Independent business valuation · Fire safety and compliance

You've Had an Offer for Your Fire Safety Business. Is It Fair?

The letter names a price for your fire protection business. It does not say how much of your maintenance income the buyer believes will renew, or how much of the price disappears at completion. An independent valuation answers both in two working days, before you reply.

Owners of fire protection companies usually reach us after a phone call they did not ask for. A group backed by private equity, assembling testing and compliance businesses region by region, wants your maintenance contracts and your engineers. Sometimes it is a larger installer looking for recurring work, or a long-serving service manager who wants to buy. Or retirement is a few years off and nobody has put a figure on the business.

Each of those parties arrives with a number they have already worked on. You are the one person at the table who has not had the business valued.

Email Mark for a free discovery call See what a valuation report contains

The stakes

What finding out late costs

An illustrative fire alarm and emergency lighting maintenance company with £7.0m turnover and reported EBITDA of £1.25m. The owner had been told compliance businesses sell for eight times EBITDA and expected £10.0m. The company and every figure are fictional.

Illustrative figures, £000
Reported EBITDA	1,250
Margin on part-complete installation projects taken to profit early, reversed	(90)
Engineer pay rise agreed for April, not yet in the accounts	(55)
Owner salary raised to a market-rate managing director	(60)
One-off legal costs on a contract dispute added back	25
Maintainable EBITDA	1,070
Enterprise value at an illustrative 5.5 times	5,885
Cash at completion	950
Vehicle finance on engineer vans	(310)
Bank loan	(200)
Maintenance fees invoiced in advance for visits not yet made, treated as debt	(420)
Working capital below the normal level, after retentions unlikely to be released	(115)
Equity value to the owner	5,790

Most of the gap between £10.0m and £5.8m sits in two places. The eight times figure described larger businesses, and the cash in the bank included fees customers had paid for service visits the buyer would have to make after completion. The 5.5 times multiple is for illustration only. A real valuation sets the multiple from the renewal history of your own contracts and who holds them, checked against comparable fire protection transactions.

The numbers you have been given

Who has already priced your fire protection business, and what do they gain from the figure?

By the time a fire protection owner asks us for a number, they have usually heard one or two already, and each came from someone who gains or loses by where it lands.

The buyer

wants your maintenance base at the lowest price you will accept. A fire and life safety group that has bought several testing companies knows from its own integrations how many FM-routed sites drop away at the next re-tender, and how long engineers stay after a change of owner. It prices those losses into the offer before it has seen your contract list. You have never had reason to measure them.

A broker

competing for your instruction has a reason to quote high, and a fire business makes that easy: count the whole contract book as recurring and the figure grows. Whether a buyer agrees comes out months later, when due diligence works through the visit logs and finds which customers are tied in and which could leave at short notice.

Your accountant

prepares your accounts and knows the figures better than anyone, but may never have sat opposite a consolidator's diligence team arguing over whether advance-billed maintenance fees are debt, or how much of your remedial income counts as recurring.

None of them is acting in bad faith. A consolidator is pricing your contracts as additions to routes it already runs, and a broker is pricing the chance of winning the instruction. Neither is answering your question, which is what the business is worth to a buyer today and how much reaches your bank account once advance billings and van finance are settled at completion.

Independence

Why our valuation is independent

When we value your business, we have no reason to push the number up or down. The fee is fixed and agreed before any work starts, and it is the same whatever the number turns out to be. You are not signing up to a sale, and nothing in the engagement commits you to anything further.

The report is yours. Show it to a buyer, your bank, your accountant or your family. Every figure in it traces back to one of three valuation methods, with each adjustment explained in the Excel model you receive alongside it.

Owners rarely go on to ask us to sell their business after a valuation, although it has happened. Most come to us for the reason this page exists. They want a number they can trust before someone else tells them what it is.

Who does the work

Who does the work, and what a valuation finds

Mark Ross Roberts FMVA CBCA carries out every valuation himself, with 30 years on the deal side of UK mid-market transactions. The largest corporate group he has negotiated against had a turnover of £3.2bn.

96%
In 96% of completed Achieve mandates, the price agreed at heads of terms is the price paid at completion.
Source: Achieve Corporation mandate records

The two summaries below show the kind of finding a valuation produces. They are examples written for this page, not records of real mandates, and they carry that label on the website until real anonymised deals replace them.

Illustrative example

Fire alarm and emergency lighting maintenance, Yorkshire

Turnover: £6m
Buyer: A private equity-backed fire and life safety group
What the valuation found: The buyer valued every maintenance contract as if it would renew. The valuation went contract by contract and showed that a large block of sites came through two facilities management companies on terms either side could end at short notice, while the directly held contracts had years of renewal history behind them.
Outcome: The owner went into heads of terms with his own split between secure and at-risk income, and the deferred element of the price was tied to the facilities management contracts alone.

Illustrative example

Sprinkler design and installation, South East

Turnover: £12m
Buyer: A larger trade buyer in fire protection
What the valuation found: Most of the profit came from installation, and year-end WIP included margin on variations the main contractors had not agreed. Retentions on several completed jobs were overdue. The LPS 1048 certification and the maintenance work that followed each installation were the parts of the business the buyer could not easily build itself.
Outcome: The owner corrected WIP before due diligence and argued the price on the certification and the maintenance tail. The installation profit figure would not have survived the buyer's accountants.

Sector insight

What buyers pay for in fire safety and compliance

Buyers pay most for statutory maintenance income they can see continuing. The law gives that income a floor: the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005 requires the responsible person to keep fire safety equipment under a suitable system of maintenance, in efficient working order and in good repair. What a buyer then checks is whether your share of that work stays with the business after you leave.

Maintenance contracts with a renewal history. Fire alarm servicing under BS 5839-1, emergency lighting testing under BS 5266-1, extinguisher servicing and sprinkler inspection, renewed year after year by the same customers. A one-off installation project is worth far less, because the profit ends when the job does.
Third-party certification across disciplines. BAFE schemes for fire detection, emergency lighting and extinguishers, LPS 1048 for sprinkler contractors, FIRAS for passive fire protection. Each takes time to win and a buyer cannot buy it with vans. Clients increasingly ask for it in tenders.
Route density. Contracts clustered tightly enough that an engineer completes several visits a day. Density shows up in margin, and a consolidator adding your routes to its own in the same region will pay for it.
Service records that stand up to scrutiny. Since 1 October 2023 responsible persons must record their fire risk assessment in full and record their fire safety arrangements (GOV.UK, section 156 guidance, 2023). Customers lean on their maintainer for that evidence, so clean digital records of every visit, defect and certificate are part of what you sell.
Remedial work that follows inspections. Defects found on routine visits produce quoted repair work at better margins. Buyers value it when the records show it recurring across the contract base.
An engineer team that stays. Qualified fire alarm and sprinkler engineers are hard to hire. A team with low turnover and a service manager who runs the routes protects the income a buyer is paying for.

What pulls the value down

Buyers of fire protection businesses apply the same discounts deal after deal, and each one traces back to an acquisition that went wrong for them.

Contracts held through facilities management companies. Work subcontracted through an FM provider belongs to the FM's contract with the building, and it can move when that contract is re-tendered. Buyers price that risk and often defer part of the price against it.
Profit that comes mostly from installation. New-build and refurbishment work follows the construction cycle. Where installation carries the profit, a buyer values the business closer to a contractor than to a maintenance company, and looks hard at WIP and retentions.
Certification that depends on one person. If the owner is the person the certification body knows, and the competence sits in the owner's head, a buyer assumes some of it leaves with them.
Wage costs fixed contracts cannot absorb. Engineer pay has risen faster than many multi-year maintenance prices. Contracts without an annual price review show up as falling margin, and buyers read the clauses.
A backlog of missed visits. Overdue service visits are a liability as well as lost income. A buyer who finds them treats the contract as at risk and the customer as a potential claim.
Legacy panels and obsolete spares. Systems that can no longer be supported mean replacement conversations with customers, and stock of spares for them is often worth less than the balance sheet says.

Most of these can be fixed or evidenced given a year's notice. Price review clauses can go into contracts as they renew, and a visit backlog cleared now will not become a talking point in due diligence. A valuation done early shows which of them apply to your business and roughly what each is costing you in price.

Method

How we value a fire safety business, and why the multiple comes last

Anyone can take a year's EBITDA from the filed accounts and multiply it by a figure a consolidator mentioned on the phone. Two fire protection companies with the same EBITDA can carry very different contract books, which is why a buyer's advisers will not price yours that way. Neither do we. We set the multiple last, from the work below, and because it comes out differently for every fire safety business we do not publish a typical range.

Before any multiple is applied, we test your contract base and the business behind it on:

Its defensible moat. What stops a competitor taking the contract at renewal? Certification, systems you installed and know, route density that lets you price lower, and how much disruption a customer faces in changing maintainer.
The market around it. A PESTLE review of the pressures on demand. That includes the Fire Safety Act 2021, which brought the structure, external walls and flat entrance doors of multi-occupied residential buildings within the Fire Safety Order; the Fire Safety (England) Regulations 2022, in force since 23 January 2023, which require quarterly checks of communal fire doors in residential buildings over 11 metres; and the Building Safety Act 2022. It also covers the construction cycle behind installation work.
Its competitive position. Porter's Five Forces applied to the business itself: the buying power of facilities management companies and housing providers, the hold that panel and equipment manufacturers have over spares and software, the barrier certification puts in front of new entrants, substitutes such as remote monitoring, and rivalry from national groups bidding for the same contracts.
Its real competitive edge. The specific reason customers renew with you, and whether it survives the owner stepping back from the key accounts.
Capital expenditure. The age of the van fleet, test equipment and service software, and what has to be spent to deliver the forecast.
Frameworks and contracts. Housing association and public sector frameworks, multi-site maintenance agreements and approved-contractor lists, and how much of next year's revenue they already cover.
Quality of earnings. Whether profits before a sale were flattered by delaying vehicle replacement or letting service visits slip. Rising EBITDA alongside a growing visit backlog is the pattern buyers look for.

Only then do we value the business three ways: on maintainable earnings with installation and remedial profit separated from contracted maintenance, on a discounted cash flow of its own forecast of renewals and engineer costs, and on the net value of its assets, with vans, test equipment and spares at what they would really fetch. Where the methods disagree, the gap shows where a buyer will push, and in fire protection that is often the renewal assumption.

On published multiples. BDO's Private Company Price Index put the median UK trade buyer multiple at 9.8 times EBITDA in Q3 2024, and 12.2 times for private equity (BDO, PCPI Q3 2024). Over the previous four years, the trade deals behind that index averaged an enterprise value of £14.5m (BDO, PCPI Q1 2024). Those deals span every sector, and an index built from them cannot tell a maintenance book renewed directly by building owners from one routed through FM companies. For a fire safety business we treat it as one cross-check against the result of the work above, and give it no more weight than that.

We value businesses up to £450m enterprise value. The fixed fees below cover businesses with turnover from £500k to £30m, and larger businesses are scoped on the discovery call.

The accounts

Where fire safety accounts mislead

Filed accounts for a fire protection company show turnover and profit without saying which part is contracted maintenance and which is one-off installation. A buyer's accountants will separate the two, then look for the items below. We correct for them first.

Maintenance billed in advance. Annual contracts invoiced up front put cash on the balance sheet for visits not yet made. Some companies release the income too early, which flatters profit. Buyers commonly treat the unearned part as debt-like and deduct it from the price.
Installation WIP and retentions. Margin taken on part-complete projects, or on variations the main contractor has not agreed, overstates profit. Retentions held long past practical completion may never be paid.
Remedial work counted as recurring. Repair income is real, but it varies with what inspections find. We separate it from contracted maintenance so a buyer cannot argue it away.
Vans on finance. Engineer vehicles on hire purchase or lease are treated as debt in a cash-free, debt-free price.
Spares and stock. Panels, detectors and extinguishers held for discontinued systems can sit at cost long after they stopped being usable.

The offer

The valuation, the fee and how to start

You receive a valuation memorandum, a written report and a locked Excel model, delivered in 2 working days. Mark Ross Roberts FMVA CBCA does the work himself. Nothing is passed to a junior analyst.

Annual turnover	Independent valuation	With funding feasibility
£500k to £5m	£1,200	£1,700
£5m to £10m	£2,000	£2,500
£10m to £30m	£3,000	£3,500
Above £30m	Scoped on the call	Scoped on the call

All fees exclude VAT. Funding feasibility adds the bank debt a lender is likely to advance against the business and tests deal structures on debt service cover, which matters if you are selling to your service manager and engineers or buying a competitor's contracts.

How to start: email Mark at mark@achieve-corporation.com with a line on the business and what the valuation is for. You get a reply the same day, then a free discovery call that confirms the right report, the fee and the turnaround. Nothing is payable until you agree to go ahead.

Email Mark for a free discovery call

Questions owners ask

Frequently asked questions

I've had an offer for my fire safety business. How do I know if it's fair?

Compare it with an independent valuation built from your own accounts and contract list before you reply. The valuation shows what a buyer is likely to pay, how much of the headline reaches you after van finance, advance-billed maintenance fees and working capital, and which parts of the offer are open to negotiation, such as a deferred payment tied to contracts held through FM companies.

Is an independent valuation worth it if I already have a broker's figure?

A broker's figure is often given to win your instruction, and it may count your whole contract book as recurring. An independent valuation has no stake in the number, separates maintenance from installation and remedial work, and gives you something to test the broker's figure against. At a fixed fee from £1,200 excluding VAT, it costs less than one point off the multiple on almost any deal.

Will you try to sell me a sale mandate afterwards?

No. The fee is fixed and agreed before work starts, and it is the same whatever the number. The report is yours to show a consolidator, your bank, or a service manager who wants to buy. Owners rarely go on to instruct us to sell after a valuation, although it has happened, and you are under no obligation to instruct us for anything else. Most fire safety owners use the report to answer a buyer who has already approached them, or to plan the years before they step back.

How much is my fire safety business worth?

There is no reliable rule of thumb. The value depends on how much of your income is contracted maintenance that renews, who holds those contracts, the certification behind them, and whether recent profits are real. A multiple of EBITDA comes at the end of that work, followed by deductions for debt, advance billings and working capital at completion. Published averages come from larger deals across every sector and say nothing about how your maintenance book renews.

Are maintenance contracts worth more than installation work?

Yes. Statutory maintenance renews every year if the customer is looked after, so a buyer can see it continuing. Installation profit has to be won again on every project. The valuation separates the two and values each on its own evidence.

Does BAFE, LPCB or FIRAS certification increase the value?

Yes, where it protects income. Certification that clients ask for in tenders keeps you on lists that uncertified competitors cannot reach. A buyer will check that it is current and that it does not rest on one person.

Most of my maintenance work comes through facilities management companies. Does that matter?

It does. A buyer sees that income as belonging to the FM's contract with the building, so it can move at the next re-tender. Expect a discount or a deferred payment against it. Contracts you hold directly with the building owner or responsible person are usually valued more highly.

What happens to maintenance fees customers have paid in advance?

Buyers commonly argue that fees for visits not yet made should come off the price, because they will have to make those visits after completion. The valuation sets out the amount and the arguments either way, so you are not negotiating it for the first time in the share purchase agreement.

Will the shortage of fire engineers affect what a buyer pays?

It can, in either direction. A settled, qualified team is part of why a buyer wants your business. Rising engineer pay on contracts with no price review will reduce maintainable earnings, and the valuation shows by how much.

Is the valuation confidential?

Yes. An NDA is available before you share any figures, and your engineers, customers and certification body are not contacted.

Sources:

Valuation guides: EBITDA analysis · Earnings multiples · Asset-based valuation · Discounted cash flow

Other sectors: Precision engineering · Metal fabrication · Civil engineering · Transport and logistics · Security services · Environmental and technical consultancy · IT managed services · Recruitment · Building services (M&E) · Food and drink manufacturing · All sectors

08:00 – 18:00

Head Office,