The Misalignment Tax is a 70-page monograph. It grows Issue 04’s feature into the full reference on how buyers really price your business, what they mark down for, and the work that closes the gap before you get in the room.
The monograph is reading, not a valuation. It does not give a value for your business. It pulls together how the field thinks about pricing and discounts. That helps founders get ready for what buyers will actually do.
What is in it
The five inputs to the buyer’s pricing model, backed by real data from Pratt’s Stats, the Capstone Middle Market Index, and Cordis Institute’s review of 200+ engagements. A worksheet for each input, so you can score your own business against the framework. Case studies (with details removed) from real deals that show how the framework and the discount stack played out.
Citations throughout to the source material: Warrillow on value drivers, Damodaran on private-company valuation, Deibel on the buy-side, Beshore on the lower middle market, the academic research on key-person dependency discounts, and Cordis Institute’s white-paper series on the five risk axes.
A closing chapter on the three-year prep window: what to do in year one, year two, and year three, in what order, and the total effect on enterprise value.
What it is not
It is not a business valuation, an appraisal, or an opinion of value. Cordis does not do business valuations. The monograph pulls together how the field thinks about pricing and discounts. It does not set a price for your business.
It is also not a how-to guide for selling a business. The nuts and bolts of a sale (hiring a banker, weighing LOIs, managing diligence) are covered in other Foundry references and in Cordis Group’s own workflow. The Misalignment Tax comes before the process. It is the reference for the work that decides whether to start a sale process at all.
Format
PDF on purchase, with a print-on-demand option coming in V1.5 (after launch). 70 pages, built for steady reading, with a citation index and a worksheet appendix.
Price
$97. The price reflects what this is: reading, not consulting. The full diagnostic is the MRI. The full advisory work is Cordis Group or Cordis Private Client. The reading is the low-cost way in.