What's your pool service business worth?

It depends mainly on your size and structure. Smaller route-based businesses (mostly recurring maintenance accounts) are typically valued as a multiple of monthly recurring revenue, while larger businesses are usually valued as a multiple of EBITDA. The exact multiple depends on things like route density, customer churn, owner dependence, and how diversified your revenue is beyond basic cleaning. Our scorecard can give you an initial sense of where your business likely falls, and an analyst-prepared valuation report can provide a more tailored indication specific to your business.

Smaller, owner-operator businesses are often priced per account or as a multiple of monthly recurring revenue, because buyers are really underwriting the route itself — how tight it is, how sticky the customers are. Once a business grows large enough to support a management team and generates significant profit, buyers shift to valuing it on EBITDA, since at that size the business is being bought as a standalone company, not just a book of accounts.

Yes, a lot. If the business can't run without you personally in the field or making every decision, buyers will discount the price to account for that risk and the cost of replacing you. Businesses with trained technicians, documented processes, and management depth that isn't dependent on the owner tend to sell for meaningfully more.

The biggest levers are usually: tightening your routes to improve margins, reducing customer churn (contracts and consistent service quality help), diversifying revenue with repairs, equipment, or renovation work, and building systems so the business doesn't depend entirely on you. These changes take time to show up in your numbers, so starting a couple of years before a planned sale makes a real difference.