The Misalignment Tax is a 70-page monograph expanding Issue 04’s feature into the full reference text on how buyers actually price your business, what they discount for, and the work that closes the gap before the room.
The monograph is reading, not a valuation. It does not produce a value opinion for your business. It synthesizes how the field thinks about pricing and discounts so founders can prepare for what buyers will actually do.
What is in it
The five inputs to the buyer’s model, with empirical anchors from Pratt’s Stats, the Capstone Middle Market Index, and Cordis Institute’s review of 200+ engagements. Worksheets for each input, allowing the reader to score their own business against the framework. Case studies (anonymized) from real engagements that walk through how the framework applied to the discount stack in specific transactions.
Citations throughout to the source literature: Warrillow on value drivers, Damodaran on private-company valuation, Deibel on the buy-side, Beshore on the lower middle market, the academic record on key-person dependency discounts, and Cordis Institute’s white-paper series on the five risk axes.
A closing chapter on the three-year preparation window: what to do in year one, year two, and year three, in what sequence, with what aggregate effect on enterprise value.
What it is not
It is not a business valuation, an appraisal, or an opinion of value. Cordis does not perform business valuations. The monograph synthesizes how the field thinks about pricing and discounts; it does not produce a price for your business.
It is also not a how-to manual for selling a business. The mechanics of a sale process (banker engagement, LOI evaluation, diligence management) are covered in other Foundry references and in the Cordis Group’s own engagement workflow. The Misalignment Tax is upstream of process. It is the reference for the work that determines whether to engage with a sale process at all.
Format
PDF on purchase, with a print-on-demand option available in V1.5 (post-launch). 70 pages, designed for sustained reading, with a citation index and worksheet appendix.
Price
$97. Pricing reflects the position: this is reading, not consulting. The full diagnostic engagement is the MRI; the full advisory engagement is Cordis Group or Cordis Private Client. The reading is the cheap entry point.