Entrepreneurial

5 things entrepreneurs need to know about valuation

– Tim Berry is the president and founder of Palo Alto Software. This post originally appeared on his blog, “Planning, Startups, Stories”. The views expressed are his own. –

Valuation is one of those four-syllable business buzzwords you’re going to have to deal with, eventually, if you either want to start a business or own a business. If it doesn’t come up when you start, it will come up later. Here is what I think you need to know, in five short points.

1. The word has vastly different meanings: don’t you hate it when the same words mean different things? Valuation means at least three different things:

• A. What a business is worth to accountants for legal purposes, such as divorce settlements, inheritance taxes, and gift taxes. A certified valuation professional, usually a CPA, makes a guess. Most of them use financial statements and analyze financial details.
• B. What a business is worth to a buyer. Small businesses go up for sale with business brokers. Hardware stores, for example, get about 40-50 percent of annual sales plus inventory, as a starting point. Plus a bonus for growth and special strengths, or a discount for lack of growth and special problems.
• C. The pivot point in an investment proposal: it’s simple math, but tough negotiations. If you say you want to get $1 million for 50 percent of your company, you just proposed a valuation of $2 million.

2. What’s anything worth? Like your car, your house, and a share of IBM stock, something’s worth what somebody will pay for it. The valuation in A is theoretical, hypothetical, but legal. With B and C, though, valuation is as real as agreeing to buy a house. It’s not what the seller says it is; it’s what the buyer is willing to pay. And this cold hard fact drives many entrepreneurs crazy.

3. For small businesses, there are guidelines and rules of thumb. If you do a good search, or work with a business broker, you can find general rules of thumb for what your long-standing small business is worth. For example, a hardware story is worth roughly half a year’s sales plus inventory, with bonuses for positive factors like recent growth, and discounts for negatives like lack of growth. You could read up on it in Bizbuysell.com, Bizequity.com, or Business Brokerage Press. Or do a Web search and check the ads for valuation experts.

4. For startups, it’s what founders and investors negotiate. Startups and investors and culture clash over valuation. Investors care about valuation. Founders often misunderstand valuation. And never the twain shall meet. I’ve seen these kinds of problems many times: founders walk into the valuation discussion full of folklore and fantasy like stories of Facebook and Twitter. They want lots of money for very little ownership. Investors see two or three people with no sales history thinking their dream startup is already worth $2 or $3 million.

Are your business plans more secure than Twitter’s?

It’s not every day that a privately-owned company’s internal financial laundry is scattered across the Web for all to see.

But that’s the unfortunate scenario microblogging startup Twitter found itself in on Wednesday after technology news site TechCrunch published a slew of the company’s confidential business documents.

The files, sent to the site by a hacker who managed to gain access to some of the company’s servers, included everything from plans to launch a Twitter reality television show to notes from its executive meetings to a detailed financial outlook from February.

Reuters tech columnist Eric Auchard provides a bit-by-bit breakdown of the financial forecast here. The outlook reveals that Twitter projected to grow to 1 billion users and rake in a $1.1 billion net profit on $1.54 billion in revenues by the end of 2013.

While Twitter co-founder Biz Stone seemed to take the news in stride, saying the financial projections are now out of date, you can bet the startup’s competitors are poring over the documents with some pleasure.

TechCrunch only published a handful of the 130 files it was sent, but the whole episode should serve as a wake-up call to startups and small businesses everywhere that there’s no such thing as too much security.

Will your business be taking any new security precautions in light of the Twitter case? Please leave your stories in the comments section.