What's Your Business Actually Worth?
I sold mine after ten years. The number at the end is decided long before you ever talk to a buyer, and almost none of it is about how much revenue you do.
What does it really earn?
A buyer will ask for three years of books, not one. One good year proves nothing on its own, and a year that is way out of line with the others gets questioned.
Revenue going up while earnings stand still is the most common trap in this trade. More work at a worse price is not growth, and a buyer sees straight through it.
Most small business sales are funded by an SBA loan. Lenders want three years of history and profit in at least two of them. Fail that and your buyer has to find cash or you carry the note yourself, which cuts the field of buyers down hard.
Seller's Discretionary Earnings — profit plus your pay plus the personal costs. This is the number every multiple gets applied to.
Direction matters more than any single year. Growth earns a better multiple; a decline gets argued down hard, because a buyer is purchasing next year, not last year.
How much of it is you?
This is what decides the multiple. Tick only what's honestly true today, not what you're working on.
What the unticked boxes are costing you
Every box you couldn't tick is money sitting on the table. Here's roughly what each one is worth, at your current earnings.
Fill in step 1 and this fills in with your numbers.
What one bad year actually did to me
I sold my handyman business after ten years. The single thing that hurt the price most was one bad year. We finished 2024 down a thousand dollars. One thousand. On a business that size it was a rounding error, and it cost me more than any other line on the books.
Because a loss year doesn't just lower the average. It changes who is allowed to buy you. The bank wouldn't fund it. No SBA loan meant no ordinary buyer with a down payment, which meant a much shorter list of people who could write the cheque at all, which meant whoever was left got to set the price. I had done the work. The business ran. And one red year on a page took a chunk out of the number anyway.
So if you take one thing from this page: protect your profit every single year, even the hard ones. A year you merely survive is a year that follows you around for three.
And if you couldn't tick the first box above, read this twice. A business that stops earning the moment you stop working isn't a business a buyer can buy. It's a job with your name on the truck. When you sell it, what changes hands is a customer list, some tools and a vehicle, and the price reflects that.
That isn't a judgement. Almost every handyman starts there, and I spent years there myself. But it's worth knowing early, because the work that makes a business sellable is the same work that makes it bearable to own. Systems, people who can run a job, revenue that comes back on its own. You don't do that to cash out one day. You do it so you can take a week off.
The number at the end is just the scoreboard.
Most handymen never find out what they built was worth nothing.
They just work until they can't, then close the doors. The difference between that and walking away with a cheque is a handful of changes made years earlier, in a particular order.
A word on the numbers: brokers advertise multiples of three, four, even five times earnings. Those are for bigger, managed businesses, not for an owner-operator handyman outfit. Real sales at our size land far closer to one or two times, and this tool is deliberately set to that honest range rather than the one that makes you feel good. This is a rough estimate to show you which direction your decisions move the number, not a valuation. A real one accounts for your market, your equipment, your growth trend, your reviews and a dozen things a web page can't see. Before you ever sell, pay a broker or an accountant who does this for a living. Thinking about your first hire instead? Try the Should I Hire? calculator.