# SDE (Seller's Discretionary Earnings)

Owner earnings: profit with the owner's pay and perks added back.

Nearly every main-street listing is priced as a multiple of this figure, so it sets the asking price before you negotiate a thing. Because the [add-backs](https://searchspheresource.com/glossary/add-backs) are where an owner dresses the number up, most of screening is really an argument over what really belongs in SDE, and at a 3x multiple every soft dollar you accept costs three dollars of price.

In numbers: A shop reporting $1.1M of pre-tax profit, a $150k owner salary, and $90k of one-time and personal expenses shows $1.34M of SDE; at 3x that supports a $4.02M asking price.

Source: https://searchspheresource.com/glossary/sde
Not dated: A definition is editorial: what a term means, why it matters, and an example. None of it reads a source that can go stale, so there is no date to take and a stamped one would be the build time wearing a costume.

Site index for machines: https://searchspheresource.com/llms.txt