What I See When I Look at Your Company: A Buyer’s Walk-Through

Private equity firms have acquired more than 50 restoration platforms since 2018. Sooner or later, one of their people may walk through your business — or you’ll walk through it yourself, preparing to. Either way, the walk follows the same route. Here is what a buyer is actually examining, in the order they examine it, and the question underneath each stop. Restoration companies change hands at roughly 3–7x EBITDA: a $5M company with $750K of EBITDA lands somewhere between $2.25M and $4.5M. Where you land in that range is decided on this walk.

Stop One: The Owner’s Chair

The first question is never about revenue. It’s this: if the owner were hit by a bus, what happens? If every significant decision routes through you, the buyer sees a business with no transferable value beyond its equipment and customer list — and prices it that way. Owner dependency is the single largest multiple-killer in this industry.

Stop Two: The Books

Clean job-level cost tracking, consistent accounting, documented revenue recognition. A buyer isn’t being picky here — messy books mean unquantifiable risk, and risk gets priced as a discount or doesn’t get priced at all because the buyer walks.

Stop Three: The Revenue Map

Where does the money come from, and how concentrated is it? If 40% of revenue rides on one TPA or one commercial client, the buyer sees a single-event risk. In a business built for value, no single customer represents more than 20% of revenue.

Stop Four: The Predictability Test

Revenue that is contractually obligated or statistically predictable is worth more than the same revenue that arrived by chance. The buyer is underwriting next year’s cash flow, not admiring last year’s.

Stop Five: The Playbooks

Does “how we do things” exist on paper, or only in the owner’s head? Documented SOPs and a team that runs them are value. A brilliant owner with nothing written down is a key-person policy waiting to be priced.

Stop Six: The Team

The quality, loyalty, and capability of your leadership team is a genuine value driver — it’s the difference between buying a business and buying a job with assets attached. I know this stop personally: I sold my own company to my management team. That outcome doesn’t happen by accident.

The Point of the Walk

Everything that raises your multiple — independence from the owner, clean books, diversified revenue, documented systems, a team that leads — also makes the company more profitable and more enjoyable to run this year. Succession planning isn’t about getting out. It’s about building something real enough that getting out is a choice. The companion piece, on how to build that value deliberately whether you ever sell or not, is Succession Planning for Restoration Companies: What Buyers Actually Look For.

Related reading

• Succession Planning for Restoration Companies
• Franchise vs. Independent Restoration
• Restoration Company Exit Planning

Mike McCabe is The Profit Detective — a 36-year restoration industry veteran who built and sold his own restoration company to his management team. He now works with restoration owners on operations, profitability, and enterprise value.