What IT & Managed Services businesses are asking

Asking multiples by deal size

Bigger businesses generally command higher multiples — more of the earnings survive the owner leaving, and more buyers can finance them.

These are asking prices, not sale prices

Worth being precise, because the difference matters. What we can observe is what sellers are asking. What businesses actually sell for is private, and anyone advertising a large database of verified small-business sale prices is extrapolating from very little.

For the job at hand, asking prices are the more useful number anyway: when you sit down with a broker, an asking price is precisely what you are negotiating against. Knowing that a seller wants more than four-fifths of their comparable competitors is a concrete thing you can raise — and it is checkable, which a rule of thumb is not.

How this is calculated

Every week we take the live IT and managed-services listings across the marketplaces we cover, divide each asking price by that listing’s stated SDE, and report the distribution. Listings without both figures are excluded, as are implausible multiples that indicate a typo rather than a deal. A category is only published when enough comparable listings exist to be meaningful — which is why some industries appear here and others don’t.

The figures are the seller’s own. We have not verified them, and a stated SDE is a claim until someone checks it against the tax returns — which is the entire reason the rest of this product exists.