Almost every multiple you will find online is American, quoted against EBITDA, and drawn from businesses much larger than yours. Applied to an owner operated Canadian business they are wrong in the expensive direction. These are the ranges we actually price against.
A multiple on its own means nothing until you know what it is multiplying. These ranges are stated against adjusted earnings: your profit after adding back the things a buyer would not inherit. Most commonly that is your own salary and benefits, one off legal or consulting costs, personal vehicles and travel, and anything else running through the business that will leave with you.
This matters more than people expect. An owner paying themselves $180,000 out of a business showing $320,000 of profit is not a $320,000 business. The adjusted figure is around $500,000, and at a four times multiple the difference between the two ways of counting is roughly $700,000 of sale price.
Typical transaction ranges for owner operated Canadian businesses, against adjusted earnings. They are not a quotation from a dataset we own, and a formal valuation is a paid engagement by a qualified valuator.
| Industry | Typical range |
|---|---|
| Manufacturing & Distribution | 3.0 – 5.5× |
| Construction & Contractingproject-based | 2.5 – 4.0× |
| Home & Property ServicesHVAC, plumbing, electrical, landscaping | 3.0 – 5.5× |
| Business & Professional Servicesaccounting, legal, consulting, staffing, cleaning | 3.0 – 5.0× |
| Financial Servicesinsurance, mortgage, wealth practices | 4.0 – 6.5× |
| Healthcare, dental or veterinary | 4.0 – 7.0× |
| Technologysoftware, SaaS, AI, managed IT | 4.5 – 7.5× |
| Transportation & Logistics | 3.0 – 5.0× |
| Consumer & Retailretail, e-commerce, auto repair, personal services | 2.0 – 4.0× |
| Food & Hospitalityrestaurants, catering, accommodation | 2.0 – 3.5× |
| Energy & Environmental | 2.5 – 4.5× |
One distinction in that table is worth pulling out, because owners regularly file themselves on the wrong row. Project based construction and recurring home services look alike from outside and are priced very differently: a maintenance contract renews and a completed job does not. If you sell renewals, HVAC, plumbing, electrical, you belong on the home services row, and the difference is about a turn and a half.
For these, a buyer may open with a completely different basis, and an owner who has only heard ours is easy to wrongfoot.
Practices in this sector are just as often priced on the book of business instead, at roughly two to three times annual commission income. Buyers will quote whichever of the two suits them, so it is worth working out both numbers for your own practice before anyone opens with one.
That range is for a technology business priced on its earnings, which is how managed services, custom development and mature software are bought. If most of your revenue is subscriptions that renew, buyers are likely to price you on recurring revenue rather than profit, and a multiple of earnings is the wrong tool: a fast growing business with thin margins can be worth several times what this range implies. It is worth saying which one you are before you accept anybody’s arithmetic.
The step is real rather than gradual, because crossing a threshold brings in a different set of buyers rather than making the existing ones braver.
This is the argument for preparing rather than listing. Moving from $900K of adjusted earnings to $1.1M is not a 22 percent improvement in price. It is 22 percent more earnings multiplied by a higher multiple, on a business a larger set of buyers is now willing to look at.
Within your industry range, these are what buyers actually price differently, and they are the four our own valuation asks about.
Three of those four are fixable, and all three take about a year to show up in numbers a buyer will look at. That is the single most useful thing on this page: the work that raises the price has to start well before the sale does.
A range is not a valuation. It cannot see your customer contracts, your lease, whether your earnings are real or an accounting shape, or whether the buyer most likely to want your business is a competitor who would pay above the range for your customer list. It is meant to tell you which conversation you are having, and nothing on this page should be quoted to a buyer.
Ten minutes, no name and no email, and you keep the report either way.