What Is Your Company Actually Worth, And What's Holding That Number Down?

By scoring across the value drivers in 8 business domains and 4 layers, not by EBITDA alone, since two businesses with identical EBITDA can carry very different risk profiles once factors like owner dependency and customer concentration are taken into account. A buyer's own advisors will look well beyond the headline earnings figure, so understanding your value the same way they will is more useful than relying on a single multiple.

Start with the professionalisation roadmap sequenced by what moves value fastest, usually transferability before growth, since a buyer discounts revenue growth that's still bundled with heavy owner or key-person dependency. Growth pursued before the underlying business is transferable tends to just grow the size of the discount a buyer applies, rather than the price they're willing to pay.

Two years before an intended sale, the things that determine price need that much time to actually change, particularly anything involving customer relationships, management information systems, or reducing dependency on the owner personally. Starting six months out means most of what a due diligence process finds gets negotiated as a price reduction rather than fixed beforehand, because there simply isn't time left to change it properly.

Owner and key-person dependency, customer and supplier concentration, contract risk, and the quality of management information are consistently among the first things a buyer's due diligence team examines, often before they've spent much time on the financial statements themselves. Each of these factors represents a specific kind of risk to a buyer, that the business won't run the same way without its current owner or a handful of key people, which a headline EBITDA figure says nothing about.

Any of the risk factors a due diligence process finds and prices in, dependency, concentration, weak reporting, the same list our risk analysis surfaces upfront, precisely so those factors can be addressed before a buyer's advisors find them during a live deal process. A risk found during due diligence typically gets deducted from the price; the same risk found and fixed two years earlier simply disappears from the conversation entirely.

Move customer relationships, knowledge, and decision rights out of the owner's head into the company's processes and management layer, so the business can plausibly be run by someone other than its current owner. This is usually the single highest-leverage professionalisation step available to a mid-market business, since owner dependency is one of the first things any buyer's advisors test for, and one of the hardest things to fix quickly once a deal process has started.

Build reporting to a standard a stranger could steer by, consistent sources, consistent numbers, consistent timing, rather than a system that only works because the owner personally knows how to interpret and reconcile the gaps. Management information built around one person's tacit knowledge is a liability in a sale process, since a buyer needs to trust the numbers without that person there to explain them.

Scoring the same 8 domains and 4 layers the Orbicul model uses, calibrated to what drives value in your specific sector, since the relative importance of factors like customer concentration or technology dependency varies meaningfully between industries. The analysis isn't a generic checklist applied uniformly, it's weighted toward whichever drivers actually move valuation multiples in your particular market.

Use sector benchmarking data alongside the internal scan to see where you're ahead or behind on the drivers that matter, rather than relying on internal impressions of how the business compares to competitors. Sector data provides the external reference point that internal management, however experienced, simply can't generate on its own, since it requires visibility into how peer companies actually perform on the same value drivers.

Roughly two years for the full professionalisation roadmap to move the value drivers that matter most, though the exact timeline depends on how far the business currently is from being transferable and how concentrated its customer and key-person risk currently is. Businesses that start the roadmap already reasonably professionalised can move faster; those starting from heavy owner dependency typically need the full runway.

Sequence it by value impact, transferability of relationships and knowledge typically comes before growth initiatives, since a family business's specific risk profile usually centres on how much of the operation exists only in the owning family's heads rather than in documented, transferable processes. Addressing that dependency first tends to unlock more value per unit of effort than pursuing growth on top of an untransferable base.

Run the same risk analysis a buyer will run, on your own terms, with time to fix what it finds, rather than encountering the same questions for the first time once a live deal process has already begun and the clock is running. Preparing this way turns due diligence from a discovery process working against you into a confirmation process working in your favour.

The Enterprise Value Scan answers the first; the professionalisation roadmap and value reviews project the second, giving an owner both a current baseline and a credible view of how much value is realistically available to unlock before a sale, rather than a single static number with no path attached to it.

That decision sits downstream of knowing your real value drivers and risk profile, the scan gives you that picture regardless of which buyer you choose, since both types of buyer will ultimately evaluate the business against broadly the same set of risk factors, even if they weigh growth potential versus stability somewhat differently in their final offer.

The scan and roadmap improve the business regardless of exit outcome, a company that doesn't sell still keeps a business that runs better, with less owner dependency, cleaner management information, and a clearer picture of its own value drivers than before the exercise started, none of which depends on a transaction actually closing to be worthwhile.