It depends first on which earnings figure applies to you. If you are still running the crews day to day and your vehicle and personal expenses run through the books, buyers price on Seller’s Discretionary Earnings. If you have an operations manager and the business would keep producing without you for a season, buyers price on EBITDA — generally the more favourable method once your earnings are large enough to qualify.

From there, your mix of contracted maintenance versus project work, your route density, whether your license transfers and how concentrated your customers are will move the number. We provide a no-cost opinion of value based on your financials and comparable closed transactions.

What we will not do is price it at what you would like to get. A defensible number brings offers. An aspirational one spends the listing’s best weeks being ignored, and every conversation after that is about coming down.

Because a business gets one launch. The buyers who have been looking for a company like yours move quickly when one finally appears, and that wave passes once — which is why the strongest offers almost always arrive in the first sixty to ninety days.

If the business is not ready to stand up to questions when those buyers show up, you spend your best weeks explaining instead of negotiating. We do not publish until the financials are recast, the operations are written down, and the questions buyers are going to ask already have answers.

Industry estimates put the share of listed businesses that actually sell at somewhere between 20 and 40 percent, depending on the source and the size of the business. Most of what decides which side of that you land on happens before the listing goes out.

This is usually the biggest decision a grower makes in a sale, and it is worth making deliberately rather than by default. Selling the ground with the business gives a buyer a cleaner asset and a simpler lender conversation. Retaining it and leasing it back keeps an income-producing asset in your name and lowers the price a buyer has to finance, which widens your buyer pool.

Either can be right. What matters is deciding early, because it changes how the business is packaged and which buyers we approach. If the ground is already leased from a third party, the first question is whether that lease transfers at all.

It is solvable, but only if you start early. If the irrigation contractor license or the pesticide applicator certification is held by you personally and the buyer has no qualifying individual, the transaction cannot close as structured. The usual answers are to qualify a key employee, to agree a transition period during which you remain the qualifier, or to focus on buyers who already hold the license.

All three take time. This is the most common reason a green-industry deal dies late in diligence, and a year of notice makes it a non-issue.

Four kinds of buyer are active in this sector. Individual operators, frequently SBA-financed, buy owner-operated service companies and smaller nurseries. Regional competitors buy for route density and crew capacity. Private-equity-backed platforms and their add-on acquisitions look for contracted recurring revenue and management depth. Search funds sit between the last two.

Which of those pools your business actually reaches is a function of your earnings, your recurring revenue share, and how much of the operation runs without you. Part of our job before going to market is telling you honestly which pool you are in, and what it would take to reach the next one.

We qualify buyers on capability and fit, not only on proof of funds. Someone who can write the check but cannot run crews and hold accounts puts your people, your customers and — if any part of your price is financed by you — your own money at risk.

And the biggest number is not automatically the best offer. How it gets paid, what sits in escrow, what is tied to future performance, how working capital is settled and how long you are expected to stay all change what an offer is really worth to you. We negotiate the terms, not just the headline price.

In most green-industry sales the crew is a large part of what the buyer is paying for, so the common outcome is that they stay. A buyer acquiring route density is acquiring the people who service those routes, and a foreman with tenure is an asset in diligence rather than a liability.

If continuity for your people matters to you, say so early. It is a legitimate deal term, it can be written into the agreement, and it shapes which buyers we put in front of you.

Not through us. Your business is marketed on a blind profile that describes it without naming it, and no buyer receives identifying information before signing a non-disclosure agreement. In a lower-middle-market engagement, buyer contact is limited to a hand-picked list rather than a public listing.

Confidentiality is the reason most owners engage an advisor rather than selling to the first competitor who asks.

Information is released in stages behind a signed agreement — a blind profile with no company name first, and nothing that identifies you until a buyer has been screened. Your employees, customers, suppliers and competitors do not learn about the sale from the process.

Run the business exactly the way you were running it when the buyer made the offer. That is not a throwaway line. A soft quarter during due diligence is the most common reason a good deal gets renegotiated down or falls apart, and in a seasonal business a weak season lands on the numbers straight away.

Everything else is ours: buyer questions, the document room, the lender, the attorneys, the landlord. We coordinate it through to closing so the deal does not stall in the last mile. Your job is the work.