Before you sell, buy out a partner, or hand the business to the next generation, you need a defensible number and a clear reason behind it.
Owners tend to carry a number in their head. It came from a competitor's rumored sale, a multiple somebody mentioned at a conference, or the amount the business would need to produce for retirement to work. None of those are a valuation. A real one starts with the company's own earnings, its own risk, and what a buyer would actually pay for it.
Baum's Accounting Services brings 18 years around the transactions that make this question urgent: partner buyouts, ownership transitions, lending decisions that hinge on what the equity is worth. Baum's Accounting Services runs valuation analysis for companies in Lexington and across Kentucky, usually for owners who need a serious number to negotiate with, plan around, or simply stop guessing about. The output is an analysis built to support your decisions and your conversations, with the assumptions laid out so you can see exactly what drives the result.
The analysis normalizes earnings first. Owner compensation above or below market, one-time expenses, personal costs running through the company, related-party rent that isn't at arm's length. What's left is what the business actually earns for whoever owns it next. From there the work considers the standard approaches: earnings-based, market comparison, and asset-based, weighted according to what your company is and how it makes money. A construction firm with heavy equipment gets read differently than a professional services practice whose value walks out the door at five o'clock. The result comes with the reasoning attached, not just a figure at the bottom.
The question rarely comes out of curiosity. A partner wants out and the operating agreement says fair value without saying how to find it. A buyer has made an offer and you need to know whether it's serious. The next generation is coming into ownership and the transfer has to be priced. A bank wants to know what's behind the guarantee. Sometimes it's the version with no deadline at all: an owner five years from stepping back who wants to know whether the business is worth what retirement requires, and what would have to change if it isn't.
This is a valuation analysis prepared to support owner decisions and the conversations that come with them. It is not a certified appraisal, and This firm does not hold a valuation credential from an accrediting body. If your situation calls for a report that has to stand up in litigation, in a divorce proceeding, or in front of the IRS for gift and estate purposes, you need a credentialed appraiser and We will say so directly. What the analysis is very good at is giving you a grounded, defensible number for negotiating, planning, and deciding whether a deal in front of you makes sense.
A valuation is more useful early than late. Once the analysis shows what drives the multiple, the levers are usually visible: customer concentration that makes a buyer nervous, financials that need three clean years behind them, an owner who is still the only person who can quote a job. Those take time to fix, and each one of them shows up in the price. Owners who start this two or three years ahead of a sale have room to do something about what they find. Owners who start when the letter of intent arrives do not. The valuation work and the CFO work tend to overlap here.
No, and it isn't built to. This is a valuation analysis for business decisions, negotiations, and planning. Litigation, divorce, and gift or estate filings call for a credentialed appraiser producing a report to those standards. If that's what you need, We will tell you at the first conversation rather than after you've paid for the wrong thing.
Three to five years of financial statements, the tax returns that go with them, a current debt schedule, and detail on owner compensation and any personal expenses running through the company. Beyond the documents, a conversation about the business itself: customer mix, key people, contracts, equipment, and what would break if you stepped away for six months.
Usually a few weeks once the documents are in hand, depending on how clean the financials are and how complicated the ownership picture is. Companies with multiple entities, related-party transactions, or several years of unreconciled books take longer, because the numbers have to be sound before anything built on them means much. You'll know the timeline after the first review.
Other work in this area that tends to come up in the same conversation.
Turning where you want the company to go into a financial plan with the numbers, timing, and funding attached to each step.
Read moreFinancial statements, budgets, and reporting formatted to what the grantor requires, plus the tracking they'll expect afterward.
Read moreOngoing financial leadership at the hours your business needs, covering forecasting, capital decisions, margins, and the meetings where numbers get questioned.
Read moreBook a consultation. Bring whatever you have, even if it is a mess, and we will tell you straight what it needs.
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