In this third audio blog in a series about business valuations, Micah Vant Hoff, a principal at CK, explains the business valuation services we provide to our clients. Many different levels and layers of services are offered under the business valuation umbrella.

Transcript:

My name is Micah Vant Hoff. I’m a principal at Cray Kaiser. We rather than doing the formal reporting a lot of the time, a lot of time business owners just want to know, what’s a range of what my business is worth? Or what would you put it at? Or, you know, I’ve received this offer. Is this within the right range? Does this offer make sense for me? Or should I be looking for more?

And what we do, because we have access to all of these business valuation resources. Because we have the ability to source and review comps. Because we have the ability to consult these various resources, and also the experience in doing this work, we’re able to either evaluate offers that businesses have received and tell them this is within the expected range or this is not. Or if there is no offer on the table if there’s just a question of value we can use some of our models that we’ve developed to drive an expectation as to value to come up with a range that is indicative of what this business is likely worth and help owners that way be able to position themselves in the discussions with potential purchasers or to even position themselves with whether they’re going out to a business broker or just starting to consider it. They at least have this idea of what they believe their business is worth and then the negotiation effectively starts from that point oftentimes.

I would note too that while we talk about business valuation, there’s many different levels and layers of the services that we offer within that umbrella. So we can be doing a formal business valuation report which is a 40 to 150 page report with the NACFA specified sections and walks you through kind of front to back what this business is, what the economic considerations are, buildup of the discounts, how we’re valuing the business, what methods we’re using. A very comprehensive analysis and reporting of business value. But a lot of business owners come to us and they’re not looking necessarily for that level of depth and detail. They just really want the question answered of what is my business worth? And we have various other consultative things that we can do to help educate them both on the business valuation, business sale process, and drivers of value, as opposed to necessarily going through a full formal business valuation.

So there are ways that we can answer that question for them or help them start to think about how to answer that question without doing a full blown valuation. And that’s, I would say, in the past couple of years we’ve done even more of that. Just as there’s a lot of M & A activity out there, there’s a lot of interest from whether it’s private equity or larger businesses in acquiring and smaller businesses, closely-held companies. And so we were able to plug in alongside our clients, our smaller businesses, to be be able to give them the resources that they need that they’re looking for to effectively enter into these discussions and be able to understand the steps involved, walk through the process and feel like they’re educated in that process and not just being taken along for the ride.