For most plumbing business owners weighing a sale, the number on the offer isn't actually the hardest part. It's the crew. It's the lead plumber who's been there fourteen years and trained half the current team. It's the guy who knows exactly which commercial clients need extra hand-holding and which ones just want the invoice sent. It's the six or seven people who've built their lives around steady work at a shop they trust. Take Mike, a plumbing business owner whose lead pl

Ask around at a supplier conference or a trade association meeting, and someone will hand you a rule of thumb for what your plumbing business is worth. Usually it's a multiple of revenue, passed down informally and repeated so often it starts to sound like fact. It isn't. Buyers don't price your top line. They price what's left after the noise gets stripped out, then apply a multiple that reflects how much risk they think they're taking on. Owners, like Mike, who go into a

You pull into a gas station and notice a truck from a competing plumbing company. New paint job, a logo you don't recognize. Then you recognize the driver and the guy in the passenger seat. Three of your best techs, now wearing someone else's uniform. That's exactly how it played out for Mike, a plumbing business owner who'd spent two decades building his company. He hadn't gotten a call. He'd gotten a gas station parking lot. That moment is what turned an abstract worry into

Two garage door companies can look almost like twins on paper. Same revenue. Same headcount. Same size of market. And yet one sells for meaningfully more than the other. That's what happened to Greg. At a trade conference last year, he ran into an old friend, another garage door business owner whose company looked, from the outside, a lot like his own. The friend had sold eighteen months earlier, and Greg finally worked up the nerve to ask what he'd gotten for it. The number

Due diligence isn't a formality. It's where deals either hold together or start to unravel, and clean financials are usually the difference. Three weeks before Greg got his first real offer, his bookkeeper quit. He'd been meaning to clean up the books for years. Meaning to separate the truck he used on weekends from the ones dedicated to jobs. The meaning is to get someone to properly track which invoices were for installs and which were for service calls. None of it had happ

Right after "What's it worth," the second question almost every garage door business owner asks a buyer is whether the name survives. It's not ego. It's the name customers say at 9 p.m. when a spring snaps and the car's trapped inside. It's the name on the truck that's parked in the same driveways year after year for a lot of owners, a family name that's outlasted invoices, jackets, and a few generations of kids watching a parent head out on emergency calls. Greg gets it. His