Every figure below comes from published transaction surveys and public filings, cited underneath. Put your own numbers in and you will see where you sit — not what you are worth, but what businesses your size have been transacting at, and why.
Every term has a "?" next to it. Open as many as you want. None of this is complicated once somebody explains it in English.
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Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation and Amortization. It is an attempt to describe what the business earns from operating, before financing choices, tax strategy, and accounting for wear on equipment.
Start with net income from your P&L. Add back interest expense, income taxes, depreciation, and amortization. That is your unadjusted EBITDA.
Buyers care about adjusted EBITDA, which also adds back one-time and personal expenses that will not continue under new ownership. That adjustment is where most of the argument in a deal happens — an add-back has to be documented, non-recurring, and provable. "Everybody does this" is not a category a buyer accepts.
If your books are on a cash basis, your EBITDA number is an estimate at best, and that is itself the finding.
Because revenue does not pay anyone. Two packing operations at $12M in revenue, one earning 4% and one earning 12%, are not worth remotely the same — and a buyer is purchasing the earnings, not the invoices.
Revenue multiples exist, and get quoted, mostly in sectors where margins are tightly clustered. In food and ag they are not, so a revenue multiple tells you very little.
The short version. The size of your business sets the range. What a buyer can verify about it decides where you land inside that range — and unlike your size, those are things you can change. Switch on Show the detail above if you want the sources, the sub-sector margin benchmarks, and why public company multiples do not apply to you.
Because a number would be false precision, and you would carry it into a conversation where somebody who does this for a living would take it apart.
The range is what other businesses of this size actually transacted at, across hundreds of closed deals. Where you land inside it — or outside it entirely — depends on things no calculator can see: whether a buyer can verify your earnings, whether the business runs without you, how concentrated your customers are, and whether your revenue is contracted or handshake.
That is the whole point. The size band sets the range. Your operation decides where in the range you land, and those are the things you can actually change.
Identical businesses, identical margins, different size — and the larger one sells for materially more per dollar of earnings. This is the most important thing on this page and almost nobody explains it to owners.
The buyer pool changes. A business earning $400K is bought by an individual with an SBA loan. One earning $8M is bought by a private equity firm with a credit facility. More buyers, more competition, and far more borrowing capacity behind each one.
Risk concentrates in small businesses. One customer leaving, one key employee retiring, or one bad season moves a small company far more than a large one. Buyers price that.
Fixed deal costs are the same either way. Legal, diligence, and quality-of-earnings work cost roughly the same on a $4M deal as a $40M one, so they eat a much larger share of a small transaction.
GF Data measured the gap between sub-$100M and $100M-plus deals at roughly 2.8 turns of EBITDA — on the same earnings, in the same year.
Seller's Discretionary Earnings. It is EBITDA plus the owner's own compensation and benefits — because in a business that small, the buyer is stepping into the owner's job and will pay themselves out of that same pool.
Above roughly $2M in price, buyers assume they will hire a manager rather than run it personally, so the owner's salary becomes a real cost and the metric switches to EBITDA.
This matters enormously when you are comparing notes. A 3x SDE multiple and a 5x EBITDA multiple can describe the same economics. Anyone quoting you a multiple without saying which metric it is attached to is telling you nothing.
Real reported figures, not rules of thumb. Note how wide the spread is — cold storage and ag distribution are barely the same industry from a margin standpoint.
Eleven sub-sector margins pulled from NYU Stern aggregates and company filings — cold storage through ag distribution. Create an account to see the figures and the chart.
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Not necessarily, and do not let anyone tell you it is without asking two questions first.
Are you comparing like with like? Those are large public companies with scale purchasing, professional treasury, and in several cases vertical integration you do not have. A $12M packing operation running below a $4B competitor's margin is normal.
Is your EBITDA actually your EBITDA? In most owner-operated businesses the reported number understates real economics, because the books were built to minimize taxable income rather than to show earnings. Personal vehicles, above-market family compensation, and one-time costs all sit in there. Cleaning that up honestly — with documentation a buyer will accept — frequently moves the number more than any operational change.
Someone will eventually show you a chart of what food companies trade at. Here is why that number is not yours.
| What it measures | Figure | Applies to |
|---|---|---|
| Public food processors, EV/EBITDA | 10.0x | 78 listed companies, freely traded minority shares |
| Public farming & agriculture, EV/EBITDA | 16.0x | 35 listed companies |
| Food & agriculture M&A, all deal sizes | 8.95x | 287 closed transactions, trailing twelve months |
| Private deals, $10–25M enterprise value | 5.9x | Sponsor-backed lower middle market |
A public share can be sold on a Tuesday afternoon. Your company cannot. That alone is worth a substantial discount, and it has been measured repeatedly.
Three peer-reviewed studies comparing acquisitions of private companies against comparable public ones found EBITDA-multiple discounts of 21.1% (Koeplin, Sarin & Shapiro, 192 transactions), 17.2% (Officer, 364 transactions), and 22.5% (Block, 91 transactions). Block also found the discount is larger for smaller and less profitable companies.
Separately, the Stout Restricted Stock Study — 783 transactions since 1980 — puts the median discount for lack of marketability at 15.7%, and found the highest-discount group had median revenue near $9M against $32.5M for the lowest.
Stack the private discount on top of the size effect and you have most of the distance between that 16x headline and the 5.9x a real buyer offers.
This is not a valuation and cannot be used as one. It is published survey and market data arranged so you can see where you sit. A real valuation examines your actual financials, contracts, customer list, and equipment, and is performed by someone who signs their name to it.
Every figure here is an average of other people's transactions. Deals cluster widely around these numbers. A well-run business with clean books and no concentration can clear the top of its band; one with neither can fail to attract an offer at any multiple.
Sources are dated and will drift. Everything on this page reflects the most recent published figures as of September 2026. Survey data is revised and re-published quarterly.
Reporting a buyer can verify, an operation that runs without you, and revenue that does not walk out the door — those are what move you inside the range, and they take longer to fix than a sale process allows. Fifteen minutes and I will tell you which one is costing you most.
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