Valuation Services Editing and Proofreading Services

A business valuation report concludes that a company is worth $4.2 million. The two shareholders reading it, one buying the other out, both accept the number without argument, then discover months later, when a dispute arises over a separate matter, that the valuator applied a 25% marketability discount without either party understanding what that discount represented or why 25% was the figure chosen rather than 15% or 35%, a decision that moved the final number by hundreds of thousands of dollars and was never actually explained to the people whose buyout depended on it.

We edit what valuation professionals produce to determine and explain a business's worth — valuation methodology and approach selection disclosures, discount and premium assumption documentation, comparable company and transaction selection criteria, and the correspondence explaining a specific valuation figure to the parties relying on it. Our editors work on the number that a buyout, an estate, or a dispute actually depends on being defensible.

The disclosed methodology and key assumptions are what a valuation figure actually needs behind it, and its failure is a headline number with no visible reasoning for the approach taken or the specific adjustments that moved it. $4.2 million states a conclusion; it does not state which valuation approach was used, why that approach was chosen for this specific business, or what each significant discount or premium applied to the base calculation actually represents and why that specific percentage was selected. We work through these so the valuation approach — income, market, or asset-based — is stated with the reasoning for its selection, since a business with volatile earnings and a business with a stable, predictable earnings history are not well served by the same approach, and a reader needs to know which considerations actually drove the choice; so every discount or premium applied is named and quantified individually, with the reasoning for the specific percentage chosen, given that a marketability discount, a control premium, and a key person discount are different adjustments addressing different characteristics of the business, and blending them into an unexplained net adjustment to the headline figure hides which one actually matters; so comparable companies or transactions, where used, are identified with the criteria used to select them, because a comparable set built from companies that do not actually resemble the subject business produces a number that looks grounded in market data and is not; so any significant assumption about future performance is stated with its basis, given that a valuation resting on a growth assumption the business has never actually achieved needs that gap disclosed, not absorbed into a confident final figure; and so a party's specific question about a specific assumption or discount receives the actual reasoning behind it, not a repetition of the final number. Reports written this way mean the parties relying on a number understand what actually produced it before it becomes the subject of a dispute.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including financial data, valuation methodology and party correspondence. We are editors rather than valuation professionals, appraisers or financial analysts, and we offer no view on valuation methodology, assumptions or figures. What we can do is make sure the number shows its own reasoning.