You can probably tell me what your house is worth within ten percent.
Now tell me what your business is worth.
Most owners can’t, and the guess they offer came from a golf course conversation, a competitor’s rumored sale, or a multiple somebody repeated on a podcast. It’s usually wrong. It’s wrong in the expensive direction.
Here’s the uncomfortable truth
Picture the meeting. You’re across the table from a buyer who does this for a living. He slides a number toward you and there’s a four in front of it where you’d always assumed a six.
You hear yourself say you’ll think about it, in a voice that doesn’t sound like yours.
And you feel it drop into your stomach, because you already told your wife you’d be done in two years.
That meeting happens to somebody every week. The owners it happens to aren’t careless or stupid. They’re good operators who never once looked at their own company the way the buyer across the table was about to.
Most business owners get one shot at their exit. One.
By the time the number shows up in a letter of intent, it isn’t information any more. It’s a verdict. The only owners who get to argue with it are the ones who saw it coming years earlier and went to work.
What the report is
Two things, and the second one matters more than the first.
A range, not a single number, with the arithmetic shown so you can see how it was built. Your Seller’s Discretionary Earnings and Adjusted EBITDA, restated the way a buyer’s analyst restates them, with your add-backs identified and defended. Then real multiples for a company your size, in your industry, with your customer mix.
Your business scored against the Six Systems that decide whether a buyer sees an investment or a job. My book puts the gap plainly: cash flow that runs without the owner can be worth around ten times, while cash flow that depends on the owner tends to trade at two to three. The scorecard tells you which side of that you’re on, which system is holding you there, and what moving it is worth in dollars.
That second part is the reason to run this report five years out instead of five weeks out. The estimate tells you where you stand. The scorecard tells you what to do on Monday.
What the report is not
An appraisal.
The report is an estimate prepared for planning and strategy. It is not a certified business appraisal, it isn’t prepared to an appraisal standard, and no credentialed appraiser signs it.
If you need a valuation for a tax filing, a court proceeding, a divorce, an estate or gift return, a lender, or a buy-sell agreement, you need a formal appraisal from a certified business valuation appraiser. Different document, different standard, different price. Tell me that’s what you’re facing and I’ll say so plainly instead of selling you this report.
Real multiples also turn on growth rate, deal structure, customer concentration, and what one specific buyer wants on one specific day. No report predicts what a buyer will pay.
Buying a report doesn’t make me your lawyer. The Terms of Use spell that out.
An honest confidence rating
Most valuation services hand you a number no matter what you send them. Garbage in, confident number out.
Mine won’t.
The report reconciles your books against your filed returns. When the two disagree, it says so, in writing, with both sets of figures side by side.
They disagree more often than owners expect. A one-time asset sale sitting inside ordinary revenue. Accelerated depreciation making a strong year look flat. Owner draws run through accounts they don’t belong in. Money moving between entities you control. None of that means anything is wrong with your business. It means the number needs work before anybody can lean on it.
LOW When your records don’t reconcile, the report says so and tells you to fix them before trusting the range. A clean-looking number in that situation is worse than no number at all.
HIGH When your books are in order, you get a range you can plan around.
Either way you find out from me for $499 rather than from a buyer’s quality of earnings review, where the price comes down, the holdback goes up, or he walks.
Who it’s for
You’re the right owner for this report if:
- Your business does at least a million a year in sales and turns a profit
- You’re thinking about what comes next, even if next is five or ten years out
- You’d rather know the number now than meet it in a negotiation
- You can put your hands on three years of financials
You don’t have to be selling. The owners who get the most out of the report usually aren’t. They’re the ones who found out early enough to fix what it showed them.
How it works
$499
One price. One report. No subscription, and no upsell to a bigger report.
- You pay $499.
- You answer a short set of questions, including what you’d pay a qualified manager to run the place day to day without you.
- You upload three years of profit and loss statements, balance sheets and tax returns, plus year to date.
- I build the report.
- The PDF reaches you by email within five business days of my having everything I need.
Why me
Thirty years representing owners of privately held companies, and more than $250 million in closed transactions, ranging from $1.5 million to $45 million.
I’ve sat on the other side of the diligence table and watched buyers take businesses apart. What a buyer hunts for is a different question from what an appraiser measures, and knowing the difference is most of the job.
The methodology in this report is the one I use representing sellers for real money. The report costs $499 because software does the arithmetic. The judgment behind it took three decades.
Get the number
$499
One report. No subscription, no upsell.
Pay by card or PayPal. You’ll get the intake form the moment you check out, and your report within five business days of my having everything I need.