What your firm
is actually worth.

Every conversation about firm value starts with a multiple, which is the least useful place to begin.

Multiples are the last thing that happens

Every conversation about firm value starts with a multiple and it is the least useful place to begin. A multiple is an output. What a buyer is actually pricing is the probability that the revenue continues without you, and almost all of that is decided operationally, years earlier, by choices that felt administrative at the time.

The three things a buyer is really assessing

1. Can the revenue be verified?

Not estimated — verified. Fee schedules that match the agreements. Billing that reconciles to the custodian. A history that does not require someone's memory to interpret. Firms discover during diligence that their revenue is harder to prove than to earn.

2. Does the process survive the principal?

If investment decisions, fee exceptions and client commitments live in one person's head, then what is being sold is that person, and buyers price that accordingly — with earnouts, retention terms and a lower number. Documentation is not bureaucracy here; it is the difference between selling a business and selling yourself.

3. How much work is the integration?

A buyer is calculating what it costs to absorb you. A firm on unusual systems, with unreconciled history and undocumented exceptions, is a project. A firm whose records are clean and whose process is written down is a transaction. That difference shows up in the price and even more in the terms.

What destroys value quietly

• Performance history that cannot be reconstructed before a platform change.
• Fee arrangements that exist as exceptions rather than as policy.
• Client agreements that do not match what is actually being billed.
• Concentration — in one client, one referral source, or one person's relationships.
• An investment process that is genuinely good and entirely undocumented.

What builds it

Nothing dramatic. Records that reconcile without intervention. A documented process applied consistently. Composites that describe the strategy rather than a selection. Recurring revenue that is provably recurring. Client relationships that involve more than one person at the firm.

Each is a modest operational discipline. Together they are most of the gap between two firms with identical revenue that sell at very different numbers.

And if you are not selling

The same work is what makes a firm transferable to a junior partner, survivable if you are ill, and defensible in an examination. Sale is simply the moment it gets priced. That is why treating it as an exit concern is a mistake — it is an ownership concern that happens to become visible at exit.