Mechanical, electrical, civil, specialty trades at commercial scale. A contractor is priced on the quality of the backlog, the strength of the bonding, and whether the numbers survive the way a buyer's accountant reads percentage-of-completion.
You know your backlog, your bonding capacity, and which project managers you cannot lose. You carry the relationships with the general contractors and the owners who award the work. The balance sheet swings with the jobs, and the earnings move with where each one sits in its billing cycle. That is a business a buyer has to be walked through, because the raw numbers mislead.
A buyer does not pay for backlog. They pay for backlog that will convert to margin, and they read every open job the way a surety and an accountant do: percentage of completion, over and under billings, and the gap between the estimate and where the job is actually landing. A full pipeline of thin or troubled work can be worth less than a smaller book of clean jobs. The contractors who sell for the most are the ones whose numbers survive that read.
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.
Not the size of the backlog, but how much of it will convert to margin. A buyer prices the troubled jobs and the thin ones separately from the clean ones.
Bonding capacity and the surety relationship transfer on conditions. A buyer models the risk that capacity shrinks under new ownership.
Over and under billings, and the gap between estimate and actual on every open job. This is where a buyer's accountant finds the surprises.
The project managers and estimators who hold the relationships and win the work. A buyer prices the day they leave.
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.
Every open job assessed for where it will actually land, so the backlog a buyer sees is margin, not hope.
Over and under billings cleaned and the percentage-of-completion schedule made to survive a buyer's accountant.
The surety relationship and the path to keeping capacity under new ownership documented before a buyer asks.
Every adjustment filed beside its proof, and the retention of the people who win and run the work built before the market sees the company.
On paper the backlog was a record. Read job by job, a quarter of it was thin or over-billed, and a buyer's accountant would have found it in week one. The readiness work reconciled the WIP, repriced the troubled jobs honestly, and documented the clean ones. The backlog a buyer underwrote was smaller, and worth far more.
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.