Thinking about selling your
business services company?

It depends on which drawer of the filing cabinet you are in, and on whether your revenue renews by default. The 7.4x EBITDA quoted everywhere for business services has no public primary source we could find. What GF Data publishes is an overall private-equity-sponsored figure with no sector breakout: 7.2x for full-year 2025. The published vertical ranges from FISART run from 3.5x to 6.0x for landscaping and 3.5x to 7.0x for staffing up to 5.0x to 8.5x for pest control and 5.0x to 10.0x for IT managed services, and broker-published ladders reach 17x for a premier pest control platform. Deal size moves the number too: CapitalPad, compiling GF Data, puts the long-run spread between buyouts above and below $100 million at about 2.6 turns. The multiple follows the evidence: agreements that auto-renew with a volume floor, retention you can show from the invoices, contracts that transfer without a consent campaign, low concentration, and a team that runs the business without you. Our business services valuation multiples guide sets out the published figures and what each one is worth, and our valuation tool gives you a starting range in about two minutes.

Build the evidence before you go to market, not during it. Sort every customer agreement by whether it auto-renews, carries a volume floor, and requires an affirmative cancellation. Pull customer-level revenue for three years with a stable account ID so net revenue retention is a number you hand over rather than one a buyer reconstructs. Find the anti-assignment and change-of-control clauses before a buyer’s counsel does, and add permitted-assignment language at renewal where you can. Then run a real process with more than one qualified buyer at the table. Owners who take the first offer from a platform that called them directly almost always leave money and better terms behind. Here is how a sell-side advisor differs from a business broker.

Maybe not, if that offer is genuinely strong, and we will tell you honestly if it is. But understand what you are looking at. PitchBook data reported by Cherry Bekaert puts add-on acquisitions at 72.9% of U.S. buyouts in 2025, so the platform calling you is most likely pricing what you add to a business it already owns. CT Acquisitions’ broker-published pest control ladder shows why that number is designed to work for them: a sponsor holding a platform valued at 12x can buy a tuck-in at 8x and create four turns of value on your earnings before touching operations. The same company can be priced as an add-on by one buyer and as a platform by another, and the gap is real money. Compare consideration, not headlines: as Auxo Capital puts it to staffing sellers, a higher multiple with heavy contingent consideration can be less attractive than a lower multiple with cleaner cash at close. Before you sign anything, it is worth knowing where you would land with real competition in the room. Here is how to evaluate an unsolicited offer, and how strategic and private equity buyers differ.

A well-run process typically takes six to nine months from engagement to close. We aim to have first offers on the table within 30 days of going to market. For business services specifically, much of diligence happens in the contract file. A buyer’s counsel reads your agreements for anti-assignment and change-of-control language, and where consents are needed, buyers push to make them a closing condition. Buyers also reconstruct your retention from three years of customer-level revenue and call twenty to thirty of your customers during confirmatory diligence to ask whether they are under contract and whether they would stay. Having those answers ready before you go to market keeps them from becoming surprises late in the process. Here is our full breakdown of how long it takes to sell a business in the lower middle market.

You are not too early to have the conversation, but you are likely leaving multiple points on the table if you go to market today. CT Acquisitions names 70% recurring revenue as the threshold where buyers materially shift their underwriting, and values recurring revenue at 8x to 10x EBITDA against 4x to 5x for one-time job revenue. You cannot make a staffing MSA behave like a route agreement, but over a multi-year window you can shift the mix: embedded RPO and MSP-style workforce arrangements instead of transactional placement, retainer or subscription pricing instead of pure project billing, multi-year agreements with volume commitments instead of annual renewals with none. Two years out, make sure every invoice carries a stable customer ID and tag each account as recurring or one-time at the point of sale. None of that happens quickly, which is why it belongs in the window described in our guide on when to start exit planning. We are based in Chicago and work with business services owners nationally, and we will tell you honestly whether now is the right time or whether you should wait and build first.