You're ready to move on.
We buy service businesses ourselves, so often you're talking to the actual buyer, not a broker taking a cut to shop you around a room. If it isn't a fit for us, we usually know who it's for and what they'll really pay.
The number in your head and the number a buyer writes down are rarely the same. The gap is almost never your revenue. It's whether the business survives the day you stop showing up.
Here's what changes
The instinct is to wait until you're ready, then hand it to a broker. By then it's too late to change the one thing that sets the price. A buyer's first question isn't what you earn, it's what happens to the business the day you walk. If the answer is "it falls apart," you're not selling a company. You're selling yourself a few more years of work at a discount.
We buy service businesses. We've sat on the exact side of the table you're about to sit at, so we know the structure that turns a job-with-your-name-on-it into something a buyer pays real money for. Most of those fixes need runway. You only have it if you start before you list.
We buy, we sell, and we consult on acquisitions, because we've done all three. Wherever you are in this, there's a door.
We buy service businesses ourselves, so often you're talking to the actual buyer, not a broker taking a cut to shop you around a room. If it isn't a fit for us, we usually know who it's for and what they'll really pay.
An honest number and a short punch list: what a buyer pays for it today, and the specific things standing between that and a higher one. Bring it cold, or years ahead of when you plan to sell.
Buyer keeps moving the goalposts on structure, terms, or diligence? We've been that buyer. We'll tell you which demands are standard and which ones to push back on, before you sign the thing.
The scorecard
Revenue gets you the meeting. These six set the number. Tick the ones that are already true of your business and what is left is the work.
Reads as riskThe job only goes right when you are standing on it.
Reads as valueA lead hand and an office run a full week without you in it.
Reads as riskOne or two accounts are most of what you bill.
Reads as valueNo single customer can take more than a slice of the revenue with them.
Reads as riskEvery month starts back at zero and you go and find it again.
Reads as valueService agreements, route work and renewals that rebook themselves.
Reads as riskPersonal spending runs through the business and no month is ever closed.
Reads as valueThree years of statements that agree with the tax returns, line for line.
Reads as riskOne person holds the pricing, the accounts or the customers, and none of it is written down.
Reads as valueNamed roles, written pay, and a reason for the good ones to stay through a sale.
Reads as riskHandshake pricing, licenses in your own name, nothing signed.
Reads as valueSigned customer agreements, current insurance, and licenses that survive a change of owner.
Ticked so far: 0 of 6.
Whatever is left is your punch list, and it is the same list we would hand you. Nothing here is sent anywhere: the count is worked out in your browser and it is gone when you close the tab.
Three of the six, in software
Owner dependence, recurring work and what transfers are the three checks on that list you can move without changing a single customer. All three come down to one question: does the business write itself down while the work happens, or do you write it down afterwards from memory?
Write your sequence down once and the software runs it. Every role carries twelve permission switches, every checklist records who ticked it and when, and the handbook is kept in versions your crew acknowledges on a phone. A run that cannot start names the step and the role that is missing.
A recurring service job keeps a visit log you name yourself: cuts, treatments, inspections. A skipped visit is a record with a reason attached rather than a gap in the history, and a moved visit keeps both dates.
Estimates and contracts are signed on a phone with the name, the time and the IP stamped into the PDF, and the file locks the moment it is signed. Anything that changes after that goes out as an addendum or a change order, so the agreement a buyer reads is the one that was signed.
Written down once, then run for you. The held step is the useful part: it names the gap instead of waiting for you to notice it.
What you can actually hand over. Your client list and your payment history come out as CSV files, and any single job's documents come out as a zip. There is an audit log of who changed what, and on the General Contractor plan a year-end 1099 total for every subcontractor. That is the whole export, and we would rather write the list out than call it everything.
The Servora pricing page sets out what each plan includes, and the product tour opens in your browser with no account.
When we tell you what a buyer wants, it isn't a broker's theory pulled from a listing template. It's the checklist we run with our own money before we wire it. That's the difference between advice that sounds right and advice that survives diligence.
A buyer is not paying for your truck, or for your name on the side of it. They are paying for work that keeps arriving after you hand over the keys, and for a file thick enough to prove it will.
The trades, the services, the routes. Real revenue, real systems, no story to sell.
Ready to hand it off now, or building toward the best possible exit three to five years out.
One operator, on your side of the math, telling you the real number and how to raise it.
Plain English
None of these are complicated. They are unfamiliar, and unfamiliar is where a deal quietly costs an owner money.
Profit after your own pay and anything the business bought that a new owner would not. On a business this size it is usually the number the price is built on.
An expense that goes back into profit because it was yours, not the business's. Every add-back has to be provable on paper, or it disappears in diligence and takes the price it was holding up with it.
The number your earnings get multiplied by. It is set by risk, not by revenue, which is why the six checks above move it further than one good year does.
A short, mostly non-binding note saying what a buyer intends to pay and on what terms. Signing one usually starts an exclusivity clock, so read the clock before you read the price.
The cash, receivables and materials a buyer expects to find in the business on day one. It gets settled at closing and it comes off your number, so agree it early rather than at the end.
Part of the price paid later, and only if the business hits agreed numbers after you have gone. It bridges a gap on price, and it puts your money on decisions you no longer make.
Step one is a conversation
Give us the basics below, no documents yet. If it's worth a closer look, we reply with a private, secured link for financials. Two steps, and nothing sensitive is ever posted on this page.
Step 1, the basics
Straight answers
Not ready to sell? Build the value first.
A buyer's first read of your business anchors everything that comes after it. Get that read early, from someone who buys these for a living, while there is still time to change what it says.
Still running it day to day? Servora's job software is $39.99/mo for a contractor and $99.99/mo for a general contractor, or walk the product tour, which opens in your browser and holds no account.