Business valuation shows two different answers to "what is this worth", because there are two different questions inside it.
Book value
What the business owns minus what it owes, taken from your balance sheet.
This is a fact rather than an estimate, and it is almost never what a service business sells for. A profitable company with few assets can have a small book value and a large sale price, because what a buyer is purchasing is the earnings, not the vans.
Estimated market value
Your earnings multiplied by a range of multiples typical for home-services businesses.
It is shown deliberately as a range and never as a quote. Nobody can tell you what your business is worth from your accounts. What a range does is tell you the neighbourhood, which is enough to decide whether a conversation is worth having.
Two things it cannot see: what a specific buyer wants, and what your market is doing this year. Both move real prices more than anything in your books.
Setting your own multiple
If you have better information than a generic range — a broker's opinion, a comparable sale in your area, an actual offer — you can replace the range with your own.
Doing so requires a reason, and the reason is stored beside the number. That is not bureaucracy. The multiple moves the valuation further than any other single input, and a figure with no reasoning behind it cannot be explained six months later, to a buyer, a lender, or to yourself. "We used 4x" invites the question "why", and the answer needs to still exist when it is asked.
Clearing back to the default needs no reason, because that removes a claim rather than making one.
What moves the multiple
This is the useful half of the page, because unlike the number itself, these are things you control.
Owner dependence. A business that runs without you is worth more — often dramatically more. A buyer purchasing your personal relationships and your knowledge is buying a job, and they price it accordingly.
Clean, single-source books. Records a buyer can verify quickly reduce their risk, and risk is what discounts a price. Reconciled books with one obvious source of truth are worth real money at sale.
Recurring or membership revenue. Predictable income is worth several times the same amount of unpredictable income, because a buyer can borrow against it.
Gross margin. Higher margins signal pricing power and survive a downturn better.
The honest use of this page
Not to decide whether to sell. To decide what to work on if you might, because every lever above takes twelve to twenty-four months to move and cannot be improved once the business is on the market.
Also worth reading next to customer concentration: a business where one customer is half of revenue is discounted heavily, regardless of how good the earnings look.