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What is my business worth?

A starting range for a UK owner-managed company, based on your own figures and published sector benchmarks. It takes two minutes and you do not need to give us your details to see the answer.

Who we are, before you start We run a service that helps buyers find UK businesses whose owners may be approaching retirement. That means we may have a commercial interest in businesses like yours — either directly or through the buyers who use our service. You should know that before you read anything below, and you should treat this as one input among several, not as independent advice. Before you sell anything, get your own corporate finance adviser and accountant.

Your figures

Nothing here is stored unless you tick the box at the end to ask us to get in touch.

Operating profit before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation — then add back anything a new owner would not pay for. In practice that usually means your own salary and benefits above a market rate for the job, one-off costs, and any personal expenses run through the business. This single number drives everything below, so it is worth getting right with your accountant.
From your balance sheet: total assets less total liabilities.
Indicative enterprise value
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How that was calculated

What this number is not

It is a starting range, not a valuation, and certainly not an offer. Two businesses with identical EBITDA can be worth very different amounts. What moves it:

  • Enterprise value is not what you receive. Deduct any debt and add surplus cash to get to the equity value, and remember tax comes off after that.
  • Owner dependency. If the business cannot run without you for a month, buyers discount heavily or tie the price to you staying on.
  • Customer concentration. One customer at 40% of sales can take a third off the multiple.
  • The quality of your numbers. Clean management accounts and documented contracts hold value through due diligence. Messy records lose it.
  • Who is buying. A trade buyer with synergies pays more than a financial buyer; both pay more than a management buyout with limited funding.

The sector ranges are drawn from published private-company transaction benchmarks. Widely quoted listed-company indices, such as Damodaran's, run several times higher because listed shares carry a liquidity and scale premium that a private company does not — applying those directly to an owner-managed business overstates value substantially.

Want us to look at it properly?

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