I want to sell in two years, how can you help me now?

There is a lot you can do to increase value between now and a sale, and two years is the window our Engineer Value programme is built for.

Over the long term, the biggest gains come from being bigger. The difficulty is timing; a valuation has two components, your EBITDA, which buyers generally average over your last three years, and the profit multiple applied to it. Because of that averaging, profit you add in the final year only partly reaches the figure a buyer pays on. The closer you get to a transaction, the less effect growth on its own has on the price.

NOTE: This is not always the case, but it is a general rule of thumb. Some buyers will weight years differently, some will consider forecasts, some won't. We can advise you about how your own business is likely to be looked at based on the sustainability of your numbers and your growth profile. A business that is growing will always attract a higher multiple than one that isn't. If growth is an issue for you, we may recommend the 3+ year programme which is designed to address exactly this.

The multiple behaves differently. It reflects how safe, transferable, and well-run your agency looks to a buyer, and it can be improved right up to the point you go to market. That is why we call this programme Engineer Value rather than Create Value; creating value grows EBITDA, engineering value works on the multiple.

In practice, we systemise the parts of your business that support the highest multiple an agency of your size can attract. Buyers discount for a business that depends on you personally, for a concentrated client list, for revenue that has to be resold every year, for a team that cannot run the business without you, and for numbers that cannot be verified in due diligence. Every one of these can be fixed, and fixing them takes months rather than weeks, which is why two years is the right time to start.

The work begins with a full valuation and a diagnostic, so we both know what the business is worth today and what is holding the multiple down. From there we work alongside you every month, closing the biggest gaps first, and we revalue the business at intervals so you can see the effect on price. As the sale approaches, we prepare you for the process itself, so due diligence confirms the price instead of renegotiating it.