Recurring revenue, route density and a crew that answers the call. A buyer pays for what keeps running without you, and discounts everything that still lives in your head or your truck.
You still answer the phone at seven in the evening. You know which crews you can send to your best accounts and which you cannot, which customers ask for you by name, and how far your best month sits from your worst. The business runs because you hold a hundred small things in your head that were never written down. That is exactly what a buyer cannot see, and will not pay for until it is.
A buyer is not paying for your trucks, or even for your revenue. They are paying for the revenue that would still be there if you took thirty days off. Renewal rate and route density are the two numbers that set your price, and most owners have never measured either. The company that commands the premium is the one where the phone does not go quiet when the founder steps away.
A buyer in this market underwrites four things before they will talk about price. Each one is a discount by default, and a point of value once it is evidenced.
Maintenance agreements, service contracts and route density are the durable base a buyer underwrites. Replacement and project work is real, but it is priced as cyclical.
When the phone, the quoting and the key accounts run through you, a buyer prices the risk that they leave the day you do.
Technician retention and who holds the master license. A buyer models the cost of keeping the team and the right to operate.
Truck, phone, family payroll and personal expense run through the number. What is not evidenced the way a buyer's accountant tests it comes back out.
The same four things, turned from risk into value. This is the preparation a Value Protection Study and the Cordis MRI are built to run.
Contracts, renewal rates and route density shown rather than asserted, and broadened where it can be before the market hears the company exists.
Dispatch, quoting and the key accounts moved onto the team, so the business is the business and not the founder.
The master-license path and technician retention addressed in writing before a buyer thinks to ask.
Every adjustment filed beside the document that proves it. An add-back without a document is a discount waiting to happen.
He came in thinking he was selling trucks and equipment. The buyer was paying for route density and a maintenance base that renewed year after year. Once that was documented, and the quoting moved off his phone, the conversation changed, and so did the number.
More in practiceThe Cordis MRI runs your own financials through the underwriting model of every buyer lane, and returns the range, not a single number. The Value Protection Study turns that read into a sequence. Both happen before anything goes to market.