What's Your Business's Market Value? How to Value a Company

How to Value a Company

What’s Your Business’s Market Value?

Are you wondering what your business's market value is? Read this article to learn how to value a company fairly so you can sell fast and make a profit.

How to value a company

You’re finally ready to sell the business you’ve worked so hard on. The first step of the process is valuing how much your company is worth.

But if you’re new to selling a business, likely you won’t have a clue where to start. Thankfully, there are several ways to work out the market value of your company.

Ultimately, your business is worth whatever you decide it’s worth. But you can make your estimation using various ways to value the company and can choose a mix that reflects your final thoughts.

Keep reading to learn how to value a company.

Work out the Value of the Assets

If you’re wondering how to value a business, the first thing you should do is add up the value of everything the company owns. This includes all the equipment and inventory. Then, you’ll need to remove any debts or liabilities.

After all, a buyer would need to purchase all the same stuff if they were starting the business from scratch, so the company at the very least is worth the replacement cost.

While this doesn’t provide an efficient whole evaluation of a business, it’s a great starting point for understanding a business’s worth. Your final balance sheet will offer a good indication of the value of your business’s assets.

Remember that the company is probably worth a lot more than its assets though. Consider how much revenue and earnings the company pulls in.

Base It on Revenue

This leads us to another method on how to value a company. You can base the value of a company on its revenue.

How much does the company make in annual sales? Work that out and determine, using a stockbroker or a business broker, how much a company within your niche may be worth for a level of sales. For example, it may typically be worth about three times sales.

Explore Beyond Financial Formulas

It’s important not to just base your assessment of your company’s value on figures. For example, maybe the location of your business is extremely sought-after?

Always consider the value of your business based on other factors too, such as geographical location.

How to Value a Company for New Sellers

When considering how to value a company, these are some of the best methods to start with. However, one of the best ways to assist with the process is to consider professional help.

Here at Biznexus, we can help. We help match business owners with the best business intermediaries to help you sell your company for great value, on optimal terms.

The service is free for business owners, and we aim to help improve entrepreneurs’ chances of having a positive experience of selling their business. To learn more about how we can help, check out our website.

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PREPARING TO EXIT YOUR COMPANY

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THE BIZNEXUS ROUNDUP

Quick & dirty interviews, war stories & tips from the trenches of business acquisition, growth & sale. We aim for value, efficiency & fun, so you'll walk away with something useful to take with you along the journey of buying, growing & selling a business.

What to Do before Selling Your SaaS Business

Are you thinking of selling your software as a service (SaaS) business? Remember, buyers most often buy SaaS businesses for financial or tactical reasons. Know what they want in an acquisition, and you will be in a better position to undergo the entire process without much difficulty.

Establish the Value of Your SaaS Business

It doesn’t matter if you are selling a SaaS business or a website; you need to find out the best price to sell your business. To know what you may receive in the market, you need to get a valuation of your SaaS business to be aware of what it’s worth. After that, start setting up your company’s prospectus, including the facts, figures, and numbers. Typically, this is done by computing the annual revenue generated by your SaaS business and doubling up that amount. Also, factor in the amount you’ll compensate the broker or marketplace you use to sell your SaaS business.

Put Your Books in Order

Recurring proceeds is one of the highest draws to a SaaS business. Nevertheless, in terms of increasing revenue generation, a growing business doesn’t guarantee that buyers will pounce on your deal.  Potential buyers are often not much intrigued by ‘what meets the eye’. Meaning, they would be more interested in finding out the fraction of your actually profitable earnings. For this reason, you need to compute costs, such as costs of acquiring customers, your rate of churn, your average growth rate, and more.

To put your books in order, you need to think about maximizing profits and minimizing expenses. Usually, it’s less costly to retain, serve, get existing clients to subscribe and renew than trying to attract new customers to swap the cash flow. Additionally, upgrade your systems time and again to help you lessen cancellations. One thoughtful way of minimizing costs is cutting down human assistance. Use tutorials, videos, and knowledge bases to reduce the need for interaction between humans.

Debug Your Source Code

It doesn’t matter your finances are in good shape. If your source code is disordered, jumbled up, or missing in documentation, potential buyers will be a bit skeptical about your business. In essence, your SaaS business source code ought to be clean, annotated, tested, and verified. It can be overwhelmingly difficult to sell your SaaS business if the source code doesn’t comply with the set standards and guidelines.

As well, a non-reliable, non-concise, overly complicated code can present you challenges as far as selling SaaS businesses is concerned. Being the business proprietor, you need to be familiar with all the entries and exits of your source code. For a reason, it will present fewer challenges to the buyer; in case they want to alter or upgrade the software. Aside from that, a well-documented source code lets the seller take over your business naturally.

Assess if You Need External Assistance to Sell Your SaaS Business

Note that, a reliable online business broker can help you get a valuation of your SaaS business. This is necessary so you are clear about what your business is worth. The good thing, you won’t need to meet your preferred business broker physically. Schedule time to chat with a reliable online business broker (website to advertise) to identify appropriate buyers. Of course, you need to have completed the valuation and prospectus before you start looking for buyers.

An extensively experienced online business broker can help you prepare and move you through the entire process of selling your SaaS company. More importantly, letting an expert online business broker negotiate the price with prospective customers on your behalf removes you from the equation. As a result, it eases the discomfort you might have when it comes to the actual transaction.

BizNexus -Learn More From Our YouTube Playlist:

Preparing To Exit Your Company

Have you checked out our podcast?

THE BIZNEXUS ROUNDUP

Quick & dirty interviews, war stories & tips from the trenches of business acquisition, growth & sale. We aim for value, efficiency & fun, so you'll walk away with something useful to take with you along the journey of buying, growing & selling a business.