For businesses valued from $5M to $100M+
Considering selling your fire and life safety business?
Fire protection is among the most consistently attractive trades to acquirers, because inspection work is mandated by code and recurs whether or not the economy cooperates.
- Inspection contract count
- Recurring inspection revenue
- Deficiency conversion rate
- Monitoring revenue
- Sprinkler and alarm mix
- NICET certification levels
- AHJ relationships
- Customer retention
- Adjusted EBITDA add-backs
What fire protection buyers are actually underwriting
The inspection base is the asset. Code-mandated inspection work recurs on a schedule, is difficult to displace once established, and produces the repair work that carries the margin.
So buyers start by counting contracts, testing renewal rates, and looking at how much deficiency repair work you convert from the inspections you already perform. A large inspection base with low conversion is a valuation problem and an opportunity at the same time.
Certification depth across your technicians and your standing with the authorities having jurisdiction in each territory both matter more here than in most trades, because they are not quickly rebuilt by a buyer.
What gets examined closely
- Inspection contract count, renewal rate and revenue per contract
- Conversion rate from inspection deficiency to billed repair work
- Recurring monitoring revenue and the terms behind it
- Mix across sprinkler, alarm, extinguisher, suppression and monitoring
- NICET certification levels across the technician base
- Standing with authorities having jurisdiction in each territory
- Construction versus service and inspection revenue split
- Customer retention history and route density
Who buys fire protection companies
Private equity platforms and their add-ons
This sector has been actively consolidated for several years. Platform buyers pay for recurring inspection bases and for technicians who stay, and they will look hard at whether inspection agreements are documented well enough to transfer.
Strategic acquirers
National and super-regional providers buying territory, certification coverage or a route base that fills a gap in their map. Strategics with an existing presence nearby can often justify more, because the route economics improve immediately.
Which type of buyer suits you depends less on the multiple than on what you want afterward: a clean exit, a second bite through rollover equity, or a few more years running the business with someone else's balance sheet behind it. That is worth deciding before you go to market rather than during.
- Inspection agreements that were never documentedUndocumented recurring revenue gets discounted heavily or excluded from the multiple entirely
- Low deficiency conversionRepair work found during inspection is where the margin lives; leaving it uncaptured lowers both earnings and the multiple applied to them
- A construction-heavy revenue mixProject work is valued on a different basis, and blending the two in your reporting invites the lower number
Where fire protection owners lose value
Almost always in the same three places, listed alongside. None of them are inevitable, and all three are decided well before a letter of intent is signed.
Putting inspection agreements in writing, and tracking conversion as a metric, are two pieces of preparation that pay for themselves several times over at closing.
Request a confidential valuation.
An advisor who works in fire and life safety will review your business and give you a real range, along with what would move it.
- No cost, no obligation, strictly confidential
- Grounded in what buyers in your sector are paying now
- Useful whether you sell next year or in five