Construction, Contractor, Financial Model, Service Businesses

Break-Even, Business Valuation, Cash Flow Projections, Debt Service Coverage, Excel, Financial Model, Loans, Pro-Forma

Most landscaping templates are startup or operating forecasts, and most brokers annualise the top line and headline a margin. But a landscaping firm bills in roughly eight warm months while its SBA loan amortises over all twelve, and the owner is usually a working crew leader, not an absentee investor. This 5-year, SBA-lender-ready model reads the firm the way a disciplined buyer and a bank do.

Seasonal revenue-curve and service-mix engine. Four revenue lines (recurring maintenance, lumpy install / design-build, applications, snow), each at its own gross margin, spread over a 12-month curve. The recurring share (about 58%) and the snow share (about 22%, in the 20-45% sweet spot), not the annual top line, decide the deal. Billing concentrates in about eight warm months; the loan amortises over twelve.

The winter cash trough, counted. The model spreads revenue and cost across the calendar and counts the months in the red: one in a snow belt (snow barely covers winter), three in a sun belt (a deeper trough). Size the working-capital line to the real seasonality. A Snow-Belt / Sun-Belt toggle flips the whole curve.

The honesty a broker’s sheet skips. It pays a real owner-operator to replace the owner who sells jobs and runs a crew, books an explicit fleet reserve above the DSCR, and re-rates the lumpy install work (one-off jobs do not earn a recurring multiple). So the true DSCR (1.44x) sits next to the naive broker DSCR (2.26x); the gap is the operator and the reserve.

The down-case that matters. The sector’s number-one risk is a mild winter. Snow minus 50% plus a wage shock drops DSCR to 0.83x, below the 1.25x floor, because overhead is fixed. The 3.85x recurring-maintenance coverage is the cushion. Normalise snow on a 10-year NOAA average, not a snowy trailing-12.

SBA 7(a) capital stack with buyer equity, a seller note (full-standby vs amortizing lever), the DSCR gate, and a 5-year cash-on-cash and equity multiple. No IRR is printed, deliberately.

Inside: ten Excel sheets (every calculation a formula, Google-Sheets-safe, no macros), a 23-page PDF guide, three firm profiles (Residential Mow-Heavy / Balanced Maintenance + Snow / Commercial-Contract + Snow-Integrated), and a sourced benchmarks sheet. Educational planning tool, not financial, legal, tax or investment advice.

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