Warrillow's eight value drivers framework, the most-cited operator-facing reference on what buyers pay for in lower-middle-market businesses. Register is pop-business-book and oriented toward sub-$10M operators, which limits depth on the $5M+ EBITDA founder, but the framework remains the right starting point for any founder who has not yet thought systematically about buyer-side value drivers.
The eight drivers Warrillow identifies (financial performance, growth potential, switching customers, recurring revenue, valuation teeter-totter, hierarchy of recurring revenue, monopoly control, customer satisfaction, hub-and-spoke risk) overlap meaningfully with the five risk axes Foundry writes about, with different emphasis. Warrillow’s framing is best understood as the operational read; the Foundry read adds the buyer-side framing on documentation quality and decision-rights legibility that the original work undersells.
Read for: the framework. Read past: the case-study sections, which are written for a smaller audience than most Foundry readers.