Electrical Sell-Side

QoE & Sell-Side Prep for Electrical Contractors

For a project-based electrical contractor, the sale price hangs on two words most owners hope nobody looks at too closely: work in progress. Get the WIP schedule right and buyers relax. Get it wrong and every job on the books becomes a question.

Electrician inspecting a residential electrical panel

What a buyer is really paying for

An electrical-contracting buyer is paying for a healthy backlog and the ability to earn on it. Unlike a service business, your value isn't a recurring contract base — it's the quality of your project pipeline, your margins on the work in hand, and whether your percentage-of-completion accounting tells the truth about profit earned versus profit still to come.

That's why the WIP schedule is the whole ballgame. Overbillings and underbillings, estimated costs to complete, change orders that were done but never booked — a buyer's QoE firm goes straight there, because that's where reported profit tends to be borrowed from next year. Getting it right beforehand keeps a normal accounting reality from looking like a red flag.

EBITDA matters, but for contractors it's EBITDA plus a defensible WIP that decides whether the buyer trusts the number at all.

Add-backs and the WIP story

You've got the usual legitimate add-backs — above-market owner comp, personal vehicles, a relative on the payroll — and those raise adjusted EBITDA if they're documented well enough to survive scrutiny. But for contractors the bigger swing is often the job-cost accounting: making sure revenue is recognized as work is actually completed, that change orders are captured, and that no single underwater job is quietly dragging the margin picture.

We reconcile the WIP schedule to the general ledger, normalize the owner's costs, and present a profit number that ties to real completed work — so a buyer isn't left wondering whether next quarter's profit was already spent.

How Kaizen runs it

We run a diligence-grade scan of your trailing twelve months, rebuild the WIP schedule, test percentage-of-completion against actual costs, normalize owner comp and personal expenses, and build the Reported-to-Adjusted EBITDA bridge a buyer's QoE firm will respect. You get a workbook, a narrative memo, and a clean-up list of the things to fix before the buyer's team finds them.

The goal: hand a buyer a job-cost story that ties out, so diligence confirms your margins instead of second-guessing them.

What's included

Trailing-twelve-month Reported → Adjusted EBITDA bridge with support for every add-back
WIP schedule rebuilt and reconciled to the GL: overbillings, underbillings, costs to complete
Percentage-of-completion revenue tested against actual job costs
Change orders and unbilled work identified and properly recognized

Backlog quantified and margin-tested so the pipeline's quality is visible
Customer and contract concentration analysis (buyers ask — have the answer ready)
Owner compensation and personal expenses normalized as documented add-backs
Narrative QoE memo plus a defensible workbook you can hand to advisors

This pairs with the 1-2-3 CFO™ Reset if the books need work first — there's no point testing WIP on a ledger that isn't reconciled.

Pricing

From $15,000one-time sell-side QoE engagement · scoped to size and book quality

4–6x EBITDAthe range project-based electrical contractors tend to trade in — clean WIP is what holds the number

WIP that tiesover/underbillings and costs-to-complete reconciled, so reported profit is real profit

Fewer surprisesissues found and fixed before diligence, not renegotiated after

Straight answers

Why does everyone care so much about my WIP schedule?

Because for a contractor, WIP is where profit gets recognized early or late. A buyer's biggest fear is paying for profit that was really borrowed from future jobs. A clean, reconciled WIP schedule removes that fear — and removing it is worth real multiple.

Isn't this what the buyer's QoE firm does anyway?

They do it to protect the buyer, and every adjustment they make lowers your price. Sell-side prep runs it first, on your side, so the WIP and the EBITDA are already defensible when they arrive.

How far ahead of a sale should we start?

Ideally 6–12 months. Job-cost habits take time to clean up, and it's far better to fix how change orders get booked while it looks like discipline rather than a pre-sale patch.

What if I mostly do one big job at a time?

Then customer and project concentration is your headline risk, and a buyer will focus there. We'd rather show them exactly how concentrated you are, with the margin history to match, than let them assume it's worse than it is.

Free 20-minute books assessment

We'll show you the five things we'd fix first in your books — useful whether you hire us, hire someone, or do neither.

Talk to Sales

Or call us directly: +1 786 789 0969