The ordering reflects how widely buyers’ offers diverge from founder expectation in each sector before preparation work is done. Sectors near the top are where the work documented in Foundry’s frameworks tends to recover the most.
What drives the spread
Sector-by-sector, the dominant drivers are slightly different. In specialty manufacturing, customer concentration and key-person dependency dominate. In healthcare services, regulatory documentation and recurring-revenue definitions account for most of the spread. In industrial distribution, vendor concentration and the absence of formalized customer contracts. In professional services, the question is succession depth and client tenure. In vertical B2B SaaS, the spread is structural (earnouts absorbing headline price). In consumer goods, the spread is comparatively narrow because comp data is more public and founders enter with better-calibrated expectations.
How to read this list
A high position is not a verdict on a sector. It indicates where the buyer-side framework most reliably moves the price when applied. Founders in any sector who do the operational work documented in Foundry’s frameworks tend to compress their personal spread well below the sector average.