What is your business worth today?
Founder', alt: 'Joe Lewin, Founder of DealFlowAgent
M&A Director', alt: 'Duncan Moore, M&A Director at DealFlowAgent
Senior Building Services & FM Advisor
What actually moves the valuation for owners in cleaning, waste, water hygiene, fire safety and the wider building services world.
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Around half an hour of your time. Yours to keep whether or not you ever sell, and nothing is ever shown to an acquirer.
Get your free valuation and value drivers report
DealFlowAgent writes a full valuation and value drivers report for owners free of charge: a preliminary read of around 15 pages within 24 to 48 hours, then an in-depth report of around 30 pages. It scores 30 value factors with the evidence written out, prices against completed transactions in your specific niche rather than a sector average, and sets out a 30-day, 90-day and twelve-month improvement plan. No card, no obligation, and nothing is ever shown to an acquirer.
The owners who keep buildings running rarely get enough credit. Cleaning, waste and recycling, drainage, water hygiene and legionella control, pest control, fire and life safety, HVAC, lifts: all of it is statutory or close to it, and it does not stop for a season, a downturn or a pandemic. These are exactly the businesses acquirers have spent the last three years competing for.
When an owner starts thinking about a sale, whether six months or three years out, the real list is long: stakeholder expectations, keeping the team steady, director alignment, what actually moves the valuation, which buyers fit, and how to have any of these conversations without competitors finding out.
That gap, between what owners actually want and what most of the M&A market offers, is why DealFlowAgent exists. Joe Lewin built and sold his own company before founding the firm, growing it to up to 30 staff at peak season with more than 600 owned vehicles, and saw the process from the seller\u2019s side directly. In doing so, Joe realised that a generalist adviser was not able to identify the potential pitfalls of the transaction, nor help him protect against them. Joe often found himself in the position of explaining basic industry concepts to the party running the deal. It was this experience that led Joe to the idea of founding an industry specific M&A practice to ensure that established business owners received high quality, tailored advice.
Ask Lewin where a sale process truly gets stuck, and the answer isn\u2019t what most expect. In the building services and FM markets, active buyers are plentiful; owners often assume that having multiple suitors in their inbox guarantees favourable terms. Yet, the reality is far more complex. The end-to-end M&A journey, spanning onboarding, data room management, and gruelling due diligence, requires precision. Traditional generalist advisers often become a bottleneck; as information passes through them to lawyers and accountants, critical nuance is lost in translation or requires constant re-explanation. This communication breakdown doesn\u2019t just drain time\u2014it erodes momentum and, ultimately, bleeds the seller of their negotiation leverage.
Martin Watson, MIET MIFSM, has now formally joined DealFlowAgent as Senior Building Services & FM Advisor. He is Chairman of both the Fire Industry Association and the British Security Industry Association, the only person to hold both roles at once, and spent over a decade in senior leadership at Mitie, latterly as Industry Liaison Director for fire and security, growing it from \u00A37 million to past \u00A3500 million in revenue. Martin was directly involved in Mitie\u2019s \u00A3366 million acquisition of Marlowe plc.
\u201CBusiness owners in these sectors deserve a specialist adviser through the whole journey to a sale, from valuation and business optimisation through to buyer access,\u201D says Watson, who advises DealFlowAgent in a personal, non-partisan capacity given his industry roles.
Duncan Moore joins as M&A Director on 22 August, leaving the UK\u2019s most active M&A advisory firm, a K3 Capital Group company. He was not looking to move, however what changed his mind was watching a firm run sale processes the way he had always argued they should be run: sector-deep rather than spread thin, AI doing the analytical grind so senior people stay on the deal rather than delegating it to an associate juggling seven others, and a growth runway across the UK and US that most established firms simply do not have in front of them.
Day to day, that specialism shows up in the detail. Within building services the firm covers cleaning, waste management and recycling, commercial plumbing and drainage, water hygiene and legionella, pest control, fire safety, HVAC, electrical and lift maintenance. Testing, inspection, compliance and planned maintenance is exactly the recurring, compliance-driven revenue that makes a business attractive to acquirers, considerably more so than one-off project work.
Buyer relationships sit at the centre of how the firm operates: a network of more than 13,000 self-registered buyers, each with defined search criteria, built from structured conversations rather than scraped from LinkedIn.
\u201CWhat sets us apart is what you cannot find online: what questions does a buyer ask when they sit down with a target? Which due diligence issues have scared them off before? What will they pay a premium for?\u201D
This sector knowledge and specialism comes from showing up, consistently in the right rooms.
Some of that room-time is public record: DealFlowAgent has exhibited at The Facilities Event, Interschutz, The Fire Safety Event, The Security Event and Fire Safety Matters Live in Coventry.
The firm is currently working with owners at both ends of the spectrum: some ready to go to market now, others 6 to 24 months out and using the time to systemise internal operations, reduce key-person dependency and move the metrics buyers actually price.
Most owners reading this are not selling next month. That is precisely why this matters now, because almost everything that moves the number takes six to twelve months to take effect.
Most generalist advisers value a business on a handful of traditional metrics. DealFlowAgent scores 30 value factors: quality of earnings and how much revenue is genuinely recurring, EBITDA margin, growth rate, contract cover, customer concentration, systems and data, compliance and accreditation, team depth, market position, and sector KPIs like revenue per engineer, technician or operative.
The one owners underestimate most is key-person dependency, and in cleaning, waste and water hygiene it is close to universal. Buyers test a simple thing: can this business run for four to six weeks without its founder. If pricing sits in your head, if the three biggest client relationships are yours personally, if supplier terms were agreed on a handshake you never wrote down, then a buyer is not acquiring a business. They are acquiring a job, and they price it accordingly.
Hire the general operations manager you have been putting off
This is the one owners resist hardest, and the arithmetic is brutal. An ops manager at \u00A380,000 to \u00A3120,000 feels unaffordable when you are doing the job yourself for free. But an owner-dependent business does not just attract a lower multiple, it can be effectively unsellable to the institutional buyers paying the strongest prices. On a business doing \u00A31 million of EBITDA, the gap between an owner-dependent multiple and a properly managed one is routinely measured in millions of pounds of enterprise value. Set against that, the salary is not a cost. It is the single highest-return purchase available to you.
Document the process before you document the business
Scheduling, quoting, complaint handling, legionella and water-hygiene records, waste transfer notes, subcontractor onboarding. Buyers do not read SOPs for pleasure, they read them as evidence the business is transferable. Undocumented processes also hide the leaks: unbilled variations, jobs priced from memory, routes running at negative margin that nobody has checked in two years.
Run an audit of where the money is actually going
Most owners are carrying hidden costs somewhere between six figures and low seven figures annually, and cannot see them, because they are the bottleneck through which every decision passes. That is the same reason you cannot take a proper holiday. The two problems are one problem.
DealFlowAgent\u2019s valuation and value drivers report is built to find exactly that. It normalises earnings line by line, tests every add-back a buyer would accept or reject, scores all 30 factors with the evidence written out, audits your online presence and search visibility, and produces a prioritised 30-day, 90-day and twelve-month plan. Crucially, it prices three scenarios rather than one: what the business is worth sold as it is today, what it is worth in twelve months with nothing changed, and what it is worth in twelve months properly prepared. On the businesses the firm works with, preparation typically supports a valuation 10 to 50 per cent higher than the do-nothing case, before a competitive process adds anything on top.
It is free, it takes about half an hour of your time, and it is yours to keep whether or not you ever sell. Feedback from owners has been overwhelmingly positive, largely because it is the first time most of them have seen their own strengths, weaknesses, risks and leaks written down and evidenced by someone who is not trying to sell them something.
That preparation matters because the buyers are active. Ranger Fire and Security has completed close to 20 acquisitions since 2024. Sureserve Group moved into electrical safety compliance this year via its Kinovo acquisition. Rentokil Initial remains pest control\u2019s standing example of programmatic buying. US platforms are more aggressive still: Pye-Barker Fire & Safety has completed more than 185 acquisitions.
\u201CIf you are an owner-manager thinking about an exit in the next two or three years, start preparing now, not when you first speak to a buyer,\u201D Lewin says. \u201CDemand for compliance-led, recurring-revenue businesses remains strong, but buyers are more rigorous, not less. Getting the financials in order and the right buyers lined up well ahead of a sale is often the difference between a stressful process and one that changes the future of the business and the owner both.\u201D
Founder', note: 'Built and sold his own operating business before founding DealFlowAgent.
Chairman of the Fire Industry Association and the British Security Industry Association.
Sell as you are today', caption:
Illustrative. Ranges in a report are priced against completed transactions in the owner's specific niche, not a sector average.
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DealFlowAgent is a sell-side M&A advisory firm working exclusively in building services, facilities management and healthcare. It writes free valuation and value drivers reports for owners, scoring 30 value factors against completed transactions in the owner's specific niche, and runs confidential sale processes into a network of more than 13,000 registered buyers.
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