How to Value a Professional Services Firm in Florida (2026)

If you own an accounting practice in Tampa, an engineering firm in Jacksonville, a marketing agency in Orlando, or a consulting shop in Naples, you have probably heard a number thrown around at a conference or a golf outing. One times revenue. Five times EBITDA. Whatever the last guy got. None of those are valuations. They are anecdotes, and they are the single most expensive thing a professional services owner can carry into a sale conversation. Professional services firms are the hardest category in the lower middle market to value well, because the asset walks out the door at 5 p.m. There is no equipment list, no fleet, no inventory, no real estate. What a buyer is acquiring is a book of client relationships, a team that knows how to service them, and a process that reproduces the result without the founder in the room. How much of that survives your departure is the entire valuation question. Everything else is arithmetic. Here is how buyers actually price these firms in Florida right now, and what moves your number up or down. ## Why Professional Services Firms Price Differently A $1M EBITDA HVAC company and a $1M EBITDA consulting firm do not trade at the same multiple, and the gap is usually wider than owners expect. Three structural reasons: - **The asset is mobile** — Clients can follow a departing partner. Staff can leave and take accounts. A buyer underwrites that risk by paying less up front and more in contingent consideration. - **Revenue is often project-based** — A roofing company's backlog and a law firm's matter pipeline look similar on paper, but recurring retainers, annual compliance work, and multi-year contracts are what separate a 3x firm from a 6x firm. - **The owner is frequently the product** — If your name is on the door and your relationships drive half the revenue, you have not built a business. You have built a job with employees attached. The good news is that every one of those is fixable, and the fix is usually worth more than a year of growth. ## Step One: Get to the Right Earnings Number Before you can apply a multiple, you need an earnings figure a buyer will actually accept. Two bases are used, and which one applies depends on the size of your firm. - **SDE (Seller's Discretionary Earnings)** — Net income plus owner compensation, owner benefits, interest, taxes, depreciation, amortization, and genuine one-time expenses. Used for firms where one working owner runs the show, typically under roughly $1M of adjusted earnings. - **EBITDA** — Earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization, after replacing the owner with a market-rate salary for the role. Used for larger firms where the buyer will install or retain professional management. The distinction matters enormously, because SDE and EBITDA are different numbers for the same firm, and the multiples attached to them are not interchangeable. A firm with $800K in SDE that pays a $200K market salary to replace the owner has $600K in EBITDA. Quoting a 5x multiple against the wrong base is a six-figure error in either direction. Your recast should separate, line by line: personal vehicles and travel, family members on payroll who do not work in the business, above-market or below-market owner rent on a building you also own, one-time legal or settlement costs, and discretionary charitable giving. Every add-back needs a document behind it. Buyers' quality-of-earnings teams disallow anything you cannot prove, and an add-back that gets struck in diligence at a 5x multiple costs you five dollars for every one you claimed. ## What Florida Professional Services Firms Actually Trade For The table below reflects typical ranges in the lower middle market for Florida professional services firms. Treat it as a starting band, not a quote — the spread inside each category is driven almost entirely by the factors in the next section.

Firm Type	Earnings Base	Typical Multiple Range	Primary Value Driver
CPA / accounting practice	SDE or EBITDA	2.5x – 5.0x	Recurring compliance work, client retention
Engineering firm	EBITDA	4.0x – 6.5x	Licensed staff, public-sector contracts, backlog
IT / managed services	EBITDA	5.0x – 8.0x	Contracted MRR, net revenue retention
Marketing / creative agency	SDE or EBITDA	3.0x – 5.5x	Retainer mix, client concentration
Staffing / recruiting	EBITDA	3.5x – 6.0x	Perm vs. contract mix, gross margin
Management consulting	SDE or EBITDA	3.0x – 5.0x	Delivery team depth, repeat engagements
Insurance agency	EBITDA or revenue	6.0x – 10.0x EBITDA	Commission renewals, carrier relationships

Two things to notice. First, the bands are wide — a consulting firm can be a 3x or a 5x depending on who delivers the work. Second, size moves you inside the band before anything else does. A firm with $400K of earnings and a firm with $3M of earnings in the same category do not get the same multiple, because the larger firm has management depth, more buyers competing for it, and access to private equity capital that will not look at the smaller one. ## The Five Factors That Decide Where You Land ### Owner dependency The first question a serious buyer asks is what happens to revenue if you leave. If you personally originate more than 30 percent of new business or are the named relationship on your largest accounts, expect a lower multiple and a larger earnout. Firms where the founder has moved to a true oversight role consistently clear the top of their band. ### Revenue quality Contracted and recurring beats repeat beats project. An agency with 70 percent of revenue under twelve-month retainers is a fundamentally different asset than one rebuilding its pipeline every quarter, even at identical EBITDA. Document your recurring base and the renewal rate behind it before you go to market. ### Client concentration Any single client over 15 percent of revenue is a discussion. Over 25 percent is a structural problem that gets priced, usually through an escrow or an earnout tied to that account surviving the transition. Buyers are not being difficult — their lender requires it. ### Team and credentials For licensed disciplines — engineering, accounting, law, insurance — who holds the license and whether they are staying is a gating item, not a bullet point. A buyer who has to acquire or replace a qualifying license is buying a different company than the one in your pitch. Have your key-employee retention plan drafted before diligence, not during it. ### Financial hygiene Cash-basis books, commingled personal expenses, and no monthly close will cost you real money. Three years of clean, consistently prepared statements that tie to your tax returns is the cheapest valuation improvement available to any firm owner, and it typically takes two quarters to produce. ## Running the Math on Your Own Firm An illustrative example. A Central Florida engineering firm does $4.2M in revenue with $780K in net income. The owner pays themselves $340K, runs $45K of personal vehicle and travel through the business, and had a $60K one-time legal settlement last year. Depreciation is $95K. Adjusted earnings before owner replacement: $780K plus $340K plus $45K plus $60K plus $95K, which is $1.32M of SDE. Replace the owner with a market-rate principal salary of $225K and EBITDA is $1.095M. At a 5.0x EBITDA multiple, that is roughly a $5.5M enterprise value. Move to the bottom of the band at 4.0x and it is $4.4M. That 1.0x spread — $1.1M in this example — is the entire prize for fixing owner dependency, locking in key staff, and cleaning up the financials. It is almost always a larger number than what the owner could add by growing revenue over the same period. ## Florida-Specific Considerations Florida has no state personal income tax, which means the after-tax proceeds on a given purchase price are materially better here than for an identical firm in New York or California. That is a real advantage, and it also draws out-of-state buyers and private equity platforms shopping Tampa, Orlando, Miami, Jacksonville, and Southwest Florida for add-on acquisitions. More buyers at the table is the single most reliable way to move a multiple. The population and business formation growth across Central Florida and the I-4 corridor also means Florida professional services firms often show growth curves that buyers in flat markets will pay for — if you can show it is market-driven and durable rather than one big client that happened to land. Watch the structural items too. Licensed practices face discipline-specific ownership rules in Florida that affect who can buy you and how the deal must be papered. Non-compete enforceability in Florida is comparatively seller-unfriendly in the sense that buyers will expect robust covenants from you and your key people, and they will expect them signed at closing. ## Frequently Asked Questions ### Can I value my firm on a multiple of revenue? Revenue multiples are a shorthand buyers use to screen, not to price. They work only inside a narrow category where margins are tightly clustered — insurance agency books being the common example. For most professional services firms, two shops with identical revenue and different margins are worth very different amounts, and a revenue rule of thumb will be wrong by a wide margin in one direction or the other. ### How much does owner dependency actually cost me? In practice, the gap between a founder-dependent firm and one with a functioning second layer of management is commonly a full turn of EBITDA, and it also changes deal structure — more cash at close versus more money sitting in an earnout you may never collect. It is the highest-return project available to most owners in the two years before a sale. ### Should I get a valuation before I am ready to sell? Yes, and ideally two to three years out. A valuation done early is not a price tag — it is a diagnostic that tells you which of the five factors above is costing you the most, while you still have time to fix it. Getting one the month you decide to sell tells you your number without giving you any ability to change it. ### What does the sale process look like for a firm like mine? For a well-prepared Florida professional services firm, expect roughly six to ten months from engagement to close: four to eight weeks to prepare materials and recast financials, two to four months of marketing and buyer meetings, thirty to sixty days to negotiate a letter of intent, and sixty to ninety days of diligence and closing. Firms with messy books or unresolved concentration issues routinely take longer or fall out of contract. ### Will private equity look at my firm? Platform acquisitions generally require $2M or more of EBITDA. Below that, you are most likely an add-on to an existing platform or a target for a strategic competitor or an individual buyer using SBA financing. Add-on buyers can be excellent outcomes — they often pay near-platform multiples for a firm that fills a geographic or service gap. ## Get a Real Number Before You Need One The owners who get the best outcomes are not the ones who negotiate hardest. They are the ones who knew what their firm was worth three years before they sold and spent that time closing the gap between the bottom and the top of their band. CBH Business Group advises Florida business owners on sell-side M&A, valuation, and exit planning, with a focus on companies in the $3M to $50M revenue range. We were named among the Top 50 Brokers in Florida in 2024 and 2025, Million Dollar Producer in 2024 and 2025, and the number one Top Dollar Producer in Central Florida in 2025. Start with a free valuation estimate at https://cbhbusinessgroup.com/valuation-calculator, then book a confidential conversation with Jesse Hastings at https://calendly.com/jesse-cbhadvisory or call (407) 908-3845. 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