You're Selling Two Businesses as One
I've sat across from owners who spent 30 years building a landscaping company and never once looked at it the way a buyer will. They see one business: one truck yard, one crew list, one bank account, one number at the bottom of the P&L. The buyer sees two companies wearing the same logo, prices them apart, and the space between those two views is usually the difference between the offer the owner wanted and the one he got.
The two companies are the maintenance book and the installation work. On your financials they blend into a single EBITDA line. In a buyer's model they get pulled apart on the first pass, because they aren't worth the same money and everyone on the other side of the table knows it.
The market pays for the contract, not the crew
Look at where the multiples land. First Page Sage's 2025 work on landscaping put quality commercial maintenance operators in roughly the 6 to 9 times EBITDA range, while residential mow-and-blow trades closer to 3 to 4.5 times owner earnings. CT Acquisitions describes lower middle market commercial maintenance firms, $3 to $10 million in revenue with 70 percent or more of revenue under contract, changing hands around 5 to 7 times adjusted EBITDA, and private-equity-backed platforms above $10 million of EBITDA reaching 8 to 12. Installation-heavy add-ons get bought at 2 to 4.
Same industry, a spread of maybe 5 turns. The variable that moves it has little to do with size and not much to do with margin. What moves it is how much of the revenue renews without a new sale. BizBuySell's landscaping benchmarks and firms like Livingstone that track the private-equity buyers all say the same thing in different words: recurring revenue is the primary driver, and a company with 60 percent or more of its book under contract commands 1 to 2 full turns more than a project shop of the same size.
Now put your own company on that scale. If 40 percent of your revenue is installation, priced and sold inside one blended number, you're letting the low-multiple half drag down the high-multiple half. The buyer un-blends it the moment diligence starts. You should un-blend it years earlier.
Why the recurring book hides in plain sight
Most owners can't tell you what their maintenance contracts are worth on their own, because the accounting was never built to answer the question. Revenue comes in by job or by month, costs go out by department, and installation and maintenance share the same trucks, the same shop, the same office manager. The renewal book, the thing a buyer would pay the premium for, has no line of its own. It's real, it's the most valuable asset you own, and it's invisible on your own statements.
That invisibility costs you twice. It costs you at sale, when you can't prove the recurring share and the buyer assumes the worst. And it costs you every year in between, because you can't manage what you never separate. You don't know your true maintenance margin, your renewal rate, or your contract attrition, so you keep feeding capital and crew hours into installation because the big project revenue feels like the growth, while the quieter book that actually carries your value gets managed by habit.
Run the company as two before you sell it as two
Split the P&L. Maintenance on one side, installation on the other, with labor and equipment and overhead honestly allocated to each. It's an afternoon of work and it changes how you see everything.
You'll get 3 numbers that matter to a buyer and should matter more to you: the percentage of revenue under contract, the renewal rate on that book year over year, and the standalone margin of maintenance once it carries its fair share of cost. Track those and the recurring business stops being a rumor inside a blended statement and starts being a provable asset with a premium attached.
There's a headwind that makes this urgent. First Page Sage and others noted average landscaping EBITDA slipping from around 19 percent in 2024 to about 17 in 2025, which means the multiple is doing more of the work in any sale than it was 2 years ago. In a softer-margin market, the recurring-revenue premium is the lever you actually control.
Don't wait for a buyer to separate your two businesses in a data room and price the split against you. Separate them yourself this year, grow the half the market pays up for, and walk in able to prove which company you're selling.