This post discusses business valuation in general terms. It is not legal, tax, accounting, or appraisal advice, and it is not an opinion of value for any business. Selling a business carries legal and tax consequences that depend entirely on your specific facts — work with a credentialed appraiser, an accountant, and counsel who can look at your actual company.
You came here for a number.
We are not going to give you one — no multiple, no range, no dollar figure, not hedged and not tucked into a FAQ where you would find it anyway.
That is not squeamishness, and it is not a lead magnet withholding the good part. It is the answer. By the end of this page you should understand not only why nobody honest can hand you a number from a webpage, but what the number would have been standing in for — and that second thing is genuinely useful, which is more than the number would have been.
What happens when you go looking for the number
We looked. Properly, on purpose, and with the intention of publishing something if it held up.
Here is what is out there. Published valuation ranges for third-party logistics and distribution businesses, sitting on the websites of mergers-and-acquisitions advisory firms — and they disagree with one another by more than a factor of two. Not a spread. A disagreement. Two pages, both confident, both aimed at the same kind of owner, arriving at conclusions that cannot both be describing the same market.
So we did the thing that separates a source from a citation: we read one of them all the way through. The firm was CT Acquisitions, an M&A advisory firm, and its page does publish ranges. What it does not publish is any of the things that would make those ranges mean something:
- No methodology. Nothing about how the range was derived.
- No sample size. How many transactions is this drawn from — five, five hundred? Unstated.
- No transaction dates. From what period? A market before a freight downturn and one after are not the same market.
- No underlying data set. Nothing a reader could check, and nothing anyone could reproduce.
And the page is, explicitly, lead-generation content for the firm’s own brokerage service. That is not a scandal. It is ordinary marketing, and the firm is entitled to do it. But it means the range on that page is not a finding. It is a hook, and it has been repeated across the internet so many times that it has acquired the texture of a fact without ever acquiring the substance of one.
Why we will not repeat it anyway
Here is the principle, and it governs everything we publish:
A real number, miscontextualized, is still a fabrication.
We could have written “one advisory firm suggests a range of…” and been technically truthful. The sentence would have been accurate. The effect would have been a lie, because you would have walked away with a number in your head — and that number would have come from a page that could not tell you where it got it.
Hedging does not fix this. Attribution does not fix this. “Sources say” does not fix this. Once a number with no method behind it is printed next to the phrase “what your business is worth,” it has been laundered — it enters the reader’s mind as knowledge, and it comes back out in a negotiation with a buyer who is holding real comparables and knows exactly where the figure came from.
So: no multiple appears on this page. Not one. That refusal is the most useful thing we can give you, because it is the same discipline you will need in the room.
What a buyer is actually buying
Now the part that is knowable, and that no multiple would have told you anyway.
A buyer looking at your warehouse, distribution, or third-party logistics business is not purchasing your racking. They are not purchasing your forklifts, or your dock doors, or even, really, last year’s revenue. Those are inputs, and inputs are replaceable.
They are purchasing one thing:
Contracted, recurring revenue that survives the owner’s departure.
Read that again, slowly, because every diligence question you will ever be asked is a proxy for it.
Are your customer relationships papered, or personal? A multi-year written agreement transfers. A friendship with a shipping manager who has worked with you since before the building did not, and cannot.
Is your revenue diversified, or concentrated? This is usually the first serious question, and it is the one owners underweight most. A business with revenue spread across many customers under written agreements and a business with the same revenue concentrated in one customer are not a big version and a small version of the same asset. They are different assets, because in the second one a single decision made in someone else’s conference room can erase most of what the buyer just paid for.
Does the operation run without you? If the pricing lives in your head, if the customer calls your cell phone, if the exception handling depends on your judgment — then a buyer is not acquiring a business. They are acquiring a job, and they will price it accordingly, or walk.
Two businesses with identical revenue, identical margins, and identical square footage can be worth wildly different amounts, and no multiple can tell you which one you are. That is not a limitation of multiples. That is the entire game, and a multiple is precisely the wrong instrument for it — an average applied to the one thing about your business that is not average.
<text x="126" y="30" text-anchor="middle" font-family="Inter, sans-serif" font-size="13" font-weight="600" fill="#0F4C5C">The ranges you will find online</text>
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<text x="126" y="63" text-anchor="middle" font-family="Inter, sans-serif" font-size="11" fill="#3F5B64">No methodology disclosed</text>
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<text x="126" y="95" text-anchor="middle" font-family="Inter, sans-serif" font-size="11" fill="#3F5B64">No sample size disclosed</text>
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<text x="126" y="127" text-anchor="middle" font-family="Inter, sans-serif" font-size="11" fill="#3F5B64">No transaction dates</text>
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<text x="126" y="159" text-anchor="middle" font-family="Inter, sans-serif" font-size="11" fill="#3F5B64">No underlying data set</text>
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<text x="126" y="191" text-anchor="middle" font-family="Inter, sans-serif" font-size="11" fill="#3F5B64">Published to sell a brokerage service</text>
<text x="126" y="222" text-anchor="middle" font-family="Inter, sans-serif" font-size="11" font-style="italic" fill="#3F5B64">And they disagree with each other.</text>
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<text x="352" y="121" text-anchor="middle" font-family="Inter, sans-serif" font-size="12" font-weight="600" fill="#1A1A1A">A number with no method</text>
<text x="352" y="139" text-anchor="middle" font-family="Inter, sans-serif" font-size="12" font-weight="600" fill="#1A1A1A">is not a valuation. It is</text>
<text x="352" y="157" text-anchor="middle" font-family="Inter, sans-serif" font-size="12" font-weight="600" fill="#1A1A1A">a marketing asset.</text>
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<text x="576" y="30" text-anchor="middle" font-family="Inter, sans-serif" font-size="13" font-weight="600" fill="#0F4C5C">What the buyer is actually buying</text>
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<text x="576" y="112" text-anchor="middle" font-family="Inter, sans-serif" font-size="12" font-weight="600" fill="#0F4C5C">Contracted, recurring</text>
<text x="576" y="130" text-anchor="middle" font-family="Inter, sans-serif" font-size="12" font-weight="600" fill="#0F4C5C">revenue that survives</text>
<text x="576" y="148" text-anchor="middle" font-family="Inter, sans-serif" font-size="12" font-weight="600" fill="#0F4C5C">the owner’s departure</text>
<text x="576" y="166" text-anchor="middle" font-family="Inter, sans-serif" font-size="11" font-style="italic" fill="#3F5B64">— and nothing else</text>
<text x="350" y="256" text-anchor="middle" font-family="Inter, sans-serif" font-size="12" font-weight="600" fill="#0F4C5C">Every diligence question is a proxy for that one sentence</text>
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<text x="130" y="298" text-anchor="middle" font-family="Inter, sans-serif" font-size="11" fill="#3F5B64">Are the contracts papered,</text>
<text x="130" y="314" text-anchor="middle" font-family="Inter, sans-serif" font-size="11" fill="#3F5B64">or personal?</text>
<text x="130" y="335" text-anchor="middle" font-family="Inter, sans-serif" font-size="11" font-style="italic" fill="#0F4C5C">A handshake does not transfer</text>
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<text x="350" y="298" text-anchor="middle" font-family="Inter, sans-serif" font-size="11" fill="#3F5B64">Diversified revenue, or one</text>
<text x="350" y="314" text-anchor="middle" font-family="Inter, sans-serif" font-size="11" fill="#3F5B64">customer carrying most of it?</text>
<text x="350" y="335" text-anchor="middle" font-family="Inter, sans-serif" font-size="11" font-style="italic" fill="#0F4C5C">The first diligence question</text>
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<text x="570" y="298" text-anchor="middle" font-family="Inter, sans-serif" font-size="11" fill="#3F5B64">Does it run without you</text>
<text x="570" y="314" text-anchor="middle" font-family="Inter, sans-serif" font-size="11" fill="#3F5B64">in the building?</text>
<text x="570" y="335" text-anchor="middle" font-family="Inter, sans-serif" font-size="11" font-style="italic" fill="#0F4C5C">Otherwise they are buying a job</text>
<text x="350" y="384" text-anchor="middle" font-family="Inter, sans-serif" font-size="12" fill="#3F5B64">No multiple can tell you which of those businesses you are.</text>
<text x="350" y="402" text-anchor="middle" font-family="Inter, sans-serif" font-size="12" font-weight="600" fill="#0F4C5C">An accredited appraiser, reading your actual books, can.</text>Where insurance shows up in a valuation conversation
It shows up in diligence, and owners are consistently surprised by how early.
Your loss runs are a management record. A buyer’s team reads them the way an underwriter does: as evidence of how the floor has actually been run, not how it is described in a memo. A clean run alongside a real forklift-operator file — the kind the federal standard already requires you to keep, which we walked through in OSHA forklift rules for warehouse and distribution operators — is a diligence asset. It is one fewer thing for a buyer to discount for.
A messy run is the opposite. It is a liability the buyer is being asked to inherit, and it does not usually come out of the price directly. It comes out in structure: indemnity language, an escrow, a holdback, a longer earnout — all of which are worse for you than a lower headline number, and none of which get discussed on a page that just hands you a multiple.
Your customer contracts define the tail. The limitation-of-liability terms in your storage and distribution agreements determine what customers can recover from you for goods lost or damaged in your care. A buyer is purchasing that exposure along with the revenue. Agreements with no limitation language are a diligence finding, and we took the subject apart in warehouse receipts and limitation of liability. The warehouse legal liability page explains the coverage that sits behind it.
And assignability is a landmine. A contract that a customer can refuse to assign on a change of control is a contract that may not survive the closing you are counting on it to survive. That is worth knowing long before you have an offer in hand.
So where does the number come from?
From an accredited business appraiser, working with your accountant, and — where deal structure and tax consequences are in play — your attorney.
An appraisal is not a range lifted from an industry page. It is an analysis of the things that actually distinguish your business from the average one: your financial statements, normalized. Your customer contracts and their assignability. Your asset and equipment schedules. Your lease, or the building if you own it. Your working capital. Your loss history. And your dependence on yourself.
It produces a number with a method attached, and the method is the part that matters — because the number will be tested by a buyer who does this professionally, and a figure you cannot defend is worse than no figure at all. This is the same principle as everything above, applied to your own side of the table.
It costs money. Pay it. The alternative is negotiating against a professional using a number you found on the internet, from a firm that was paid to make you want to sell.
What to do instead of searching for a multiple
The useful work is not finding the number. It is changing the number, and that work is entirely within your control.
The drivers that a buyer actually prices — contract mix, customer concentration, the racking and automation as scheduled assets, the lease, owner dependence, the loss run and the safety file, and the limitation-of-liability terms in your customer agreements — are the subject of the value drivers buyers actually price. That is where the usable content lives, and it is a better use of the next hour than any multiple would have been.
If you want someone to read your loss runs and your customer contracts the way a buyer’s diligence team will — which is, not coincidentally, the same way an underwriter does — that is the conversation.
Sources
This post cites no valuation source, and that is the finding.
Here is exactly what was checked and why nothing from it appears above:
- Published 3PL and logistics valuation ranges from M&A advisory firms. Checked, and not used. The ranges we found disagree with one another by more than a factor of two, which is not a spread — it is a signal that they are not measuring the same thing, or not measuring anything.
- CT Acquisitions, an M&A advisory firm. We read its published valuation page directly, because it is representative of the genre. It discloses no methodology, no sample size, no transaction dates, and no underlying data set, and it exists as lead-generation content for the firm’s own brokerage service. Not used, and deliberately not linked — we are not going to route you toward a number we are not willing to repeat.
We publish numbers only when they trace to a primary source we can name and you can check. For the market value of a third-party logistics or distribution business, no such source survived the check — so the number is absent, and this section exists to tell you that it is absent on purpose rather than by oversight.
There is no dollar figure, no multiple, and no range anywhere on this page. If you find one on a page that will not tell you where it came from, you have found the same thing we did.