Five minutes of QuickBooks read-only and a few quick questions surfaces what a buyer would discount your well-drilling business for — whether the rigs run without you on the license, how much of the work is one-time drilling versus recurring pump service, and the rig-and-fleet replacement bill they'll subtract from cash flow. Preview is free; $499 for the full memo.
Enter two numbers for an instant Well Drilling 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 well-drilling shops the owner holds the state driller's license, reads the geology, bids the footage, and runs the rig. That license and that judgment — where the water is, how deep to go, how to price the dry-hole risk — are exactly what doesn't transfer unless someone else on the crew is licensed and the bidding is documented. A search-fund or SBA buyer treats an owner-only license-and-estimating role as a job, not a business, and discounts it hard.
Drilling rigs are among the heaviest, most expensive iron in the trades — a new rotary or sonic rig runs well into six figures, and support trucks, mud systems, and pump equipment add to it. A buyer normalizes the replacement bill straight off cash flow, and an aging, undocumented rig fleet becomes a large assumed liability unless you can show age, hours, condition, and a replacement plan.
New-well drilling is project work tied to housing starts, agricultural demand, and the drought cycle — it boomed and busted through the last recession and surges in dry years only to fall back. A buyer underwrites the trough, not the drought-driven peak. A book that is mostly one-time drilling, with little recurring service to smooth it, prices toward the floor.
Dry holes, deepening water tables, per-well drilling permits, and state water-resource regulation all directly affect the work and what it's worth. A buyer prices the risk of a regulatory change, a permitting slowdown, or a region where wells must be drilled deeper and dry-hole risk is rising — and they'll test whether your estimating already prices that in.
Each lever is sized for a typical $2m–$5m revenue water-well drilling & pump-service contractor, drilling + recurring service mix — about $500K EBITDA. Same number whether we frame it as “what a buyer discounts” or “what you keep by fixing it.”
Build a book of pump replacement and service, water-system maintenance agreements, and well rehabilitation, inspection, and water-testing — the work that recurs regardless of whether new wells are being drilled. It moves the business off the dry-hole-and-drought cycle toward a water-services model, and recurring service revenue is what buyers credit as durable and pay up for.
adds about 0.3–0.6× to your multiple · usually takes 12–18 months
Get a second crew member licensed, document the bidding and footage-pricing rules, and put the municipal and agricultural relationships on the team. The license is the constraint that makes owner-dependence sharper here than in most trades — so building a bench that can drill, bid, and stand behind the work is the lever that turns 'buying the owner' into 'buying a business.'
adds about 0.3–0.6× to your multiple · usually takes 12–24 months
A per-rig and per-truck schedule (age, hours, condition, replacement year), clean accrual books with job-level costing, and a documented add-back trail turn an assumed worst-case fleet haircut into a financeable plan — and let a buyer trust the recurring revenue and the heavy asset base they're paying for.
adds about 0.2–0.4× to your multiple · usually takes 3–9 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-well drilling & pump-service contractors on. The diagnostic fills the “your business” column from your actual QuickBooks data.
| Metric | Well Drilling benchmark | Your business | What it means |
|---|---|---|---|
| Recurring / contracted revenue | ~25% of revenue | Your data | Higher is better — the top multiple lever |
| Gross margin | ~38% | Your data | Pricing and job-costing discipline |
| EBITDA margin | ~16% | 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 | 3.0–5.5× 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.
Water-well drilling is a fragmented, heavy-equipment trade where the business splits between one-time drilling and a recurring pump-service-and-maintenance layer. Larger water-services and infrastructure platforms acquire operators that serve municipal, agricultural, mining, and industrial customers with a high recurring-service share; regional strategics buy for rigs, crews, and territory; individual and SBA-backed buyers buy owner-driller shops, with the rig assets acting as a financing floor. The acquirers that pay up want a deep recurring pump-service book, diversified end markets, a licensed driller other than the founder, and a documented, modern rig fleet. 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 Well Drilling businesses in the $1M–$10M revenue range trade at roughly 3.0× to 5.5× normalized EBITDA, with a typical deal near 4.0×. 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.
A well-drilling 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. Against that we apply a multiple grounded in recent transactions in this heavy-equipment water-infrastructure trade. Because it's rig-and-fleet-heavy, buyers blend earnings with asset condition, and they look hard at the one-time-drilling versus recurring-pump-service mix, drought and housing cyclicality, end-market concentration, geology and permitting exposure, and whether a licensed driller other than you transfers with the business. Every figure traces back to your books — never a revenue rule-of-thumb.
A deep recurring pump-service, maintenance, and well-rehabilitation book, diversified municipal/agricultural/industrial end markets, a licensed driller and operations manager beyond the owner, a documented modern rig-and-truck fleet, 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.