Reference material for Canadian advisors, built on realized transaction data. Every figure is sourced.
The named Canadian deals we can document closed at a median of 3.00x recurring revenue, inside a range running from 1.00x to 3.25x. The spread, not the median, is what determines what your book is worth.
Six named Canadian transactions, five of them with a disclosed revenue multiple, running from 1.0x to 3.25x with a median of 3.00x. This article builds the answer from realized deals rather than from published ranges.
Canadian advisor books are priced three different ways: as a multiple of recurring revenue, as a percentage of assets under administration, and as a multiple of earnings. The same book can produce honest answers several million dollars apart depending on which denominator the buyer uses.
Any book of business valuation calculator is an input problem, not a maths problem. This is what to have in hand, which drivers actually move the output, and where a calculator stops being useful.
Selling a Canadian advisory practice well is a 12 to 24 month project, and three decisions move the outcome more than the headline multiple: which channel you sell through, how the deal is structured for tax, and how long you stay on afterwards.
Succession, sale and exit are three different decisions, and most advisors treat them as one. The evidence says an unplanned exit costs roughly 25% to 35% of value, an internal successor costs 20% to 30%, and the 12 to 24 months before you transact is where the outcome is actually decided.
A working guide for a Canadian advisor making a first or second acquisition, built on the handful of Canadian purchases where the buyer went on the record about what they paid and how they structured it.
Most Canadian advisor books never reach a public listing. They move inside dealers, through informal advisor networks, via MGA and carrier introductions, to consolidators, and through a small number of platforms. This is how that market works and how to evaluate an opportunity inside it.
A fully worked, illustrative structure for a $50M AUA Canadian book: how the price is built, how the payment is split, what the debt service does to cash flow, and what happens when markets fall 15% or retention misses the test.
Holdbacks, earnouts, clawbacks and vendor take back notes allocate risk in four different ways, and advisors use the words interchangeably. Here is what each one does, what Canadian sellers actually agreed to, and the drafting details that cause the arguments.
In the realized deals we can source, down payments ran from 25% to 100% of the purchase price with a median of 90%. Plan for far more cash than the classic 25% to 50% rule of thumb suggests, and understand what a lender will and will not count as your income.
Canadian life insurance blocks are priced on renewal or commission income, not on assets. The published index runs 3x to 5x annual renewal commissions by in-force premium, larger practices trade on EBITDA, and the single biggest surprise for buyers is that the carrier may keep paying the originating advisor.