Health and wellness businesses were in high demand in 2024, with their price-to-sales ratios jumping 18% according to data from BizBuySell. Meanwhile, ice cream shops saw melting multiples.By Brandon Kochkodin, Forbes Staff
In 2024, small business buyers weren’t looking for dessert. Instead, they were looking to sweat. Fitness businesses got more expensive and ice cream shops got cheaper, according to data from BizBuySell, an online marketplace for small businesses and a division of Arlington, Virginia – based CoStar Group ($30 billion market capitalization).
Gyms saw their price-to-revenue multiples jump from 0.72x to 0.85x, an 18% year-over-year increase, the biggest gain among 23 small business sectors it tracks that had greater than the median number of transactions in both 2023 and 2024. Ice cream shops (0.56x down to 0.54x) and hair salons (from 0.52x to 0.5x), meanwhile, tied for the worst performance, with both seeing their price-to-revenue multiples drop by 4% from 2023 to 2024.
Price-to-revenues or sales, represents the amount acquirers are willing to pay as a multiple of an enterprise’s annual revenues. While many small businesses routinely change hands at less than one times annual sales, the large publicly traded companies in the S&P 500 index trade for an average of more than 3 times revenues, and tech companies like Apple command more than nine times annual revenues. The highest price-to-sales ratio among the 9,530 deals that BizBuySell surveyed in 2024 came from bed-and-breakfast establishments which changed hands for a median price of $1.5 million, which was an average of 2.76 times annual revenues. The lowest multiples came from car dealerships, which sold for 0.23 times revenues and had a median sales price of $600,000.
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