Selling a trade business in Australia — electrical, plumbing, construction, landscaping, or any other skilled trade — typically takes 6 to 12 months from the decision to sell through to settlement, and most businesses sell for between 2x and 4x EBITDA. That spread is enormous. A trade business doing $400,000 in annual profit might sell for $800,000 or $1.6 million depending on almost entirely controllable factors: how the business runs without you, the quality of the contracts, the depth of the team.
Most owners start preparing about six months before they want to be out. That’s too late. The preparation that actually moves the needle takes two to three years.
What Is a Trade Business Actually Worth?
Trade businesses are valued primarily on EBITDA — earnings before interest, tax, depreciation, and amortisation, normalised to remove personal expenses and one-off items. The multiple applied to that EBITDA depends on the quality and transferability of the earnings.
In Australia, trade businesses currently sell in the following ranges:
- Sole operator with one or two vans: 1x–2x EBITDA. The goodwill is largely personal — most of it walks out the door when you do.
- Small team, project-based work, $300K–$700K EBITDA: 2x–3x EBITDA. Decent business but dependent on owner for client relationships and quoting.
- Established team, maintenance contracts, systems in place, $700K+ EBITDA: 3x–4x EBITDA and sometimes higher if a strategic acquirer is competing for the deal.
A plumber I worked with in Perth had built what looked like a solid business — $1.2 million in revenue, good margins, phone ringing off the hook. When we started doing the preparation work, the problem became clear: 70% of the revenue came from two commercial property managers who called his personal mobile. When we asked whether either contract was in writing, he looked at me the way people look when they know the answer is no. He’d built an excellent income; he hadn’t built a transferable business. We spent 18 months fixing that before we went to market.
A trade business with $500,000 EBITDA and a solid contract book will sell for two to three times more than one with the same EBITDA and no written agreements. The goodwill isn’t in the profit — it’s in the certainty.
For a detailed breakdown of multiples by trade type, see our EBITDA multiples by industry guide.
Build a Business That Runs Without You
This is the single biggest driver of sale price for any trade business, and it’s the one owners most consistently underestimate.
The test is this: if you took four weeks off with no mobile reception, what happens? Does the business keep running — jobs scheduled, quotes going out, invoices raised, clients answered? Or does everything grind to a halt because the work lives in your head and on your phone?
A buyer is paying for predictable cash flow that continues after you leave. If that cash flow is dependent on your relationships, your licence, or your presence on site every day, they’re not buying a business — they’re hiring an employee and calling it a sale (which is why they’ll price it accordingly).
The practical steps to address this:
- Document your processes. Job management, scheduling, estimating, invoicing — these need to be in a system like Simpro or ServiceM8, not in your head.
- Empower your team. Your leading hand or site supervisor needs to be capable of managing jobs, dealing with clients, and making day-to-day decisions without you.
- Get your licence situation right. If your business operates under your personal licence and your team doesn’t have the qualifications to keep working without you, that’s a major problem for any buyer. A licensed employee or business partner who’ll stay post-sale is worth real money.
This takes time. Most businesses need 18 months to two years to genuinely shift from owner-operated to owner-managed before they’re ready for market.
Get Your Financials in Order — Early
Buyers and their accountants will pull apart three years of financial statements. What they’re looking for is a clear, consistent picture of normalised earnings.
Clean financials for a trade business mean:
- Separate business and personal expenses. The ute that’s being depreciated through the business but used 40% for family holidays needs to be disclosed. Buyers will find it. Better to normalise it yourself upfront.
- Owner’s salary at market rate. If you’re paying yourself $80,000 when a replacement manager would cost $140,000, that needs to be reflected in the normalised EBITDA (it reduces it, which is painful, but buyers factor it in either way).
- Consistent accounting treatment. Three years of accounts prepared by the same accountant, using consistent methods, signals to a buyer that the numbers are reliable. Switching accountants mid-stream or restating prior years raises flags.
The ATO publishes small business benchmark data for trade industries — your accountant can use these to sense-check whether your margins look normal or whether you’re an outlier that needs explaining.
Start working on this with your accountant two to three years before you want to sell. The upside of clean, normalised financials isn’t just a higher price — it’s a faster, smoother due diligence process that’s less likely to fall over at the last minute.
Who Actually Buys Trade Businesses?
Understanding your likely buyers shapes how you present the business and what you negotiate hard on.
Individual buyers are the most common buyer for smaller trade businesses — typically an experienced tradesperson wanting to move into ownership, or someone from another industry with capital to deploy. They usually need vendor finance (partial seller-funded payment over time) and they’re buying your lifestyle as much as your cash flow. They need to see simplicity and systems.
Trade competitors looking to expand into your geography or add your client base to theirs. These buyers know your industry, can assess your team quickly, and often move faster. The downside is that they have leverage — they understand what your contracts are actually worth. They’re also more likely to cherry-pick your staff and clients during negotiations if you’re not careful about confidentiality.
National roll-up companies have been active in Australian trade services for the last decade — particularly in electrical, HVAC, plumbing, and pest control. Companies like Programmed, Service Stream, and various private equity-backed platforms have been acquiring regional trade businesses as part of national service networks. If your business has a strong commercial or infrastructure maintenance focus and $1M+ EBITDA, these buyers are worth pursuing. They pay higher multiples for the right businesses, but they have professional M&A teams and run a rigorous process.
Private equity at the lower end of the market is rare for businesses under $3M EBITDA, but PE-backed trade platforms will occasionally acquire smaller businesses if they fit a specific geographic gap.
Recurring Revenue: The Feature Buyers Pay a Premium For
Project-based trade work — new builds, one-off renovations, fitouts — is income you have to re-win every time. Maintenance contracts — service agreements, periodic inspection programs, preventative maintenance retainers — are income that renews unless actively cancelled.
Buyers price these very differently.
A plumbing business with $200,000 in annual maintenance contract revenue and $400,000 in project work will sell for significantly more than a business with $600,000 in project work and no contracts — even though the revenue is the same. The contracts de-risk the buyer’s investment.
Before you go to market, spend 12 to 18 months actively converting existing client relationships into written service agreements. A commercial property client you’ve been looking after informally for five years is a genuine candidate for a three-year maintenance contract. Most won’t push back — in fact, many prefer it because it means you’re accountable to a schedule.
Customer concentration matters too. If more than 30% of your revenue comes from a single client, buyers will discount heavily or structure an earn-out to protect themselves. The goal is a diversified book: no single client above 15–20% of revenue, and ideally ten or more clients providing meaningful recurring income.
The Asset Sale vs Share Sale Question
Most trade businesses sell as an asset sale — the buyer acquires the goodwill, equipment, client contracts, and intellectual property, while the legal entity (your company or trust) stays with you. This is often simpler and reduces the buyer’s exposure to your historical liabilities.
A share sale transfers the entire company to the buyer, including all its history, contracts, and liabilities. This can be advantageous for the seller from a tax perspective and is more common in larger transactions or where the company’s contracts can’t easily be assigned.
For trade businesses in particular, the asset vs share sale question intersects with licensing: if your business is licensed under the company entity, a share sale can be cleaner because the licence stays with the company. If it’s tied to your personal licence, a share sale doesn’t solve the licensing problem — you still need the buyer to have their own licence or have one of your team members hold it.
This is a decision to make early, in consultation with your accountant and lawyer. The structure affects tax, price negotiation, and what you can do with the proceeds. Read more in our asset sale vs share sale guide.
Tax: What You Actually Need to Know
The most common question trade business owners ask when they start thinking about selling is some version of: “I’m going to get killed on tax, aren’t I?”
Often, no (which is more than most expect when they first walk into my office).
Australian tax law has a set of concessions specifically for small business owners selling their businesses — collectively called the Small Business CGT Concessions. If your business qualifies as an active asset and your net assets are under $6 million, you have access to:
- The 50% active asset reduction — halves the capital gain before calculating tax
- The 15-year exemption — if you’ve continuously owned an active asset for 15+ years and you’re over 55, the entire gain can be excluded from tax
- The retirement exemption — up to $500,000 of the gain can be excluded if used for retirement, even if you’re under 55
These concessions can dramatically reduce or eliminate tax on a trade business sale. But they require careful planning — the structuring decisions you make now affect whether you qualify later. The full guide to tax when selling a business covers this in detail.
Do not wait until you’ve signed a sale agreement to ask your accountant about CGT concessions. By then, some of the planning options are already off the table.
The Timeline That Actually Works
If you want to sell your trade business in the next three years, here’s the honest sequence:
Now: Get a professional valuation or assessment. Understand where you’re starting from and what the gaps are. Talk to your accountant about tax structure.
Year one: Fix the financials, start documenting processes, begin converting informal client relationships into written contracts.
Year two: Reduce owner dependency, build up your team, diversify your client base, get the licence situation resolved.
Year three: Prepare your business for sale — information memorandum, financial normalisation, engaging an advisor, approaching buyers.
The owners who get the best outcomes aren’t the ones with the best business on paper. They’re the ones who started preparing early enough to fix the problems everyone else didn’t know they had.
If you’re thinking about your exit — even if it’s two or three years out — start the conversation now. Use our valuation calculator for a first read, or reach out directly to discuss where your business sits and what it would take to get the most from a sale.