Landscaping & Snow Removal Acquisition & SBA Underwriting Financial Model

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: on the seasonal cash curve, the recurring quality of the book, and normalized SDE after a real operator.

What it does

- Seasonal revenue-curve + 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 ~58% recurring share and the ~22% snow share (in the 20–45% sweet spot), not the annual top line, decide the deal. Billing concentrates in ~8 warm months; the loan amortises over 12.

- The winter cash trough, counted. The model spreads revenue and cost across the calendar and counts the months in the red — 1 in a snow belt (snow barely covers winter fixed cost), 3 in a sun belt (a deeper −$40,200 trough). Size the working-capital line to the real seasonality, not the annual average. 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 / equipment reserve above the DSCR, and re-rates the lumpy install work (one-off jobs don't earn a recurring-maintenance multiple). So the true DSCR (1.44x) sits next to the naive broker DSCR (2.26x) — the gap is the operator and the reserve — and the recurring-vs-lumpy carve-out shows $144,840 of overpay to negotiate out.

- The down-case that matters. The sector's #1 risk is a mild winter. Snow −50% plus a wage shock drops DSCR to 0.83x — below the 1.25x floor, because overhead (year-round staff, facility, fleet) is fixed. Profitable in a normal year; under pressure when the snow doesn't come. The 3.85x recurring-maintenance coverage is the cushion.

- SBA 7(a) capital stack — buyer equity, a seller note (full-standby vs amortizing toggle as the DSCR lever), and the SBA loan that fills the rest, with the lender's DSCR gate and a 5-year cash-on-cash and equity-multiple exit. No IRR is printed (deliberately — single-deal timing is too fragile).

Inside: a 10-sheet Excel model (every calc a formula, Google-Sheets-safe, no macros), a 20+ page PDF user guide, and a benchmarks sheet with sourced ranges. Three firm profiles (Residential Mow-Heavy / Balanced Maintenance + Snow / Commercial-Contract + Snow-Integrated) reload the multiple, working-capital peg, fleet-reserve rate and book retention.

*Educational planning tool, not financial, legal, tax or investment advice.*

---