A buyer does not start from your revenue, and the gap between what you hope for and what gets paid is rarely about revenue anyway. Put your numbers in, tick the boxes honestly, and see what each missing piece is costing you in dollars.
Buyers pay a multiple of SDE, seller's discretionary earnings: what the business puts in its owner's pocket in a year, with the owner's own pay counted in rather than taken out. The multiple is where the money is. The same $90,000 of earnings can sell for $180,000 or for $270,000, and the difference is whether the business runs without you, whether the records exist, and whether the customers belong to the business or to you.
A written process is the cheapest box on this page to tick, and fleet work only counts as recurring when it is on paper. Mechanics Alliance members get nine ready-to-use templates, including service agreements, a fleet master service agreement, a work authorization and inspection reports. Founding membership is free.
Join free More toolsSDE is revenue, minus business costs, plus add-backs. Your multiple starts at the base for your SDE size band, moves up or down for each box you tick, and is then held under a ceiling. The estimate is SDE times that multiple, and the likely range is a quarter turn either side, never above the ceiling.
The size bands come from a 2026 report on auto repair shop transactions: 2.0x to 3.0x SDE under $250,000 of earnings, 2.5x to 3.5x from $250,000 to $500,000, 3.0x to 4.5x from $500,000 to $1M, and 4.0x to 6.0x from $1M to $3M, where buyers also start pricing on adjusted EBITDA. The same report says a shop where the owner performs 40% or more of the billable technician work caps out at 2.5x to 3.0x SDE regardless of profitability, which is why this tool holds you at 2.5x under $250,000 of SDE and 3.0x above it until that box is ticked. It also ties fleet revenue above 30% to the upper end of the range.
A buyer-side breakdown of auto repair valuation puts the premium for reviewed or audited financial statements at 10 to 20% over compiled-only ones, and flags a single account above 20% of revenue as a concentration risk. The size of each adjustment here (books +0.35x, written process +0.35x, off the tools +0.75x, recurring revenue +0.30x, concentration −0.40x) is our own weighting inside those published ranges, not a published figure.
All of these figures describe fixed-bay repair shops, the closest published comparables. We know of no published dataset for mobile-only operations, which is one reason we run the State of Mobile Mechanics survey. Treat the output as a planning estimate, not an appraisal.
SDE is revenue minus every real business cost, with the owner's own pay counted in rather than taken out, plus any personal or one-time costs a new owner would not have. It answers the buyer's actual question: if I stepped into this business, how much would it put in my pocket in a year?
Usually because the earnings are really a wage. If you do most of the work yourself, a buyer is not buying income, they are buying a job they would have to show up to, and far fewer people want to buy a job. That is why owner dependence sets the ceiling for everything else: while you do 40% or more of the billable work, clean books and a written process can only take the multiple so far.
Not in this number. This is goodwill: the customer list, the reputation, the booked work and the systems. Hard assets like the van, tools and inventory are valued separately, and plenty of mobile mechanics keep their tools and sell only the business.
Yes. Clean books are what a bank asks for before a van loan or a line of credit, and a written process and proper paperwork are what a fleet manager wants to see before handing a one-person operation a contract. And if you ever get hurt, the business that runs without you is the one still there when you get back.
Plan on two years. Buyers and lenders ask for several years of filed returns and financial statements, and none of that can be produced after the fact from a box of receipts. A structure that appeared the month the business was listed gets priced like no structure at all.