Free reading for owners of private companies

Your company is wortha different numberto every buyer.

Whether you would ever sell or not, that is the one thing nobody explains to an owner. So we did. In plain language, from the people who sit on the other side of the table for a living.

See how five buyers price one shop Free. Nothing to fill in.
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01 / The system

Five levels. Each one is a different relationship to your price.

You do not have to be selling anything to move up. Every level you climb makes the company harder to break, and that holds whether an offer ever arrives or not.

Find your level

Five questions. The first one you answer no to is where you stand.

No form, no score, nobody grading you. Most owners of good companies land on two or three, and that is a perfectly normal place to be standing.

  1. 01Do you know what the company would sell for today, and could you say why?
  2. 02If you were gone ninety days, would that number still hold?
  3. 03Could you hand a stranger the file behind the number and have it survive?
  4. 04Would more than one party compete for it at the same time?
  5. 05Do you set the terms, or do they?
02 / The buyers

Five buyers walk the same shop and offer very different money.

This is about how buyers think, not about what is wrong with your shop. One company, six things that are true about it, and five parties who weigh those six things completely differently.

The individual buyer$10.5M to $13.3M
The regional strategic$14.3M to $18.0M
The private equity add-on$16.7M to $20.2M
The family office$18.0M to $21.7M
The public company tuck-in$19.2M to $24.5M
0.0x

The best offer is more than twice the worst one. Not one thing about the business is different between them.

Walk through all five

A man's hands resting on a set of drawings
The gap table · Row 01 of 30

The more your business runs without you, the more a buyer pays for it.

Walt had not been out of reach for two weeks in twenty nine years, and he was proud of it. His advisor told him it was the single biggest question mark over his price. Here is what she meant, and what he did about it over the next eighteen months.

Read it
03 / Updated weekly

What moved this week.

Who is buying, what they are looking for, and what it means for a company like yours. Worth about nine seconds.

AUG 18

Buyers now ask your team what they are allowed to decide.

They stop asking the owner and start asking the second in command, listening for whether that person answers or defers.

PatternAUG 15

A new kind of buyer just arrived at your size.

Search capital that used to stop at $1.5M of earnings is now closing above $3M. That is one more name that can reach a table it could not reach last year.

Buyer lanesAUG 15

Three public companies keep buying small businesses every quarter.

A serial buyer needs each company run by someone other than the person who sold it.

Who is buyingAUG 11

Diligence findings are now the second biggest reason deals die.

Behind only valuation expectations. That makes documentation a survival question, not housekeeping.

PatternAUG 04

Lenders pay more for revenue a customer is obligated to buy.

The haircut happens before the offer ever reaches the seller.

Buyer lanes
Start anywhere

The work is the same. Only what happens next changes.

An offer you never asked for. A health scare. A son or daughter who decides they do not want it after all. One company, forged properly, answers all three, and nothing is wasted if none of them happen.

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The quarterly

What moved this quarter, in one email.

The numbers, refreshed quarterly, and what changed for companies like yours. No pitch, and nobody will ever call you about selling.

Four times a year. Unsubscribe anytime.