Should I Sell My Alarm Company or Keep Building? The 2026 Decision Framework

Every owner who asks me this is really asking: is the market going to pay me more for my company than I can build into it? I've been in this industry 23 years. I founded and ran Protect America, built over 800,000 accounts, and sat on both sides of these decisions. The honest answer is arithmetic, not emotion — and the arithmetic depends entirely on which multiple tier you're in today and whether you have the appetite to climb.

So let's do the arithmetic: what the market pays now, what the buyers are really doing, and the specific conditions under which building beats selling.

Start with the verified 2026 numbers, because every good decision anchors on them:

The spread between the first two rows is the whole decision. Same industry, same year — but a project shop and a recurring-revenue regional with identical EBITDA sell millions of dollars apart.

Consolidators buy independent dealers at 3-9x EBITDA. Those same consolidators are themselves valued at 13-20x. That spread is the roll-up arbitrage, and it's the entire reason the acquisition letters keep landing in your inbox. Every dollar of EBITDA they buy from you at 4x is instantly marked closer to 15x inside their platform.

This isn't a scandal — it's a business model, and knowing it changes how you negotiate. The buyer's floor is well below their ceiling. It also tells you something more useful: the market is structurally hungry for what you own, which means time pressure in an offer letter is usually theater.

Look at the biggest roll-up in the industry. Pye-Barker has completed 200+ acquisitions — 57 in 2025 alone — grown to roughly 9,000 employees, and in January 2025 took a recap valuing it at 17-20x on roughly $350 million of EBITDA, north of $6 billion in enterprise value, backed by Altas Partners as majority holder with Leonard Green plus ADIA and GIC minority stakes. APi Group paid an SEC-filed 14.6x for Chubb and roughly 13x for Elevated.

Two lessons. First, the buyers' own pricing held or rose from 2021 through 2025 — this is not a market losing interest in security companies. Second, those double-digit multiples belong to platforms with scale and density you don't have; they're proof the arbitrage works, not a price you should expect for your company.

• ▸You're already in the top tier — recurring past 40-50%, management team in place, attrition under 10% — and priced at 7-8x+, most of the climbing is done.
• ▸You have no appetite for two or three more years of building; a company run by a tired owner usually drifts down-tier, not up.
• ▸Your attrition is rising and you can't or won't fix it — a shrinking book loses value every month you wait.
• ▸The business depends entirely on you and you're unwilling to build the management layer buyers pay for.
• ▸You have a real outside use for the capital — health, family, or a better opportunity — that beats the return on staying in.

• ▸You're a project-heavy shop in the 3-5x tier with a genuine path to growing recurring revenue — the 5-9x tier is worth millions more on the same EBITDA.
• ▸Recurring mix is worth roughly 2-3 full EBITDA turns, and you're within reach of the 35-50% recurring threshold.
• ▸Your attrition is healthy — under 10% — so the RMR you build compounds instead of leaking.
• ▸You can hire or promote a management layer, converting the company from a job into an asset.
• ▸There's no verified compression in tuck-in pricing — the market isn't punishing patience, so the arbitrage window isn't slamming shut.

Run the tier-change scenario. A shop with $600,000 of EBITDA and thin recurring revenue sells today at 3-5x: $1.8 to $3.0 million. Suppose over two to three years you push recurring revenue to the 35-50% band and put a manager over operations — same EBITDA, different company. At 5-9x, that's $3.0 to $5.4 million, and past the 40-50% recurring mark the 7-8x+ end comes into play. The building didn't just add revenue; it re-priced every dollar of profit you already had.

One caution from a man who built accounts for a living: new RMR is expensive up front. Creating an account typically takes 30-40+ months of RMR to recoup the fully loaded cost. Building the book depresses near-term cash flow before it re-prices the company — plan for that valley, because quitting halfway through it is the worst outcome of all.

Keep building when three things are true: you're below the top of your achievable tier, you have a concrete plan to raise recurring mix and management depth, and you have the energy to execute it for two to three years. That combination is the only one where the market reliably pays you more later.

Sell when any of the three is false. An owner coasting in the 3-5x tier isn't preserving value — attrition at the industry-typical 10-13% quietly eats the book while the multiple stays flat. In this business you're either building the asset or the asset is shrinking. There is no neutral.

Owners get pushed to sell with scare stories about closing windows. The verified record doesn't support panic: platform pricing held or rose from 2021 through 2025, and there's no verified compression in tuck-in pricing. Directionally, demand remains strong — consolidators need acquisitions to feed the arbitrage. Sell because the price is right and you're ready, not because someone's quarterly quota says the sky is falling.

The worst version of this decision is the passive one: no sale, no build, just another year of drift while attrition compounds. The best version is a written two-path plan — what the company nets if sold in the next twelve months, what it plausibly nets after a defined building program, and the honest cost of executing that program. Put real numbers on both paths and the decision usually makes itself.