Cleaning businesses get bought and sold more often than people realize -- recurring revenue and low equipment needs make them a fairly liquid small-business asset, if you know how to value one.
Low startup capital requirements, minimal specialized equipment, and -- critically -- a base of recurring clients make a cleaning business more straightforward to value and transfer than many small businesses, where value is harder to separate from the specific owner.
Small service businesses like this are commonly valued as a multiple of annual earnings (seller's discretionary earnings, roughly profit plus the owner's own compensation), with the specific multiple shaped by how recurring and retained the client base is, not just the revenue number itself.
Client concentration (one or two accounts are most of the revenue), no written contracts, a crew that's clearly loyal to the owner personally rather than the business, and books that mix personal and business expenses all reduce what a buyer will reasonably pay.
Buyers discount for uncertainty. A year of clean, separated financials and documented client contracts ahead of a sale process is worth more in final price than almost anything else you could do in that same window.
Revenue history tells you the past; actual conversations with the largest recurring clients (with the seller's permission, as part of due diligence) tell you whether that revenue survives a change of ownership.
Value in this business is mostly about how much of the revenue is genuinely recurring and how little it depends on the current owner personally -- both sides of a deal should focus due diligence there first.
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