Full-Service Industrial & Commercial Landscaping Company, $18M Revenue Contractor

$18.0M

Revenue

$2.7M

SDE

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Full Editorial Writeup

This is a full-service commercial and industrial landscaping contractor doing roughly $18M in revenue with $2.73M of adjusted EBITDA, a clean 18.5% margin held steady from 2023 through 2025. The service mix spans large-scale new construction and installation, grounds management, ongoing landscape maintenance and enhancements, and snow and ice removal. That breadth lets it act as a one-stop shop for commercial property owners, developers, and property managers across its market, with natural cross-selling between project work and recurring maintenance.

The standout numbers are the growth and the stickiness. Revenue compounded at 26.3% from 2023 through the trailing twelve months ending June 2026, which is unusually fast for a two-decade-old services business, and 95% of 2025 revenue came from repeat clients. That combination of a long reputation (built over 20-plus years) and a client base that keeps coming back is exactly what separates a real franchise from a project shop living quarter to quarter.

The real estate is leased, so this is a clean operating-business sale. The buyer is purchasing a crew-dependent, relationship-driven contracting operation with a maintenance annuity underneath it and a project book on top. The question for any acquirer is how much of the EBITDA depends on the owner's relationships and bidding judgment versus systems and a bench of managers that transfer with the deal.

Why we like it

Earnings quality is strong for the category: $2.73M EBITDA on $18M revenue is an 18.5% margin held steady across three years, and 95% repeat-client revenue means the business is not re-winning its whole book every January. That stability is rare for landscaping, where many operators live and die on one-off installs.
The moat is reputation plus a recurring maintenance base. Two decades of service, a one-stop-shop offering, and contractual grounds management and snow/ice work create switching friction for commercial property managers who do not want to re-bid their portfolio. Snow and ice adds a counter-seasonal revenue leg that smooths the calendar.
Market tailwinds favor this model. Commercial property owners and developers continue to outsource grounds management, and the fragmented landscaping space rewards operators who can bundle install, maintenance, and snow under one contract. The 26.3% revenue CAGR shows this specific operator is already taking share.
Operator advantage is real for a buyer with sales and M&A muscle. The listing explicitly flags geographic expansion, more maintenance and enhancement work, and deeper property-manager relationships as untapped levers. A disciplined acquirer could bolt on adjacent crews and route-density without reinventing the operating model.

How to improve it

Shift the revenue mix toward maintenance and enhancement contracts, which the seller already identifies as the recurring-revenue lever. Converting more one-off install clients onto multi-year grounds-management agreements raises the floor on revenue and makes the EBITDA far more defensible and bankable.
Expand the geographic footprint deliberately rather than opportunistically. Target adjacent metros where existing commercial clients already own property, so you win the new work on the strength of current relationships instead of cold-bidding into unfamiliar markets.
Formalize the property-manager and developer channel. Build a named-account program with dedicated reps for the largest regional property managers, since securing additional work inside existing portfolios is the cheapest growth available and the listing calls it out directly.
Tighten crew productivity and route density using job-costing by contract. At $18M in revenue with crew-dependent margins, even a one to two point improvement in field labor efficiency drops meaningful dollars to EBITDA and funds competitive bids without eroding price discipline.
Pursue tuck-in acquisitions of small local landscapers and snow operators. The space is fragmented, and buying crews, contracts, and equipment at lower multiples than this platform commands is immediately accretive and deepens route density in existing markets.
Lock in the counter-seasonal snow and ice book with multi-year, per-occurrence-plus-retainer contracts. Guaranteed winter revenue reduces the volatility of relying on snowfall and gives lenders and future buyers more confidence in off-season cash flow.
Invest in a professional sales and estimating function if it is currently owner-driven. The single biggest risk in a relationship-based contractor is owner dependence, so building a repeatable bidding and account-management system protects the 95% repeat rate through the transition.

Diligence notes

Separate project revenue from recurring maintenance and snow revenue. The 95% repeat-client figure is encouraging, but repeat client is not the same as contracted recurring, so quantify how much EBITDA sits under multi-year agreements versus re-bid annually to understand the true quality of earnings.
Stress-test the 26.3% CAGR for durability and concentration. Fast growth in a contracting business can come from a few large construction projects that will not repeat, so pull revenue and margin by client and by project to see whether growth is broad-based or lumpy.
Assess owner dependence on bidding, estimating, and key client relationships. With no disclosed transition terms, map who actually owns the customer relationships and estimating judgment, and price in the risk that revenue walks if the seller and crews are not locked down.
Review the equipment and fleet condition and off-balance-sheet obligations. Real estate is leased, so confirm lease terms and remaining life, and inspect the age and maintenance capex of trucks and equipment since deferred fleet capex can quietly erase a chunk of that 18.5% margin.
Verify labor model, workforce stability, and wage inflation exposure. This is a people-heavy, seasonal business, so examine crew turnover, reliance on seasonal or H-2B labor, and whether recent margins held because of favorable labor costs that may not persist.

Source

Originally listed on BizBuySell. View original listing →