3 Expert Secrets for Business Valuation and Selling Your Business

This is the third part in our series on business valuation. In Part 1, we give you the rundown on public vs. private valuations. Part 2 discusses 5 key factors influencing valuation. This time we are bringing you an expert’s take on common misperceptions, how to get the biggest bang for your buck when it comes to selling a business, and who is likely to be involved in the deal.

To punctuate our fall blog series on business valuation, we interviewed a friend of Audacia Strategies, Dan Doran, Principal at financial services firm Quantive. As an experienced M&A professional focusing on small and mid-sized privately held companies, Dan has seen it all—or at least, A LOT. He and his team support both buyers and sellers uniquely positioning him to be the voice of reason when it comes to transformative business deals. Check out our full interview here.

If your plans involve selling your business—even if retirement is several years in the future—you need to carefully consider the insights Dan offers here. So let’s look at Dan’s top business valuation strategies for sellers.

1. Think early and often about how to influence your business’s valuation.

In basic terms, business valuation is a snapshot of the health of a business at any given time. We already examined in greater detail how analysts and buyers determine what a business is worth. But value can be boiled down to three things:

Earnings
Growth
Risk

To influence valuation, Dan works together with owners to get them thinking early on about these three aspects of their business. One challenge he often runs into is that business owners tend to think about the worth of their companies only when they are ready to go to market or when an offer comes their way. But, says Dan, “this is actually backwards.”

If you want to get the best price, it’s important to understand how you can best position yourself in the market. And if you aren’t satisfied with your current position, you need time to make improvements before you’re ready to find a buyer.

In addition, there are a lot of reasons why someone may want to know the value of a business, besides being in a position to sell. “There are number of litigation reasons, for example,” says Dan. A business owner might be going through divorce or someone might have died making the value a probate matter. Then, there’s the transaction stuff: buying or selling a company, buy-ins and buy-outs, capital needs, etc. “For all these reasons, it’s important to get to an understanding of where the market will likely price an asset (i.e., the business) at a given point in time.”

2. Mind the difference between valuation and price.

It’s also important to remember that there’s a difference between valuation and price. In the simplest terms, valuation is an analysis, while price can be negotiated. So, what this means for you is if you use an expert like Dan he will build a valuation model to predict where the market would likely price your business.

Of course, any valuation is only as good as the facts and knowledge available. “There’s no such thing as perfect information,” says Dan. In every transactional deal, there will be an asymmetry of knowledge, meaning that buyers and sellers will have different perceptions of what a company is worth. The most timely example of this is Elon Musk’s tension with short sellers a few months back.

Here’s Dan’s take on Tesla:

“This was really a battle of information,” says Dan. “There’s an asymmetry of knowledge and investors in public markets are constantly trying to gain more knowledge to predict where they think price will go. So, Elon is in possession of more facts than these investors and his position has been that the stock is going to grow, whereas short sellers are looking for it to decline. It’s been a battle of information to try to manipulate that stock price.”

But perhaps the biggest lesson learned in watching Elon Musk trying to value (or price?—it’s a bit hard to label) Tesla at $420 per share is that bringing a neutral party to the table during negotiations can help. Regardless of whether Elon was fairly valuing his company, he had no buyers in the end. A good M&A process will have some competition and likely involve negotiations around not only price, but also the terms of the deal.

3. Get the biggest bang for your buck when influencing business valuation.

We’ve discussed in a previous post, how competitive the M&A market is and how important it is for business owners looking to sell their businesses to stand out from the crowd. Our conversation with Dan reinforced this point. With fewer businesses being passed down to the children of business owners, 80% of business owners need to liquidate their businesses to fund their retirements, which means this is a seller’s market.

But where does Dan suggest putting your resources to see the biggest ROI? Well, he says, it’s important to realize that when you have a consultancy like Quantive appraise your company, “essentially what we’re doing is creating a risk profile that becomes a roadmap for what is impeding value and what we should be fixing before we go to market.”

So, again, it’s important not to wait to value your company. You want time to follow that roadmap to improve your position before going to market. “The real question,” according to Dan, “is how do we begin to drive more value and return a bigger rate on this investment?”

To answer this question, you need to think carefully about who your buyer might be and think like her. While the majority of small business owners are baby boomers (65+), buyers are likely to be in the next generation. What do these buyers want? What do they care about? Why is your company a smart investment for them?

And recognizing that we all tend to overprice our own assets can help you adjust expectations. As Dan says, selling a business is really not that different from going to market with a house. “Everybody thinks that their own house is a special unicorn. As a business owner when we go to market we want to get the most for that asset, obviously. But the market is looking at your business relative to alternative investments.”

Thinking of your business in these terms, as one possible alternative in a sea of potential investments for a buyer, you’ll want to look at several key factors to help you stand out:

- Timing: we want to sell when the company is in a good position and when the market is in a good position.
- Value of the company vs. how it fits into your overall portfolio: if you’re in a position where you want to liquidate your business to fund your retirement, you’ll want to have these two numbers in mind: how much is it worth and how much do I need?
- Be ready for the personal transition: Most business owners spend more time working on their company than doing anything else in their lives. So when they sell the company, they suddenly have a lot of time on their hands. You have to look in the mirror and figure out what you’re going to do with that time. Otherwise, what invariably happens is the week before closing people look for excuses not to close. Releasing control can be hard, so make sure you’re ready.

As challenging as it can be to sell your business (which, let’s face it, feels more like “another child”), if you start early, consider how to influence business valuation, and take the necessary steps, you will be happily enjoying mai tais (or another drink of choice) before you know it.

To make the whole process less challenging, it’s smart to enlist the help of experts early on. At Audacia Strategies, we talk a lot about how to differentiate companies in a really crowded field. We can help you negotiate the best possible price for your business. Why not contact us to set up a consultation? It’s never too early to start strategizing!

Photo credit: Dmitriy Shironosov