Restoration & Cleaning Company, Fort Worth Home-Based Operator

$2.2M

Revenue

$512K

SDE

1.3x

Multiple

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Full Editorial Writeup

This is a Fort Worth restoration and cleaning company established in 2009 that runs two complementary service lines under one roof. The recurring side is carpet, upholstery, and tile cleaning, work that property owners and businesses need on an ongoing maintenance cadence. The higher margin side is restoration, primarily water damage and mold remediation, much of which is insurance funded and therefore less price sensitive than out-of-pocket consumer spend.

The operation is structured to stay lean. It is home based with low overhead, runs on a small team of three full-time employees who do not require specialized licensing, and already has marketing, lead generation, and appointment setting systems built into daily workflow. On roughly $2.2M of revenue it throws off $512K of seller cash flow, a healthy 23 percent owner-earnings margin for a services business of this size.

The asking price of $673K against $512K of SDE is a 1.31x multiple, which is notably cheap for restoration comps that typically trade in the 2x to 3.5x range. That gap is the whole story here: either there is real customer concentration or owner-dependency behind the discount, or the seller is motivated and mispriced the deal. Either way, the entry math offers meaningful downside protection if the cash flow holds.

Why we like it

Earnings quality is strong on paper: $512K of cash flow on $2.2M revenue is a 23 percent margin, and a chunk of it comes from insurance-funded water and mold restoration work that is far less discretionary than consumer-paid services. The recurring carpet, tile, and upholstery cleaning provides a baseline of repeat maintenance revenue underneath the higher-margin restoration spikes.
The moat is modest but real: restoration is a trust-and-response-time business where established local operators with insurance-adjuster relationships and 15-plus years in market (founded 2009) get first call on emergency jobs. A brand that stands apart from generic cleaning providers, as the listing claims, is worth diligence but can drive premium job flow.
Market tailwinds favor this category through any cycle. Water damage, mold, and disaster response do not wait for a good economy, and insurance funding decouples demand from the customer's discretionary budget. This is exactly the kind of boring, essential, sticky cash flow that compounds quietly.
The operator advantage here is the price. At 1.31x SDE this is roughly half the going multiple for restoration businesses, so a buyer who can verify the earnings gets an unusually short payback of about 15 months and a wide margin of safety if revenue softens.

How to improve it

Formalize and deepen insurance-adjuster and property-manager relationships within the first 90 days. Restoration referral pipelines from carriers, TPAs, and preferred-vendor programs are the single biggest lever on job volume, and locking these in converts one-off jobs into a predictable emergency-call pipeline.
Build a light commercial recurring-contract book on the cleaning side. Selling scheduled quarterly carpet and tile maintenance to offices, medical suites, and multifamily managers turns lumpy one-time cleanings into contracted revenue that smooths cash flow between restoration events.
Audit and scale the existing lead-generation and appointment-setting systems the listing says are already built. If those systems produce a positive-ROI cost per booked job, pouring incremental marketing spend into local SEO, Google LSA, and paid search is a clear path to top-line growth with known unit economics.
Add a second crew and truck to capture demand the current three-person team cannot service. The listing explicitly flags room to expand, and in restoration the constraint is usually response capacity during peak damage events, not demand, so adding crew capacity directly unlocks revenue.
Pursue IICRC certification and any needed restoration credentials to bid larger commercial and multi-unit water and mold losses. Higher-value commercial restoration jobs typically require documented certification and carry both larger tickets and stronger margins than residential work.
Tighten job-costing and invoicing on insurance claims using Xactimate-style estimating. Restoration profitability lives and dies on billing every line item the carrier will pay for, and disciplined estimating can lift realized margin on the exact same job volume.
Systematize post-job review and reputation management to drive Google reviews and repeat referrals. In a trust-driven local service, a steady flow of five-star reviews lowers customer acquisition cost and defends against newer competitors.

Diligence notes

Interrogate the 1.31x multiple hard. A restoration business at half the normal comp multiple almost always signals something: customer or referral-source concentration, owner-performed sales or technical work, a lumpy one-time restoration year inflating cash flow, or a distressed seller. Find out which before anything else.
Verify the revenue and cash flow split between recurring cleaning and restoration. Restoration revenue can be volatile and event-driven (a single large flood or storm can distort a year), so pull three years of financials and separate recurring maintenance from one-time claims to understand normalized earnings.
Confirm owner dependency and the reality of the lean three-person team. The listing frames this as owner-lite, but you need to know whether the owner personally holds the adjuster relationships, does the estimating, or drives sales, because that determines how much of the $512K survives a transition.
Examine the insurance-funded job mix and payment reliability. Understand which carriers and TPAs refer work, average days to collect, denial and chargeback rates, and whether any preferred-vendor status is contractual and transferable to a new owner.
Assess licensing and regulatory exposure for mold and water remediation in Texas. The listing highlights a non-licensed staffing model as a benefit, so confirm what certifications the business actually holds versus needs, since gaps could cap the types of jobs a new owner can legally bid.

Source

Originally listed on BizBuySell. View original listing →