Understanding your business's true worth forms the foundation of its overall health and future planning — including your exit strategy. However, figuring out the real value of your business can be tricky, especially if it's not publicly traded.

What is Business Valuation?

A business valuation, often referred to as a small business valuation for privately held companies, is an independent assessment that determines your company’s worth. This is typically based on expected cash flow and transactions of similar companies if they exist.

The valuation of a company offers more than just a number - it's a powerful tool providing insight into your company's inner workings. By starting the valuation process early, you give yourself more time to optimize your business's "levers of value" and achieve your goals.

While you may have an idea of your business’s worth, a third-party appraisal provides an objective value and outlines steps to prepare for future growth or exit.

Additional Factors that Influence Business Valuation

A comprehensive business valuation considers factors beyond direct financial metrics. It examines the broader financial structure, funding mechanisms, and contractual agreements that shape a company's overall value and dynamics. Key considerations include:

Understanding these factors provides a more complete picture of your business's value and potential, helping inform decisions about its future.

Conducting Business Valuations Early and Often

Periodic appraisals of your business, ideally every year or two to three years, can offer significant benefits. This practice keeps all stakeholders informed about your business's evolving value throughout its lifecycle.

Starting early with professional appraisals provides several advantages:

• Early Familiarity: All stakeholders become acquainted with the valuation process from the beginning.
• Efficiency: Addressing potential issues during the initial appraisal streamlines future valuations, saving time and money.
• Deeper Insights: The appraiser's understanding of your company and its industry grows over time.
• Stakeholder Confidence: Regular valuations build trust among all parties involved.
• Ongoing Awareness: Stakeholders maintain a continuous understanding of the business's current value.
• Preparedness: A predefined plan for triggering events prevents last-minute scrambling, ensuring a well-thought-out approach.

Why is Business Valuation Important for Family-Owned Businesses?

Family businesses often have complex ownership structures, blending active and passive family members with non-family stakeholders. In this context, business valuation becomes essential. It ensures ownership is distributed equitably among all family members and stakeholders, preventing potential conflicts and aligning expectations.

Early and proactive valuation gives leaders time to protect and enhance company value rather than scrambling at the last minute. It allows your business to address management and operational issues that could impact future sales or transitions. This foresight helps maintain your business's health and prepare for eventual changes in ownership or leadership.

Even when transitioning to the next generation, knowing your business's true worth is paramount. It helps owners make fair decisions about future ownership distribution, accommodating both active and passive stakeholders. This knowledge facilitates a smoother succession process, ensuring that the business can continue to thrive under new leadership.

Regular valuations will provide your family business with the insights needed to navigate complex ownership dynamics and plan for sustainable success across generations. They inform strategic choices about growth, investment, and long-term planning, helping to secure your business's future for years to come.

Navigating Discounts Within Business Valuation

When you're planning to gift company shares to family members, you might hear about certain discounts. These matter most when you're giving away shares that don't come with control over the company. The discount for lack of control (DLOC) and the discount for lack of marketability (DLOM) are two important factors to consider when considering passing ownership to the next generation.

A DLOC is like a price reduction because the owner can't make big decisions or control money distributions. They can't change how the business runs, hire or fire top management, decide when to give out profits, or use the company's assets in the best way possible. This lack of control is why the discount exists.

A DLOM, on the other hand, recognizes that selling part of a private company isn't as quick as selling public company stocks. You can't just cash out private company shares in a few days like you can with public stocks. It takes more time, so there's a discount for that.

If you own shares but can't control the company, profit distributions are the main way to make money. However, these depend on how well the company is doing financially. You also need to consider things that might make it hard to sell your shares later, like rules about transferring shares or the company's policies on buying back shares.

Understanding these discounts is important whether you're passing down a family business or talking to outside investors. If you're thinking about selling your business, knowing about these discounts helps you set realistic expectations about the price you might get.

How to Value a Business: 6 Methods

1. Market Capitalization

When it comes to valuing a company, especially one that is publicly traded, market capitalization is one of the simplest methods. You calculate this by multiplying the total number of outstanding shares by the current market price of one share. This gives you a quick snapshot of your company's market value, reflecting investor sentiment and current market conditions.

While straightforward, this method doesn't consider factors like your debt or the value of your intangible assets, which could result in an incomplete picture of your business's true worth.

2. Times Revenue Method

The Times Revenue Method, also known as the revenue multiple approach, focuses on your company's revenue generation. You multiply your annual revenue by an industry-specific multiplier to get an estimated value. This is especially useful if you have a newer business with limited earnings, as it provides insight into your company's future potential based on its revenue. However, your revenue doesn't account for operating expenses, so this method may not always reflect your business's fair market value.

3. Earnings Multiplier

With the Earnings Multiplier method, you evaluate your company's earnings, typically before interest and taxes, and multiply it by a set factor. This factor varies depending on your growth potential, profitability, and industry trends. This method gives you a clearer view of your company's profitability and growth potential. It's helpful in cases where a straightforward business appraisal may not capture your company's earnings power, providing a more realistic assessment for investors and stakeholders alike.

4. Discounted Cash Flow (DCF) Method

The Discounted Cash Flow analysis helps you project your future cash flows and discounts them to the present, accounting for the time value of money. This is one of the most comprehensive business valuation methods because it considers your future earnings and cash flow projections.

5. Book Value

The Book Value method assesses your company based on your balance sheet by subtracting your total liabilities from your total assets. Valuing a business this way gives you a tangible view of your company's worth but often misses intangible assets like your brand reputation or intellectual property. While it's a valuable baseline for comparison, you’ll usually want to combine it with other methods for a more complete view of your corporate valuation. This approach provides insight into the financial stability of your business, especially in industries where asset holdings are significant.

6. Liquidation Value

Liquidation value looks at what your company's physical assets would be worth if you were to go out of business. This method excludes your intangible assets and focuses solely on what you could recover from a quick sale of your tangible assets. It’s typically used in distressed business cases where the liquidation value is lower than other company valuation methods because of the discounts applied during forced sales.

While it’s applicable in bankruptcy or business closure cases, it may not reflect your company's full potential.

Make Sense of Your Business’s Value

Understanding your business's true worth isn't just about putting a price tag on it. It's about empowering you to make smart decisions, whether you're preparing for unexpected events or planning a smooth ownership transition. By getting a handle on your business value early, you're setting yourself up to tackle challenges head-on and seize growth opportunities when they arise.