Starting from the practical viewpoint of, “I would rather be approximately right than perfectly wrong” this book provides a commonsense comprehensive framework for small business valuation that offers solutions to common problems faced by valuators and consultants both in performing valuations and providing ancillary advisory services to business owners, sellers, and buyers. If you conduct small business valuations, you may be seeking guidance on topics and problems specific to your work. Focus on What Matters: A Different Way of Valuing a Small Business fills a previous void in valuation resources. It provides a practical and comprehensive framework for small and very small business valuation (Companies under $10 million of revenues and often under $5 million of revenues), with a specialized focus on the topics and problems that confront valuators of these businesses. Larger businesses typically have at least Reviewed Accrual Accounting statements as a valuation starting point. However, smaller businesses rarely have properly reviewed and updated financials. Focus on What Matters looks at the issue of less reliable data, which affects every part of the business valuation. You’ll find valuation solutions for facing this challenge. As a small business valuator, you can get direction on working with financial statements of lower quality. You can also consider answers to key questions as you explore how to value each small business. Is this a small business or a job? How much research and documentation do you need to comply with standards? How can you use cash basis statements when businesses have large receivables and poor cutoffs? Should you use the market method or income method of valuation? Techniques that improve reliability of the market method multiplier How might you tax affect using the income method with the advent of the Estate of Jones and Section 199A? Do you have to provide an opinion of value or will a calculation work? How do you calculate personal goodwill? As a valuation professional how can you bring value to owners and buyers preparing to enter into a business sale transaction? How does the SBA loan process work and why is it essential to current small business values? What is the business brokerage or sale process and how does it work? How do owners increase business value prior to a business sale? This book examines these and other questions you may encounter in your valuation process. You’ll also find helpful solutions to common issues that arise when a small business is valued.

The Art of Company Valuation and Financial Statement Analysis: A value investor’s guide with real-life case studies covers all quantitative and qualitative approaches needed to evaluate the past and forecast the future performance of a company in a practical manner. Is a given stock over or undervalued? How can the future prospects of a company be evaluated? How can complex valuation methods be applied in practice? The Art of Company Valuation and Financial Statement Analysis answers each of these questions and conveys the principles of company valuation in an accessible and applicable way. Valuation theory is linked to the practice of investing through financial statement analysis and interpretation, analysis of business models, company valuation, stock analysis, portfolio management and value Investing. The book’s unique approach is to illustrate each valuation method with a case study of actual company performance. More than 100 real case studies are included, supplementing the sound theoretical framework and offering potential investors a methodology that can easily be applied in practice. Written for asset managers, investment professionals and private investors who require a reliable, current and comprehensive guide to company valuation, the book aims to encourage readers to think like an entrepreneur, rather than a speculator, when it comes to investing in the stock markets. It is an approach that has led many to long term success and consistent returns that regularly outperform more opportunistic approaches to investment.

Financial markets are noisy and full of half-baked opinions, innuendo, and misinformation. With deep insights about investor psychology, Book of Value shows how to apply tools of business analysis to sort through the deceptions and self-deceptions in financial markets. Anurag Sharma joins philosophy with practical know-how to launch an integrated approach to building high-performance stock portfolios. Investors at all skill levels should learn to be mindful of their psychological biases so they may better frame investment choices. Book of Value teaches novices that investing is not a game of luck but a skill—and it teaches the emotional and analytical tools necessary to play it well. Intermediate investors learn how to effectively control emotions when investing and think strategically about their investment program. Advanced investors see the formalization of what they already know intuitively: that the philosopher's methods for seeking truth can be profitably applied to make smart investments. A groundbreaking guide full of lasting value, Book of Value should be on the shelf of anyone who takes investing seriously.

Praise for Business Valuation: An Integrated Theory, 2nd Edition "The Second Edition of Business Valuation: An Integrated Theory manages to present the theoretical analysis of valuation from the first edition and expand on that discussion by providing additional guidance on implementing the relevant valuation theories, notably in its expanded discussion of the Quantitative Marketability Discount Model." —Dr. David Tabak, NERA Economic Consulting Your Essential Valuations Reference Whether you are an accountant, auditor, financial planner, or attorney, Business Valuation: An Integrated Theory, 2nd Edition enables you to understand and correctly apply fundamental valuation concepts. Thoroughly revised and expanded, the Second Edition demystifies modern valuation theory, bringing together various valuation concepts to reveal a comprehensive picture of business valuation. With the implementation of new accounting pronouncements mandating the recognition of numerous assets and liabilities at fair value, it has become critical for CPAs charged with auditing financial statements to understand valuation concepts. With thoughtful and balanced treatment of both theory and application, this essential guide reveals: The "GRAPES of Value"-Growth, Risk and Reward, Alternative Investments, Present Value, Expectations, and Sanity The relationship between the Gordon Model and the discounted cash flow model of valuation The basis for commonly applied, but commonly misunderstood valuation premiums and discounts A practical perspective on the analysis of potential business acquisitions Grounded in the real world of market participants, Business Valuation, 2nd Edition addresses your need to understand business valuation, providing a means of articulating valuation concepts to help you negotiate value-enhancing transactions. If you want to get back to valuation basics, this useful reference will become your guide to defining the various levels of value and developing a better understanding of business appraisal reports.

As well as covering traditional valuation issues, this book also seeks to address the complexities associated with measuring the value of intangible assets in a practical context. Provides information on key aspects of business and intellectual property valuation, economic damages analysis, and intercompany transfer price analysis.

Do you really understand what business value is? Information technology can and should deliver business value. But the Agile literature has paid scant attention to what business value means—and how to know whether or not you are delivering it. This problem becomes ever more critical as you push value delivery toward autonomous teams and away from requirements “tossed over the wall” by business stakeholders. An empowered team needs to understand its goal! Playful and thought-provoking, The Art of Business Value explores what business value means, why it matters, and how it should affect your software development and delivery practices. More than any other IT delivery approach, DevOps (and Agile thinking in general) makes business value a central concern. This book examines the role of business value in software and makes a compelling case for why a clear understanding of business value will change the way you deliver software. This book will make you think deeply about not only what it means to deliver value but also the relationship of the IT organization to the rest of the enterprise. It will give you the language to discuss value with the business, methods to cut through bureaucracy, and strategies for incorporating Agile teams and culture into the enterprise. Most of all, this book will startle you into new ways of thinking about the cutting-edge of Agile practice and where it may lead.

Discover the tools necessary to determine what your company's value is, what drives its value, and how to enhance that value during an M&A transaction. The only book to focus on valuation specifically for mergers and acquisitions, Valuation For M&A: Building Value in Private Companies, Second Edition lays out the steps for measuring and managing value creation in privately held businesses. This groundbreaking work led directly to authors Chris M. Mellen and Franck C. Evans being named the joint 2010 AM&AA Middle Market Thought Leader of the Year by the Alliance of Merger & Acquisition Advisors, and its thorough overview of the subject: Recognizes a company as an investment and explains how to manage that value to maximize shareholder returns, focusing on returns, risks, and capital invested Explains investment or strategic value versus fair market value and provides a document request checklist; sample interview questions; and formats for adjusting financial statements, developing discount rates, the computation of net cash flow; and a valuation reconciliation form Includes a comprehensive case study to illustrate concepts and calculations Now covers fair value accounting and the impact of SFAS Nos. 141, 142, and 157 and their IFRS counterparts, intangible asset valuation techniques, exit planning, international M&As, and venture backed/early stage companies Showing corporate executives as well as M&A professionals and business appraisers how to value privately-held businesses for merger and acquisition purposes, this book helps investors, executives, and their advisors determine the optimum strategy to enhance both market value and strategic value to maximize return on investment.

For decades, the market, asset, and income approaches to business valuation have taken center stage in the assessment of the firm. This book brings to light an expanded valuation toolkit, consisting of nine well-defined valuation principles hailing from the fields of economics, finance, accounting, taxation, and management. It ultimately argues that the "value functional" approach to business valuation avoids most of the shortcomings of its competitors, and more correctly matches the actual motivations and information set held by stakeholders. Much of what we know about corporate finance and mathematical finance derives from a narrow subset of firms: publicly traded corporations. The value functional approach can be readily applied to both large firms and companies that do not issue publicly traded stocks and bonds, cannot borrow without constraints, and often rely upon entrepreneurs to both finance and manage their operations. With historical side notes from an international set of sources and real-world exemplars that run throughout the text, this book is a future-facing resource for scholars in economics and finance, as well as the academically minded valuation practitioner.

Accounting for Value teaches investors and analysts how to handle accounting in evaluating equity investments. The book's novel approach shows that valuation and accounting are much the same: valuation is actually a matter of accounting for value. Laying aside many of the tools of modern finance the cost-of-capital, the CAPM, and discounted cash flow analysis Stephen Penman returns to the common-sense principles that have long guided fundamental investing: price is what you pay but value is what you get; the risk in investing is the risk of paying too much; anchor on what you know rather than speculation; and beware of paying too much for speculative growth. Penman puts these ideas in touch with the quantification supplied by accounting, producing practical tools for the intelligent investor. Accounting for value provides protection from paying too much for a stock and clues the investor in to the likely return from buying growth. Strikingly, the analysis finesses the need to calculate a "cost-of-capital," which often frustrates the application of modern valuation techniques. Accounting for value recasts "value" versus "growth" investing and explains such curiosities as why earnings-to-price and book-to-price ratios predict stock returns. By the end of the book, Penman has the intelligent investor thinking like an intelligent accountant, better equipped to handle the bubbles and crashes of our time. For accounting regulators, Penman also prescribes a formula for intelligent accounting reform, engaging with such controversial issues as fair value accounting.

Says Bill Ackman of Pershing Square Capital Management about The Art of Value Investing: "I learned the investment business largely from the work and thinking of other investors. The Art of Value Investing is a thoughtfully organized compilation of some of the best investment insights I have ever read. Read this book with care. It will be one of the highest-return investments you will ever make." Based on interviews with the world's most-successful value investors, The Art of Value Investing offers a comprehensive set of answers to the questions every equity money manager should have thought through clearly before holding himself or herself out as a worthy steward of other people's money. What market inefficiencies will I try to exploit? How will I generate ideas? What will be my geographic focus? What analytical edge will I hope to have? What valuation methodologies will I use? What time horizon will I typically employ? How many stocks will I own? How specifically will I decide to buy or sell? Will I hedge, and how? How will I keep my emotions from getting the best of me? Who should read The Art of Value Investing? It is as vital a resource for the just starting out investor as for the sophisticated professional one. The former will find a comprehensive guidebook for defining a sound investment strategy from A-to-Z; the latter will find all aspects of his or her existing practice challenged or reconfirmed by the provocative thinking of their most-successful peers. It also is a must read for any investor – institutional or individual – charged with choosing the best managers for the money they are allocating to equities. Choosing the right managers requires knowing all the right questions to ask as well as the answers worthy of respect and attention – both of which are delivered in The Art of Value Investing.