Repeat business
What portion of work repeats? How do renewals, cancellations and customer tenure look over time?
Resources / Pest control valuation guide
What could your
business be worth?
A useful starting point is understanding the earnings, the buyer and the terms behind a number. Explore a historical small-business benchmark, then see what it can—and can’t—tell you.
01 Explore the numbers
Start with your earnings.
SDE generally includes the earnings available to one working owner, including their compensation and supported adjustments. It is not revenue.
SDE and EBITDA: what’s the difference?
SDE adds back compensation for one working owner. EBITDA measures earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortization; a managed business still needs to cover a market-rate management cost. Adjustments require support, and the two measures use different comparisons. Read the explanation from BizBuySell.
Historical SDE benchmark
A starting point.
Not a price tag.
Lower quartile illustration · 1.69×
Upper quartile illustration · 3.00×
At the historical median multiple, 2.04×:
Enter annual SDE to illustrate the middle 50% of reported sale multiples in the source below.
Your business may sell outside this range. This is not a valuation, offer or estimate of cash at closing.
Discuss your business with SameerThe source behind the numbers
Historical data.
A specific market.
The calculator uses BizBuySell’s reported pest-control sales from 2021–2025: SDE multiples of 1.69× at the lower quartile, 2.04× at the median and 3.00× at the upper quartile.
Median revenue in that dataset was $263,597 and median SDE was $124,184. It primarily describes small businesses; it is not a model for larger strategic acquisitions or EBITDA-based offers. The public page does not disclose the transaction count.
Source checked September 30, 2026. Asking prices are excluded. Calculation: your entered SDE × each historical multiple. No automatic premiums or discounts are applied.
02 The context around the number
What buyers need
to understand.
The routes
How concentrated are customers geographically? What does it take to serve them well?
The people
Who runs the day-to-day work? What would change if the owner stepped away?
The records
Can revenue, costs and proposed adjustments be explained and supported consistently?
The exposure
How dependent is the business on a customer, technician, license or service line?
The buyer’s plan
How would the business fit their operations, and which assumptions do they need to confirm?
These are discussion topics, not a formula for adding a fixed premium. For one acquirer’s published criteria, see Rentokil’s acquisition overview.
03 Understand the offer
The headline price
is only the beginning.
A proposal can include money at closing, later payments, performance conditions or ownership you keep. Compare the terms with your own legal, tax and financial advisers.
Business value and owner value
Enterprise value and equity value are different: net debt connects the two. The calculator’s source does not standardize cash and debt treatment, so its result is not labeled enterprise value. BDC explains the distinction.
Cash now and cash later
Ask which amounts are due at closing, which are deferred and which depend on future results. Review debt, tax, fees and working-capital adjustments separately.
A business-specific discussion
For a larger business or an EBITDA-based proposal, start with the actual financials, operating model and buyer interest. A small-business SDE multiple is not a substitute.
A direct conversation
Put your numbers
in context.
Talk with Sameer about your business, the information available and what a buyer conversation could look like.