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1. The opinion belongs to somebody who is paid to sell
A broker earns a commission on completion. That points the number in one of two directions. High, to win your instruction against the broker who quoted lower. Or low, to move a business quickly and bank the fee. Neither is dishonest, exactly. It is just that the person handing you the number is not neutral about which number you accept.
Ask any valuer, me included, what they earn if you act on their figure. It is the fastest way to understand what you are being told.
2. Market conditions are quoted, not applied
A multiple is not a fact about your business. It is a fact about what buyers were paying for businesses like yours, in your sector, at a particular moment. Sector performance, the cost of debt and how many buyers are actually active all move it. A valuation that cites a sector multiple without saying which deals it came from and when is quoting an average, not valuing your company.
3. The financial review stops at the profit line
Profit is where a thin valuation starts and stops. What a buyer actually underwrites is cash: working capital, the shape of your debt, how concentrated your customer base is, and how much of last year's profit depended on you personally being in the building. Every one of those changes the number, and every one of them surfaces in due diligence anyway. Better to find them before a buyer does.
4. Assets are counted, or they are not
Property, plant and equipment are the easy part. What gets missed is the intangible side: contracts with time left to run, accreditations that take years to earn, a maintenance base that renews without being sold to, and a brand that wins work on its own. In HVAC and building services particularly, an accreditation and a recurring service book are frequently worth more than the vans.
5. Nobody asks what happens next
A valuation built only on trailing performance values the business you are finishing with, not the one a buyer is starting with. What is the pipeline, what would this business do inside a larger group with more buying power, and what does it need that you were never going to fund? A buyer is pricing the future. A valuation that ignores it is answering a different question.
Where I sit in this, plainly
I am not an independent valuer and this is not a neutral article. I buy companies. When I value a business it is because I am considering acquiring it, which gives me a bias in exactly the direction you would expect, and you should read any number I give you with that in mind.
What I do not have is a commission. I am not paid on completion by you, there is no percentage of your proceeds, and I am not trying to win an instruction. That removes one specific distortion from the list above. It does not remove all of them, and anybody who tells you their valuation has no angle at all is selling you something.
The practical advice is the same either way: get more than one number, ask each person what they earn if you accept it, and treat any figure that arrives without workings as a marketing document.