Your shop sells for 5x. The platform that buys it sells for 18x.
If a private equity buyer knocked on your door this year, here is roughly what your business would fetch, based on what M&A advisors are reporting across 2026 transactions:
HVAC: about 4x to 8x EBITDA. The higher end goes to shops with real maintenance-agreement revenue and some commercial mix.
Plumbing: about 3x to 6x. Service agreements and geographic density move the number most.
Electrical and roofing: about 3x to 6x. Roofing sits lower because it is project-based and asset-heavy, with less recurring revenue.
Pest control and other recurring-contract services: about 7x to 10x, the highest in the trades, purely because the revenue renews on its own.
Now here is the part that matters. The roll-up that buys your shop at 5x does not resell it at 5x. Once a platform reaches scale, with hundreds of locations and a billion-plus in combined revenue, it trades at roughly 17x to 20x EBITDA. So a sponsor can buy your shop at 5x, plug it into a platform, and that same dollar of your profit is suddenly valued at three to four times more, without changing a thing about how you run the truck.
That gap, often 12 to 13 turns of EBITDA, is the entire business model of the rollup wave in your market. It is not magic. It is the reward for size, systems, and recurring revenue.
The take: You do not have to sell to use this. The exact things that lift your own multiple, recurring maintenance plans, a clean management layer that runs without you, and route density in your service area, are the same things that make the business run better and throw off more cash whether you sell or not. Optimize for your multiple and you get a better business as the consolation prize.
WHAT'S WORKING: The dispatch change that finds an extra hour per tech per day
The fastest margin win we keep seeing this year is not a new tool. It is squeezing more billable hours out of the techs you already have. (The figures below are drawn from publicly reported operator results across several shops, not a single business.)
A tech on the clock eight hours a day is often only billing five or six of them. The rest leaks into windshield time, waiting on parts, and gaps between jobs. Shops that tighten this, by clustering jobs geographically so drive time drops, by setting a same-day "first available" rule instead of fixed windows, and by having a dispatcher actively manage the board rather than letting it run itself, are reporting roughly one additional billable hour per tech per day.
Run that out. One extra billable hour, across six techs, at a $150 effective rate, five days a week, is about $4,500 a week in revenue you were already paying the labor for. It drops almost entirely to the bottom line because the trucks, the techs, and the overhead are already paid.
Try this: For one week, track "billable hours" against "paid hours" for each tech. If the ratio is below 70%, the problem is dispatch and routing, not effort. That is a scheduling fix, and it is free.
THE QUICK HITS
The arbitrage in one number. Individual home service shops are changing hands at roughly 3x to 8x EBITDA in 2026, while the platforms consolidating them trade at 17x to 20x. That spread is why PE keeps buying and is unlikely to close while the market stays this fragmented.
Recurring revenue is the whole game. The single biggest swing factor on your multiple is the share of revenue under maintenance agreements. It is the difference between the bottom of your trade's range and the top, often two to three full turns of EBITDA.
Roofing trades at a discount, and here is why. Project-based, weather-dependent, low repeat-purchase frequency. If you run a roofing shop, the highest-leverage move on your valuation is building a service or maintenance line that gives a buyer recurring revenue to underwrite.
The labor squeeze is still the backdrop to all of it. PE wants platforms partly because scale is the only durable answer to the technician shortage. Combined back offices, shared recruiting, and shared training are easier to justify across 100 locations than across one.
That's the brief. If a fellow operator would get value from this, forward it to them. It is the single best way to help us grow, and it takes ten seconds.
See you Friday.
— ContractorBrief
