What service agreements are worth to a buyer
Recurring work is the most valuable revenue in a service business, and most owners understate it. What counts as recurring, and what gets discounted.
In a service business, the most valuable revenue is the revenue that shows up again next year without anybody selling it. Buyers pay more for it, lenders underwrite against it, and most owners understate how much of it they have.
What counts, and what only looks like it counts
A written agreement with a term, a price and a renewal counts. A customer who has called you every spring for nine years is worth something, but it is not the same thing, and a buyer will not treat it the same way.
The gap between those two is often the cheapest value you can create before a sale. The customers already behave like contract customers. Putting the behaviour on paper converts a pattern into an asset a buyer can verify.
What gets discounted
Agreements that auto-renew but nobody has looked at in years. Pricing that has not moved while your labour cost has. Contracts in your name rather than the company's. Terms that let the customer leave on thirty days' notice, which a buyer reads as no term at all.
Also attrition. If you add agreements every year and lose nearly as many, the base is not growing and a buyer will work that out from two years of counts.
A Straight Answer
Count your agreements, their renewal dates, and how many you lost last year. If you cannot produce those three numbers quickly, that is the first thing to fix — a buyer will ask, and "most of our customers come back" is not an answer he can underwrite.
BuiltEquity is a sell-side brokerage for trades and field-service companies. Nothing here is legal, tax or accounting advice. Your CPA and your attorney are the authority on your situation.