[ STORY · PLUMBER · OWNER · ILLUSTRATIVE COMPOSITE ]

Bill

Master plumber, 20 years running his own shop, working out who deserves to inherit it

Reported

Trades Navigator — Editorial composite · Wisconsin · Plumber

The situation

Bill turned 60 in February. He started the business when he was 40, after 14 years working for other people. He learned the business side by making expensive mistakes and then not making them again.

Twenty years later he has 3 service trucks, a reputation that keeps the phone ringing without advertising, and 3 and a half employees. His wife Marge runs the books on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons.

His kids are not interested. His daughter is a nurse practitioner in Phoenix. His son manages a brewery in Vermont. Bill raised them to follow their own paths. He just did not plan for what that means for his.

What this is actually worth

Trades-business valuation typically combines tangible assets, the customer book, and goodwill. Brokerage data published by BizBuySell and the IBBA shows that small home-services businesses commonly trade in a range of 2 to 4 times seller's discretionary earnings (SDE), depending on customer retention and recurring service contracts.

For a 3-truck residential plumbing business with stable revenue, that range is most of an owner's retirement. The number can also evaporate if the customer book walks out the door 6 months after the sale. The structure of the deal is what protects the value.

The conversation with Marcus he has been postponing

Marcus has been at the shop 11 years. He knows every customer by name. He fixed the boiler at the elementary school in February when the principal called Bill at 6 a.m. on a Tuesday. He is the reason the business runs without Bill on every job site.

Marcus also knows Bill is 60. Marcus does not say it directly, but he watches Bill stretch his back when they unload a water heater, and he asks more questions about pricing than he used to. Marcus is 38 with two kids in middle school. He is figuring out his own next decade, and the business he has helped build is part of that math.

Bill and Marcus have been dancing around the question for two years. Bill keeps planning to sit Marcus down and lay out the buyout option formally, and then a job comes up, and the conversation gets pushed. Bill knows that every month he postpones, Marcus gets one month closer to taking a phone call from another shop that wants to make him an offer. The conversation is going to happen this quarter, or it is going to happen too late.

The private equity call he almost took

Last April a representative from a private-equity-backed home-services rollup called Bill and offered cash for the business. The number was specific. It was higher than Bill expected, and lower than Bill thought the business should be worth on a multi-year structure. The rep walked through the diligence process, the timeline, and the seller's role post-close (a six-month transition, then out).

Bill told the rep he would think about it. He did. He ran the numbers with Marge at the kitchen table for a week. The cash was real. It would have funded retirement immediately. It also would have meant the apprentice they hired last year probably gets cut in the first round of post-close "efficiency" reviews, the customer book gets rolled into a regional brand, and the small-business relationship that the 800 customers had with Bill specifically becomes a 1-800 number to a call center.

Marge was the one who said no out loud first. Bill had been thinking it. He called the rep back the next Tuesday and declined. The rep was polite about it.

Bill is not opposed to selling. He is opposed to selling without a structure that protects the people who built this business with him. That is the difference. The PE call was a useful test — he learned what the cash number was, and he learned what he was not willing to do for it.

The 3 paths he is weighing

Internal buyout. Marcus has been with him 11 years and knows every customer by name. Marcus could buy the business over 5 years using a combination of seller financing and an SBA 7(a) loan.

External sale. A young licensed master plumber from outside the company who has the skills but not the customer book. Bill stays on as a consultant for the first 1 to 2 years to transition the customer relationships.

Partial sale with earnout. Marcus takes on a partner. The 2 of them buy Bill out over 5 years. Bill keeps a minority stake during the earnout period. The structure aligns Bill's continued involvement with the success of the deal.

Why this matters at scale

BLS data and industry surveys put the average age of master tradespeople in plumbing, electrical, and HVAC well above 50. The Bureau of Labor Statistics OOH pages document the workforce-aging trend across construction trades. A large share of the construction workforce is projected to retire by 2031 per multiple industry studies.

Most of these owner-operators do not have a formal succession plan. The ones who do typically arrived at it through expensive professional fees or by accident. The Trades Navigator does not replace a CPA, a business broker, or an attorney. It lays out the choices in plain language so the conversations with those professionals start in the right place.

What he does on the site

Bill opens the Exit and Succession Planning module. He reads the valuation framework, the 3 succession structures, and the seller-financing primer. He bookmarks the SBA 7(a) loan page for Marcus to read when the conversation is ready.

Marge opens the bookkeeper handoff checklist. She has been the quiet engine of this enterprise for 15 years. The checklist documents what she carries that nobody else has written down.

What is on the table

What Bill is choosing between is not just a number. It is whether the apprentice they hired last year still has a job in 2 years. Whether the 800 customers who call Bill's name still get a person who picks up the phone. Whether Marge's last 15 years of bookkeeping translate into a clean transition or a year of cleanup.

Bill does not need encouragement. He needs the checklist. He needs the conversations to be informed. The site's job is to make sure the public information is on the table before the private decisions get made.

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