Independent business valuation · Civil engineering

You've Had an Offer for Your Civil Engineering Business. Is It Fair?

The offer letter puts a price on the business. It says nothing about how much of your work in progress the buyer believes, or what is left once the plant finance is settled. An independent valuation answers both, in two working days, before you reply.

Owners of groundworks, highways and civils contracting firms tend to reach us at one of a handful of moments. A tier-one contractor you have worked under for years asks whether you would sell. Sometimes it is a private equity-backed group buying up regional contractors, with a number already in the letter. Your contracts manager and quantity surveyor want to buy you out. Or retirement is a few years off and nobody has costed what the business would fetch without you pricing the work.

Whoever puts the first number in front of you had a reason for choosing it. You are the only person at the table without a valuation of your own.

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

The stakes

What finding out late costs

An illustrative groundworks and civils contractor with £14.0m turnover and reported EBITDA of £1.45m. The owner had been told at an industry dinner that contractors sell for six times EBITDA, and expected about £8.7m. The company and every figure are fictional.

Illustrative figures, £000
Reported EBITDA	1,450
Unagreed variation claim taken to profit in WIP, reversed	(220)
Loss on a fixed-price drainage contract not yet provided for	(130)
Commercial manager costed in to replace the owner's estimating role	(65)
One-off adjudication costs added back	40
Gain on sale of old excavators removed	(45)
Maintainable EBITDA	1,030
Enterprise value at an illustrative 4.5 times	4,635
Cash at completion	1,100
Hire purchase on plant and vehicles	(850)
Bank loan	(250)
Working capital below the normal level, after retentions unlikely to be released	(180)
Equity value to the owner	4,455

Much of the gap between £8.7m and £4.5m sat in the profit figure itself, which counted a claim the client had never agreed and ignored a loss already building on a live job. The multiple the owner heard described larger businesses, and the plant finance was always going to come off the price. The 4.5 times multiple is for illustration only. A real valuation sets the multiple from the evidence in your business and comparable transactions.

The numbers you have been given

Why the numbers you have been given are not neutral

Every valuation an owner hears before a sale comes from someone with a stake in the answer.

The buyer

wants to pay as little as you will accept. Their first figure is an opening position, and their advisers know where contractors' accounts flatter profit better than you do.

A broker

competing for your instruction has a reason to quote high. A large number wins the mandate. Whether the market agrees comes out months later, usually in due diligence.

Your accountant

knows your numbers better than anyone, but may never have taken a business through a sale or sat across from a buyer's due diligence team.

None of them is acting in bad faith. Each one is answering a different question from the one you are asking, which is what the business is worth to a buyer today and how much of that reaches you.

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 bonding provider, 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

Groundworks contractor, East Midlands

Turnover: £5m to £8m
Buyer: A larger regional civils and groundworks group
What the valuation found: Most of the work came from one housebuilder on package orders placed site by site, with no framework behind them. The year-end WIP also carried variations the housebuilder's surveyors had not signed off. The valuation took those variations out of maintainable earnings and showed the owner how a buyer would price the reliance on one client.
Outcome: The owner went into the first meeting knowing which part of the price the buyer would want to defer, and agreed a shorter deferral period on his own evidence.

Illustrative example

Highways and drainage contractor, Yorkshire

Turnover: £10m to £15m
Buyer: A private equity-backed infrastructure services group
What the valuation found: A local authority highways framework supplied a large share of revenue and was due for re-tender about a year after any likely completion. The owner had also given personal guarantees to the bonding provider. The valuation modelled the business with and without the framework, and listed every bond and guarantee that would need replacing.
Outcome: Release of the personal guarantees became a condition of the deal from the first offer, and the price was agreed with the framework risk already on the table.

Sector insight

What buyers pay for in civil engineering

Trade buyers and private equity both pay more for earnings they can see continuing. In civils contracting that comes down to a short list, and a buyer's quantity surveyor tests each item against your contract files early in due diligence.

Framework places with years left to run. A seat on a local authority highways framework, a water company's capital programme or a regional public-sector framework gives a buyer visible work. What a buyer checks is the renewal date and the work actually called off. A framework's headline value tells them very little.
An order book that converts at margin. Secured work priced at current labour, plant and material costs, under contracts that share risk sensibly with the client. A large order book won cheaply in a rising cost market is worth less than its size suggests.
Commercial records a buyer can follow. Valuations, compensation events and variations agreed as each job goes, so the WIP at the year end traces to signed paperwork.
A plant fleet that matches the work. Machines of sensible age and hours, financed over their useful life. A buyer reads the plant register next to the hire purchase schedule and works out the replacement bill.
The accreditations clients demand. Constructionline, CHAS or an equivalent, ISO 9001, 14001 and 45001, and the sector schemes needed for highways or utilities work. Every serious competitor holds them, so on their own they rarely raise the price. A lapsed one stops you tendering, and buyers check the dates.
Commercial and site management below the owner. Contracts managers, a quantity surveyor and an estimator who price and run jobs without the owner on every tender and every site visit.

What pulls the value down

The discounts in civils are predictable. Buyers apply them because contractor failures have taught them where profit goes missing.

One client carrying the order book. Work that comes mostly from one tier-one contractor or one local authority is priced as a single point of failure. Where it dominates, part of the price is often deferred and tied to that client staying.
The owner prices every job. When the owner is also the estimator and the commercial manager, a buyer assumes tendering accuracy leaves at completion and costs a replacement into the earnings.
Fixed-price work in a rising market. CECA's Workload Trends Survey found 57 per cent of firms reporting higher tender prices for new construction and improvement work in the first quarter of 2026 (CECA, July 2026). Jobs priced on a fixed sum before those rises, with no fluctuation provision, are where buyers look for losses.
Contract terms that load risk onto you. Amended NEC or JCT terms that pass design responsibility, ground conditions or uncapped liability down to the contractor. A buyer's lawyers read the live contracts and price the worst of them.
Bonds and guarantees in the owner's name. Performance bonds, parent company guarantees and personal guarantees to a bank or bonding provider have to be replaced or released at completion. A buyer that has to commit its own bonding capacity builds that cost into the offer.
Labour supplied through long-term CIS subcontractors. Labour-only subcontractors who have worked for the business for years, under its direction, can raise employment status and tax questions. Buyers answer them with an indemnity request or a lower price.

Most of these can be fixed, or at least evidenced, given twelve months' notice. A valuation done early shows which ones apply to your business and roughly what each is costing you in price.

Method

How we value a civil engineering business, and why the multiple comes last

Anyone can take a year's EBITDA from the filed accounts and multiply it by a number from a newspaper. A buyer's advisers will not price your business that way, and neither do we. The multiple is the last thing we set. It comes out of the work below and differs for every business, so we do not publish a typical range.

Before any multiple is applied, we test the business on:

Its defensible moat. What stops a competitor taking the work at the next tender? Framework places, sector approvals, specialist plant or skills, a record with clients' engineers, and the cost to a tier-one contractor of bringing in a subcontractor it has never used.
The market around it. A PESTLE review of the pressures on its clients' spending, such as public infrastructure budgets, water company investment cycles, housing starts, planning, the retentions ban the government proposed in 2026, skills shortages and the cost of fuel and aggregates. CECA's Workload Trends Survey for the first quarter of 2026 had 7 per cent of firms, on balance, reporting lower workloads, while 60 per cent, on balance, expected workloads to rise over the following 12 months (CECA, July 2026).
Its competitive position. Porter's Five Forces applied to the business itself: the power of plant hire firms, material suppliers and labour gangs, the buying power of tier-one contractors and local authorities, the threat of new entrants on low-barrier groundworks packages, substitutes such as a client's own direct labour, and rivalry on every tender.
Its real competitive edge. The specific reason clients keep asking this contractor to price, and whether that reason survives the owner stepping back from estimating and site visits.
Capital expenditure. The age, hours and condition of the plant fleet, the hire purchase behind it, and what must be spent to deliver the order book without hiring in at a higher cost.
Frameworks and contracts. Framework places and their renewal dates, the share of next year's revenue already secured or called off, and the contract forms behind it (NEC, JCT or bespoke) with the risk each one leaves with the business.
Quality of earnings. Whether recent profits rest on claims and variations not yet agreed, losses not yet provided for, or plant replacement and maintenance held back before a sale. A buyer's quantity surveyor will walk the WIP contract by contract, so we do it first.

Only then do we value the business three ways: on maintainable earnings, on a discounted cash flow of its own forecast, and on the net value of its assets, which carries real weight in civils because the plant fleet is a large part of what a buyer gets. Where the methods disagree, the gap shows where a buyer will push.

On published multiples. BDO's Private Company Price Index put the average 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). An average built from larger businesses says nothing about your frameworks, your plant or your WIP. We use such figures only as one cross-check against the result of the work above.

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 civil engineering accounts mislead

Contractors' filed accounts rest on judgements that a buyer's accountants and quantity surveyors will reopen. We reopen them first.

Claims and variations taken to profit before they are agreed. Contract accounting lets a contractor recognise income it expects to recover. Where the expectation is optimistic, profit is overstated by the difference, and a buyer reverses it.
Losses on live contracts not yet provided for. A job heading for a loss should carry a provision for the whole of that loss once it is foreseen. Where it does not, earnings are overstated, and the buyer prices the loss back to you.
Retentions receivable that will never come in. Retentions held by clients sit in the balance sheet at face value. Old ones, or ones owed by a client in difficulty, get written down. In March 2026 the government proposed banning cash retentions in construction contracts, subject to further consultation (UK government, Time to Pay Up consultation response, 2026), so a buyer may also ask how a ban would change your cash cycle.
Retentions you hold from subcontractors. Money held back from your own subcontractors is owed to them. Buyers often argue it should come off the price as a debt-like item.
Plant sale profits and related-party hire. Gains on selling old plant are one-off and come out of maintainable earnings. Plant or yards rented from a company the owner controls are reset to a market rate.
Family on the payroll, or missing from it. A spouse paid for no role is added back. An owner who draws a low salary and takes dividends needs a market-rate manager costed in their place.

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 a management team or buying a competitor.

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 civil engineering business. How do I know if it's fair?

Compare it with an independent valuation built from your own accounts and contract records, before you reply. The valuation shows what a buyer is likely to pay, how much of the headline reaches you after plant finance, debt and working capital, and which parts of the offer are open to negotiation.

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. An independent valuation has no stake in the number, shows every adjustment, 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 valuation is a standalone engagement at a fixed fee, and you are under no obligation to instruct us for anything else. Most owners use the report to negotiate with a buyer they already have, or to plan their next few years.

How much is my civil engineering business worth?

There is no reliable rule of thumb. The value depends on how defensible the business is, the frameworks and contracts behind next year's revenue, the condition of the plant fleet, and whether the profit in the accounts survives a contract-by-contract review of the WIP. A multiple of EBITDA comes at the end of that work, followed by deductions for debt, hire purchase and working capital at completion. Published averages describe larger, different businesses.

Will a buyer accept the claims and variations in my work in progress?

Only the ones that are agreed or well evidenced. A buyer's quantity surveyor reviews each live contract, and income booked for claims the client has not accepted is usually taken out of maintainable earnings or held back from the price until it is recovered. The valuation does that review first, so you know the figure a buyer will work from.

What happens to my retentions when I sell?

Retentions owed to you are part of working capital, and a buyer will discount any that are old or owed by a client in difficulty. Retentions you hold from subcontractors may be treated as debt and deducted. Some sellers keep the right to collect retentions on finished jobs, with the price adjusted to match. The valuation sets out both sides, so you negotiate the treatment with the numbers in front of you.

Do frameworks and accreditations increase the value?

Frameworks do, where they have years left to run and work is being called off under them. Accreditations such as Constructionline, CHAS and the ISO standards are what let you tender at all. Buyers expect them and check the renewal dates, because a lapsed accreditation stops you tendering.

Is hire purchase on my plant deducted from the price?

In almost every deal, yes. Hire purchase and finance leases on plant and vehicles are treated as debt in a cash-free, debt-free price, so they reduce the amount you receive.

What happens to the bonds and personal guarantees I have given?

A buyer will normally need to replace parent company guarantees and arrange the release of personal guarantees given to a bank or bonding provider. The valuation lists every one, so their release can be a condition of the deal from the first offer.

Is the valuation confidential?

Yes. An NDA is available before you share any figures, and your staff, clients and subcontractors are not contacted.

Sources:

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

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