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A RocketLevel playbook for restoration owners, especially those within sight of a sale or a handoff, backed by decades of experience in the trade. About a 10-minute read, with a calculator you run on your own numbers.
Picture two restoration companies, each with $4 million of EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization). Priced at roughly 4.5 times earnings, one comes to around $18 million. Priced at roughly 7 times, the top of RocketLevel's working band for a diversified, owner-independent book, the other comes to around $28 million. Both are illustrations built on the working ranges below.
Most of that difference comes from how much of each company's work depends on someone else's decision.
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The governing ranges, in plain numbers. These are RocketLevel's working judgment as of 2026, drawn from deals we have watched in the trade. No public dataset reports restoration multiples by revenue mix, so get a real opinion of value before you price anything. Residential and program-dependent books: roughly 4.5 to 5.5 times EBITDA. A diversified, owner-independent commercial book: roughly 6.5 to 7 times, with the top of that band reachable only when strong margins come with the mix. A mixed book lands between the two bands. Anything at 8 times or above is an outlier reserved for clean, multi-vertical platforms. A business with $4 million of EBITDA often clears 4.5x on scale alone, so read the opening comparison for the spread between the two multiples, which holds wherever the floor sits. On margins, the 2025 RIA Cost of Doing Business Report, based on FY2024 data, puts most companies' mitigation gross margin at 50 percent or better, with 28 percent above 70. Blended gross margin falls as a company grows, to about 39 percent above $30 million in revenue. Mitigation looks richer than it is, because coordinator, warehouse and equipment costs usually sit in overhead instead of on the job. Figures on this page sit inside these ranges unless the text says otherwise, and where one runs above a band it is called out at the number.
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That ten-million-dollar gap comes from a few drivers you can measure, and the calculator below sizes it on your own numbers.
Selling is one reason to read this. The same levers that make a business worth more to a buyer make it steadier to run, and there is a section on that below for the owner who never plans to sell.
A buyer values your business as your annual earnings multiplied by a number called the multiple. Earnings, here, usually means EBITDA, your profit before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization. Small changes in the multiple move big dollars. The same earnings at a 4.5x multiple versus a 7x multiple is the difference between an $18 million outcome and a $28 million one.
So two questions decide your number: how much you earn, and what multiple a buyer will pay for it. You can move the second one.
A buyer pays for cash flow that is durable and transferable. Durable means it will still be there next year. Transferable means it survives without you personally in every conversation. The pattern we have watched repeatedly in this trade is that owner-dependence is what costs the most at sale, and documented systems plus a real management team are what earn the premium.
Revenue that depends on a single carrier's posture, a program's rules, or the owner's own relationships looks fragile to a buyer. The work itself may be perfectly good, but it can change with a decision the new owner does not control, and fragile revenue gets a lower multiple. That is why, in RocketLevel's working view, residential and program-dependent books land in the range of roughly 4.5 to 5.5 times EBITDA.
Owner-independent commercial revenue, recurring Master Service Agreements (MSAs), and a pipeline that keeps producing without the owner in the room read as durable and transferable. For a clean diversified, owner-independent book, roughly 6.5 to 7 times EBITDA is RocketLevel's working band. Plan on the bottom of that band. The top, 7, is where a book can land when strong margins arrive with the mix, and nothing about the mix alone guarantees it. That is why the worked example below pairs a 4.5x program-dependent shop against a 7x diversified shop carrying those stronger margins, so you can see both levers at once.
The deal record points the same way. In October 2021 Dominus Capital, the private equity firm that had owned BluSky since 2018, sold the company to Kohlberg & Company and Partners Group, a sponsor-to-sponsor sale in which Dominus kept a minority stake. The buyers' own announcement described the business as a leading US provider of commercial restoration services. One institutional owner handed a commercial book to two more, and the commercial mix was the headline. What that transaction does not tell you is what your business is worth. A sponsor-to-sponsor sale of a national platform prices differently from a regional shop, and no announcement discloses the multiple paid. Read it as evidence of where institutional appetite sits, and nothing more.