Industries
Built for organizations whose work lives in the record.
Verelume is designed for document-intensive professional-services organizations. Engineering firms are our current focus; the same problem shows up across the professions below.
Engineering firms
Engineering work produces a dense, long-lived record: calculations, drawings, submittals, RFIs, change orders, field reports. The questions that matter most often arrive long after the project closed, during a dispute, a renovation, a claim, or a staff departure. Verelume is designed to help your team find what the record actually says, with the sources attached.
Explore →Insurance agencies
Independent agencies are being acquired steadily, usually by a broker platform assembling scale. What the buyer is paying for is the book, and it tests the book by reading the record: what was quoted, what was bound, what changed at renewal, and whether the client relationship is contractual or personal. Those are the same questions that carry exposure day to day. Verelume is designed to help your team find what the record says, with the sources attached, and to show where it says nothing.
Explore →Law firms
A firm's institutional knowledge is spread across matters, memos, correspondence, and the recollection of the lawyers who handled them. When a matter reopens or a colleague departs, the question is what the record establishes about positions taken and why. Verelume is designed to help your team find that from the record, with the sources attached.
Explore →Accounting firms
Accounting practices are being consolidated by platforms that buy for recurring revenue and staff capacity. A buyer wants to know which engagements recur under an agreement rather than a habit, which clients belong to the firm rather than to a partner, and whether the reasoning behind prior positions survives a change of hands. Those are the same questions that arise every time an engagement comes back around. Verelume is designed to help your team find that from the record, with the sources attached.
Explore →Community association management
Community association management is being consolidated. The buyer is usually a platform backed by private equity, and it has done this before. It arrives with a repeatable diligence process and it applies that process to hundreds of management agreements at once. The question is not what the industry trades for. It is whether your record answers what that buyer asks.
Explore →Dental practices
Dental practices sell into two different markets. A retiring dentist selling to an individual is priced one way. A dental service organization buying to add a location prices on a different measure entirely, and runs diligence to match. Before either conversation, the practical question is whether your production, collections, and agreements say the same thing as each other.
Explore →HVAC contractors
Mechanical services is one of the most actively consolidated trades. The buyer is usually a platform assembling regional density, and what it is really buying is recurring service revenue. That makes the maintenance agreement base the centre of diligence, and it is the part of the record that most contractors have never had to prove.
Explore →Plumbing and electrical contractors
Plumbing and electrical contractors are being acquired by the same platforms buying mechanical services. The buyer wants licensed capacity, recurring service work, and a clean picture of what has been installed and what is still owed on it. The published valuation record for these trades is thin, which is a useful preview of how a buyer will treat any claim that rests on a single source.
Explore →Veterinary practices
Veterinary practices are bought either by an individual veterinarian, often with SBA financing, or by a corporate group assembling a platform. Those two buyers use different measures of earnings and reach very different numbers. Whichever arrives, the diligence lands on the same place: whether the practice can operate without the owner, and whether the record proves it.
Explore →IT services and managed service providers
Managed services is heavily consolidated, and it is the one trade in our set where the published record holds together. Two independent publishers report on owner earnings and their ranges overlap. They also agree on what moves a business within that range, which is the share of revenue under a genuine recurring agreement. That makes the contract base the whole of diligence.
Explore →Pest control companies
Pest control is consolidated aggressively, by national platforms and by regional operators building route density. What they are buying is a book of recurring service accounts, and they value it by how many of those accounts are genuinely contracted and how long they stay. Revenue that came from one-off treatments is a different asset entirely.
Explore →Landscaping and lawn care companies
Landscaping is being consolidated by operators building regional density, and the value sits in contracted maintenance rather than in project installation work. Commercial maintenance agreements renew and survive an ownership change. Residential work booked season by season depends on relationships and habit, and a buyer knows the difference even when the revenue looks similar.
Explore →Restaurants
Most independent restaurants are bought by another operator, frequently with SBA financing, rather than by a consolidator. That shapes diligence. The buyer is assessing whether they can run this room profitably, and the answer turns on the lease, the equipment, the licences, and whether the reported numbers reconcile. Multi unit groups are a different market with different buyers.
Explore →Main street retail
Independent retail is bought largely by individual operators rather than by consolidators, often with SBA financing. Diligence concentrates on things a new owner inherits directly: the lease, the inventory and what of it is genuinely saleable, supplier terms, and whether reported sales reconcile to the records behind them.
Explore →Property management
Residential, commercial, and short term rental management are being consolidated by platforms buying door count and contracted fee revenue. The published record for the sector is unusually contradictory, to the point where the two main publishers put the same sub verticals in opposite order. What a buyer will actually test is narrower and more answerable: whether your management agreements say what you believe they say.
Explore →Commercial cleaning and janitorial
Commercial cleaning and janitorial businesses are acquired for contracted revenue and route density. The buyer wants to know which accounts are under a written agreement, what notice each requires, and whether the crews to service them will stay. Revenue that recurs by habit rather than by agreement is priced very differently.
Explore →Pool service companies
Pool service is consolidated route by route, particularly across the Sun Belt, and the asset is a book of recurring maintenance accounts. Buyers count accounts rather than revenue, because weekly maintenance is what transfers and repair work is what does not. Whether your account list, your billing, and your service history agree is usually the whole of diligence.
Explore →Physician practices
Private physician practices are acquired by hospital systems, by payer backed groups, by private equity platforms, and by other physicians. Those buyers use different measures, and the published record reflects that by offering several conventions at once. What holds across all of them is that a buyer needs production, payer mix, and compliance records that reconcile.
Explore →Light manufacturing
Manufacturers are acquired by strategic buyers, by private equity platforms, and at the smaller end by individual operators. The measure changes with the buyer, and the published record for this sector disagrees on both axes at once, on which measure applies and on what the multiple should be within it. What a buyer tests is narrower: whether the operation runs without the owner and whether the numbers reconcile.
Explore →E-commerce businesses
E-commerce is one of the few sectors in our set where two independent publishers broadly agree on the range. That helps with benchmarking and settles very little about a specific business, because what a buyer prices here is dependency: on a marketplace, on a traffic source, on a supplier, and on the accounts that hold them.
Explore →Construction and specialty trades
Construction is not really one market. The advisory publishers that report valuation figures for the trades report them trade by trade, and none of them offers a number for construction generally. What does exist is transaction data: businesses reported sold rather than listed for sale, which is the more defensible kind of figure. Our estimator leads with it, and in the same breath reports that only one independent source stands behind it. Both statements are true and you should have both. What a buyer examines is narrower anyway: the backlog, the bonding, and whether completed work was closed out properly.
Explore →Transportation and logistics
We checked the publishers reporting small business valuation figures and none of them covers transportation and logistics. That is unusual for a sector this large, and it means an owner here has no benchmark to lean on. What a buyer will examine is well defined regardless: contracted freight, driver retention, equipment condition, and a compliance record that holds up.
Explore →Find the gaps before a buyer does.
Start with a guided Diligence Readiness Assessment, delivered with an advisor. Verelume keeps your records organized and answerable long after the deal closes.