What buyers in your industry are paying right now

If you're weighing whether to sell, the question that actually matters isn't what a broker's rule of thumb says your business is worth. It's what buyers are actually paying, right now, for businesses like yours. Rules of thumb lag reality and get repeated long after the market has moved. We pulled the real numbers instead, straight from our own live listings.

Across every industry on our platform, the current overall median deal clears a 2.87x multiple on SDE, with a median asking price of $320,000. That is the baseline. Where your industry sits relative to that baseline tells you something concrete about your negotiating position before you ever talk to a buyer.

Construction, Professional Services, and Healthcare are all currently commanding the strongest multiples in our data, each around 2.9x. These are relationship-driven, credential-gated, or licensure-heavy businesses, and buyers are paying up for the durability and defensibility that comes with those characteristics. If you operate in one of these categories, you have real leverage in a negotiation, and a low-ball offer anchored to a generic industry rule of thumb is worth pushing back on with our actual data.

Retail sits close to the middle at 2.71x. Food & Beverage, despite being by far the deepest category in our database, 4,440 current listings, more than double any other vertical, is actually pricing at the lowest multiple among the major categories, 2.56x, below the overall market median. That gap between volume and pricing power is real and worth understanding if you're in this space: a large supply of aging owner-operators looking to retire, combined with historically thinner margins and higher labor intensity, gives buyers more negotiating room than sellers in most other industries currently have.

The overall market median is 2.87x SDE. If your industry runs meaningfully below that, a broker's generic rule of thumb is probably overstating what you'll actually clear.

None of this means a below-average multiple is the ceiling for your specific business. These are medians across a large pool of listings with wide variation in quality, location, and financial performance. A well-run, well-documented Food & Beverage business with clean books and a stable staff can still command a premium over the category median. But knowing where your category sits relative to the broader market gives you a real anchor for that conversation, instead of walking in blind or trusting a number a broker pulled from a five-year-old industry report.

This is also the first step of our exit-readiness process: an honest, sourced read on where your business actually sits against real, current market comps, before you talk to a broker or field your first offer. Knowing the real number changes how that first conversation goes.