By Phil Harwood

I recently had the opportunity to present an educational session at Equip Expo in Louisville, Kentucky. This massive trade show brings in over 25,000 attendees and just keeps getting bigger every year with over 1,000 exhibits and 30 acres of outdoor demonstration space. 

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If you were able to attend my session, I appreciate your attentiveness and excellent questions. It was great to meet many of you in person and hear about your plans for your business. For those of you who were unable to attend, my educational session was focused on the process of business valuation - discovering what your business is worth. 

Because the session was focused on business valuation, I assumed the attendees would be mostly gray-haired Baby Boomers. As you may know, more than half of all businesses are owned by Baby Boomers, born before 1964. This group is particularly interested in business valuation as it relates to succession planning. However, much to my surprise, most of the attendees were younger business owners in their 20s and 30s.  
 
Of course, there are many different reasons for having a business valuation and even more reasons for wanting to learn about the process of valuation. Succession planning is only one of these reasons. As my younger attendees validated, some of the other reasons are equally compelling. These youngsters were not interested in valuation because they were planning to retire. Instead, they were interested in valuation because they plan to acquire other businesses as part of their growth plan strategy or they simply wanted to become more educated about this topic.
 
Business valuation is an essential part of any transaction that involves changing ownership. This includes the sale of a business, mergers, acquisitions, partnership agreements, buy-sell agreements, and more. Unfortunately, the process of business valuation is seen by many owners as a mystery and something that only a few, specially-trained people are able to understand. The good news is that there is no mystery.  

During my session, I walked through many of the more difficult to understand concepts related to business valuation and explained some of the jargon in plain English. If you would like to have a copy of the slides, please click here. And if you are interested in valuing your business or learning about the process of this evaluation, let’s talk. My email is phil@growthebench.com.
 
For the Baby Boomers - or younger owners - thinking about succession, I invite you to take complimentary no-obligation online assessment of your readiness to exit your business. You’ll receive a valuable, customized report that will move you in the right direction. Click here to take the assessment.
 
Now go forth.