Less than the rule of thumb you heard at the supply house, and more than what the trucks would bring. The honest answer is that the range for a company your size is wide, and where you land inside it comes down to the six things above — how much of your work is under agreement, and how much of it is new construction, more than anything else.

We put together an opinion of value from your own numbers rather than a multiple stuck on your revenue. It takes a few weeks and it costs you nothing to find out.

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 We do not publish until the financials are recast, the operations are written down, and the questions buyers are going to ask already have answers.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.

Yes, and it is the first thing almost every owner in this trade asks. In Florida the license belongs to a person, so your buyer either holds one already or needs a qualified employee inside your company. Buyers who already have one exist, but there are fewer of them.

The expensive version of this is finding out after you have a signed letter of intent. Putting a qualified employee on the license a year ahead widens who can buy you and takes the surprise out of the back end.

They will not find out from us. 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.

On telling the crew: after closing, with the money cleared. Telling them early does not give them certainty, it gives them a reason to start looking — and in a trade where two good techs walking out changes what the company is worth, that is the one risk entirely inside your control.

Run the company 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 this trade one bad summer shows up in the numbers immediately.

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.

Not on proof of funds alone. Someone who can write the check but cannot run a service company puts your technicians, your customers, and — if any part of your price is financed by you — your own money at risk. We qualify buyers on whether they can actually operate what they are buying.

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.

A sale in this trade usually runs six to twelve months from the day you engage to the day you get the wire, so the real question is which set of numbers a buyer will be looking at when they are doing their homework — not what month you sign with us.

A full season already closed out, with month-by-month detail, is almost always a stronger picture than a partial year a buyer has to guess the rest of.

Usually for a defined transition — often thirty to ninety days for a service company, longer where the license is in your name or the commercial relationships are with you. A buyer is not trying to keep you around; they are trying to keep what is in your head.

The more of that sits in your systems, your service history and your technicians before we go to market, the shorter the stay a buyer will agree to.