What your business is worth

The number that matters is not revenue

Buyers price businesses on owner earnings: what the company produces after every real expense, including a fair market salary for the work you do in it. A Westchester business with impressive revenue and thin margins is worth less than a quieter one that reliably throws off cash.

This is why two businesses on the same street, with the same top line, can sell for wildly different prices. The buyer is purchasing future cash flow, not your history of sales.

The multiple, and what moves it

Main-street businesses typically sell for a multiple of owner earnings, and the multiple is where judgment lives. It rises with recurring revenue, a broad customer base, long lease terms, experienced staff who stay, and clean books. It falls with customer concentration, an owner who is the entire sales department, expiring leases, and revenue that is already declining.

Westchester adds its own texture. A service business with dense routes in Scarsdale and Bronxville is worth more than the same routes spread thin, because drive time is margin. A restaurant with a favorable lease in a walkable downtown like Pleasantville carries value that has nothing to do with its menu.

What online calculators get wrong

Automated valuations apply an average multiple to whatever number you type in. They cannot see that your biggest customer is also your brother-in-law, that your lease has nine years left at below-market rent, or that three competitors would each pay a premium for your territory.

A real number comes from a real buyer looking at your actual situation. That is what we provide in a first conversation: not a formal appraisal, but an honest range from people who actually write checks, at no cost and with no obligation.

Raising your number before you sell

If you are a year or more out, a few changes reliably move the price: locking in a longer lease, documenting your processes so the business runs without you, diversifying away from any single large customer, and cleaning up the books so earnings are easy to see. We are glad to walk through which of these matter most for your specific business, even if you never sell to us.

Tell us about your business and we will give you a straight read on where it stands today.