single biggest reason these businesses get discounted, even with strong margins.
This trade lives on paid lead flow — pay-per-click, lead aggregators, and home-show traffic. A buyer probes how concentrated the pipeline is in one channel and what acquisition cost has been doing. Revenue that depends on a single lead source at a rising cost-per-lead is fragile, and a buyer prices that fragility.
Transferable lifetime warranties are a future obligation that stays with the business after the sale. A buyer wants to see whether a reserve exists, how claims have trended, and what the tail liability looks like. An unquantified warranty book is a line a buyer will haircut hard until you've funded and documented it.
Foundation and water-intrusion demand tracks rainfall events and home-sale activity, and a large share of closed jobs depends on a third-party consumer-financing partner. A buyer prices the risk that a wet-year revenue spike doesn't repeat and that tighter credit or a partner-program change throttles the close rate.
Each lever is sized for a typical $3m–$5m revenue waterproofing & foundation-repair contractor, high-margin system work — about $600K EBITDA. Same number whether we frame it as “what a buyer discounts” or “what you keep by fixing it.”
Hire and train closers, document the consultative in-home sales process, and run it on CRM-tracked KPIs so deals get sold without you in the room. This directly attacks the owner-as-closer discount and is the highest-leverage move from an SDE basis toward an EBITDA basis.
adds about 0.4–0.8× to your multiple · usually takes 12–24 months
Reduce reliance on a single paid channel by building organic, referral, and reputation-driven demand — a strong review moat lowers acquisition cost and de-risks the pipeline. A diversified, lower-cost lead engine is worth materially more to a buyer than a single-channel one.
adds about 0.2–0.4× to your multiple · usually takes 6–18 months
Convert lifetime warranties into a funded program with paid annual inspections and dehumidifier or sump service, carry an explicit warranty reserve, and recast EBITDA cleanly. It manufactures a recurring annuity on top of one-time repair and removes the liability a buyer would otherwise discount.
adds about 0.2–0.5× to your multiple · usually takes 6–12 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 waterproofing and foundation-repair contractors on. The diagnostic fills the “your business” column from your actual QuickBooks data.
| Metric | Waterproofing benchmark | Your business | What it means |
|---|---|---|---|
| Recurring / contracted revenue | ~10% of revenue | Your data | Higher is better — the top multiple lever |
| Gross margin | ~45% | 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 10% | 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 | 3.0–6.5× 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.
Waterproofing and foundation repair has been one of the most actively consolidated home-services trades: private-equity-backed national platforms have rolled up local contractors aggressively, drawn by high system margins, low customer concentration, and a non-discretionary repair need. Strategics and platforms buy branded, multi-location, management-run businesses with a repeatable lead engine and pay up for scale; individual and SBA-backed buyers acquire owner-operated, owner-sold shops at the other end of the range. What separates the two is whether the selling, lead flow, and warranty obligations run without the founder. The memo maps which buyer 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 Waterproofing businesses in the $1M–$10M revenue range trade at roughly 3.0× to 6.5× 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.
The 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 a warranty reserve treated explicitly. Against that we apply a trade-specific multiple grounded in recent small-business sale transactions. The factors that move it up or down: how much of the selling only the owner can do, how concentrated lead generation is in one paid channel, the warranty liability a buyer will reserve against, customer concentration (usually low, a strength here), and whether a trained sales team transfers with the business. Every figure traces back to your books — never a revenue rule-of-thumb.
A sales process and team that close deals without the owner, diversified lead sources with a strong review moat and lower acquisition cost, a funded warranty program with paid annual service that creates recurring revenue, low customer concentration, and clean books with a documented warranty reserve. 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.