What could your business sell for?
A range based on what businesses your size sold for. Three short stages, about two minutes, and your range shows right away.
1. Your business
2. What buyers look at
3. Your range
What kind of business do you own?
About two minutes. Your range shows right away, and nothing is sent to us unless you ask for your breakdown.
How the estimate works
Buyers price a private business as a number of times its yearly profit. A business that keeps $1 million a year and sells for $4 million sold for 4 times profit. Smaller businesses, roughly those selling for under $2 million, are usually priced on profit plus one owner’s pay, because the new owner often steps into that job (advisors call this seller’s discretionary earnings, or SDE). Larger ones are priced on profit before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization (EBITDA). The calculator works out both from what you enter and uses the one that fits your size.
It then uses what business brokers and M&A advisors reported for completed sales in the IBBA and M&A Source Market Pulse survey. The low and high ends of your range are the lowest and highest typical figure reported for businesses your size over the last eight quarters. Your sales do not change the range: they show the size of the business, check the profit figure, and let the result say what the range is as a share of sales.
| Sale price | Priced on | Times that, 8 quarters | Q2 2026 | Cash at closing, Q2 2026 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Under $500K | Profit plus owner's pay (SDE) | 2.0 to 2.3 | 2.0 | 88% |
| $500K to $1M | Profit plus owner's pay (SDE) | 2.5 to 3.0 | 2.8 | 92% |
| $1M to $2M | Profit plus owner's pay (SDE) | 2.9 to 3.3 | 3.1 | 91% |
| $2M to $5M | Profit (EBITDA) | 3.5 to 4.1 | 4.0 | 84% |
| $5M to $50M | Profit (EBITDA) | 4.5 to 6.0 | 5.8 | 83% |
What moves a company within the range
The five questions in the calculator are the ones buyers ask first. Your answers place you in the lower, middle or upper part of the range. That placement is our judgment, not survey data: no published survey measures how much each of these moves a multiple.
Sales that repeat
Sales under contract, or from customers who pay every month, are easier for a buyer to count on, so they support a higher price.
What moves the price a buyer paysOne big customer
When one customer is a large share of sales, losing that customer after the sale is a risk the buyer prices in.
How buyers build a figureOwner dependence
If customers, decisions and know-how run through you, a buyer is paying for something that may leave with you.
Owner-dependent business valuationProfit trend
Buyers pay for the profit they expect to keep. Growth supports the price; a decline brings a lower price or more of it paid later.
Earnouts and seller financingThe quality of the books
Clean, documented books let a buyer trust the profit, and a cost you add back but cannot prove is one they take out again.
Preparing clean financials
What this estimate is not
It is not a valuation. It combines all industries, because the survey does not publish figures by trade, and it uses typical figures, while individual sales spread much wider. In one quarter the survey did publish the spread for sales of $5 million to $50 million: they ranged from 3.5 to 9.5 times profit (EBITDA), around an average of 5.3 (Market Pulse, Q4 2023). Where your company actually lands depends on its books, its contracts, the buyers active in your trade and the terms of the deal.
For property management companies, the per-door figures you may have heard are a different shorthand; what a property management company is worth explains how the two compare.
The range is the start. The number comes from your books.
A confidential valuation looks at your actual financials, contracts and buyers, and tells you where you would land and why. No cost, no obligation.