Landscaping / Lawn-Care & Snow Removal Acquisition & SBA Underwriting Financial Model

Description
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 ~58% recurring share and the ~22% snow share (in the 20-45% sweet spot), not the annual top line, decide the deal.
• 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, 3 in a sun belt). 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. So the true DSCR (1.44x) sits next to the naive broker DSCR (2.26x).
• The down-case that matters: a mild winter (snow -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 a seller-note full-standby vs amortizing lever, the DSCR gate, and a 5-year cash-on-cash and equity multiple (no IRR, deliberately).
  
  

Ten Excel sheets (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.