Practical thinking on building business value, winning back your time, and creating genuine freedom — written for owner-managed businesses.
Most owners assume their business is worth a multiple of profit. The reality is more nuanced — and far more within your control. Here are the eight factors that determine what your business is really worth.
Read the article →Ask yourself a simple question: who actually wins the business in your company? If the honest answer is “me”, your business is worth less than it could be — and you are less free than you should be.
Read the article →Gavin Bell had what plenty of people would call the dream. Known around Edinburgh as “the Facebook ads guy”, he was billing around £30,000 a month with barely any overheads.
Read the article →When Sean McAuliffe sold his company, the fundamentals looked good. His distribution business was turning over close to £15 million, margins were healthy and growth was steady.
Read the article →Most owners are fixated on winning new customers. The pipeline, the marketing budget, the growth targets — all of it points one way: find more, close more, grow faster.
Read the article →Reselling other people's products and services looks like an easy path to the next revenue milestone. It can lift your top line — but it usually does so at the expense of your company's long-term worth.
Read the article →Most owners assume growth is the goal — more customers, more turnover, more staff. And they are largely right: buyers do reward growth.
Read the article →When a prospective buyer first sizes up your business, they tend to drop it into a category within moments. That snap classification can shape the value they place on it — and if you land in a less favourable box, climbing out is hard.
Read the article →Most owners assume bigger is better — more products, more customers, more markets. Adam Rossi took the opposite view.
Read the article →When a buyer evaluates your business, they are looking past what you have already built. However successful you are today, they need to see how much bigger it could become to justify their return.
Read the article →What makes you genuinely hard to compete with? It is the thing your customers value that your rivals cannot seem to match — and it has a direct bearing on what your business is worth.
Read the article →Value Builder analytics, drawn from more than 80,000 owners, found that companies which can run without their owner for at least three months are twice as likely to attract an offer above six times earnings. The idea is simple.
Read the article →Murray Kent paid £30,000 for a four-person electrical fittings business operating out of premises he charitably described as a slum. A decade later, a private-equity-backed buyer wrote him a cheque for 6.2 times earnings.
Read the article →The garage door trade is not the most obvious place to build an empire. Yet in just a few years one operator, Guild, consolidated a fragmented market into a scalable platform worth a fortune.
Read the article →The “Rembrandt in the attic” describes a hidden, undervalued asset sitting inside a business that the owner either does not realise is valuable or does not know how to monetise.
Read the article →In the early days of Airbnb, co-founder Brian Chesky went to unusual lengths to gather feedback — staying with hosts to experience the platform exactly as they did, asking detailed questions about their frustrations. His commitment to listening was not just about tweaks; it was about understanding the customer experience in a way few founders bother to.
Read the article →Brent Beshore never set out to be a private equity investor. He had no Wall Street background, never took a finance class, and once had to look up the term “due diligence”.
Read the article →Supplier risk quietly erodes the value of a company. When a buyer examines your business, they hunt for red flags — and a big one is over-reliance on a single supplier, whether that is a sole raw-material provider or a platform that controls your main sales channel.
Read the article →On paper, the business looked eminently sellable. It served blue-chip clients, generated millions in revenue and ran on strong margins.
Read the article →Some leaders take pride in leading from the front. They are in the trenches with their team and never delegate a task they would not do themselves.
Read the article →Could knowing too much about your own product or service actually hold you back? Sometimes not being the technical expert helps you sidestep a trap many founders fall into — getting so absorbed in the work that they never build the business around it.
Read the article →Building and curating a personal brand online is often sold as a route to success. Founders are told to put themselves front and centre, to be the face of the business, to use social media to grow their influence and their company at once.
Read the article →In mergers and acquisitions there is a well-worn idea called the Rembrandt in the attic. It describes the moment a buyer discovers an asset or capability inside a target company that the seller undervalued, underused, or did not even realise was there.
Read the article →Have you ever wondered why some brilliant athletes struggle the moment they move into coaching? The same shift trips up business owners too — and learning to make it is one of the most reliable ways to build a valuable company.
Read the article →For owners thinking about their endgame, learning what makes a company valuable can feel overwhelming. Buyers prize recurring revenue, a differentiated offer and a leadership team that runs without the owner.
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