Advisory

Five decisions decide what your company is worth.

Who you serve. What you offer. At what price. Through what channel. With what story. Every one of them moves the same number — the gap between what your customers will pay and what it costs to serve them. That gap is what a buyer eventually multiplies. We find those decisions, size them, sequence them, and stay through the execution.

Two operations that get confused for each other.

Almost every argument inside a business — about price, discount, margin, budget — is an argument about dividing value. Very few are about making more of it. Here is the difference, on one diagram.

The whole bar is the value your business creates. The top is the most a customer would pay before walking. The bottom is the least your suppliers and team would accept. Everything in between is shared out between three parties — and price and cost decide how.

Raise the price and nothing was created. Your margin grew because the customer’s gain shrank. The bar is exactly as long as it was. This is capture, it is legitimate, and it has a hard ceiling — the customer’s walking-away point, which you did not move.

Now the bar is longer. Customers will pay more than they would have, and good people and suppliers will work with you for less friction than before. There is more to share, so every party can end up better off. This is the work, and it happens upstream of any campaign.

Value created
What customers will pay, minus what your suppliers and team will accept. One number. It goes up or it does not.Not: effort, output, or activity.
Value captured
How that number gets split between customer, business and supplier. Set by price and cost.Not: the same thing as creating it. Confusing the two is the mistake this practice exists to correct.
Willingness to pay
The most a specific customer would pay before saying no. Moved by the product, your position, the occasion you own, and how much you are trusted.Not: your price. Price is what you charge; this is the ceiling above it.
Go-to-market
Every decision about who you serve, what you offer, at what price, through what channel, with what story.Not: marketing execution. That is one part of it, and it sits downstream of all of the above.

The same five decisions set the multiple.

This is not our framework applied to valuation after the fact. Ask any adviser who sells companies for a living what moves the number, and they give you the same five decisions in different words. Published ranges, so you can check your own business against them tonight.

Who you serve
The largest single lever available. Specialists trade at roughly 1.5–3× the multiple of generalists at the same revenue and profit. One client over 25% of revenue draws a discount. Which means specialising is refusing clients — and refusing clients is worth more than almost anything else you can do.
What you offer
Recurring beats project work by 25–40% on valuation. Buyers pay for what they can predict, not for what you once delivered well. A smaller business on retainers is routinely worth more than a larger one on projects.
At what price
Healthy service businesses run 15–25% profit margins. Below 10%, buyers stop asking what you are worth and start asking whether the model works. Discounting does not just cost you this year. It reprices every future year at once.
Through what channel
Owner dependency draws a 15–30% discount and is named the number-one deal killer in agency sales. If you are the rainmaker, the buyer is purchasing your calendar. The founder who is in every room is building a job, not an asset.
With what story
Strategic buyers pay premiums for a defined position. Small generalists clear 2.5–4× profit. Specialists meeting the full profile reach 8–12×. The highest bidder is rarely the buyer who likes you most. It is the one who can explain you to their own investment committee.
What this means
None of these can be fixed in the year you sell. Buyers look at three years of trailing numbers. A decision made today shows up in the price you are offered somewhere around 2029. That is the whole argument for making them on purpose now.

Ranges are blended industry figures published by M&A advisers who transact in these markets — directionally reliable, not a valuation. Your number depends on your books. We are not brokers and we do not sell companies; we work on the decisions that set the number long before that conversation starts.

Growth has to be operated for now — it can’t be financed into existence.

For over a decade, a great deal of business value came from cheap debt and rising valuations. That is over. Bain’s 2026 analysis of private equity concluded that deals now need roughly 12% annual profit growth to hit the returns that 5% used to deliver — because the borrowing and valuation tailwinds that produced most of the returns through 2022 are gone.

The response, so far, has mostly been cost-cutting. Alvarez & Marsal found that margin improvement climbed from 21.5% to 51% of all profit growth in recently exited businesses, while top-line growth fell from 78.5% to 49%. Read that plainly: growing demand got harder, so the market stopped trying.

Cutting has a floor. You can only reach zero. What customers are willing to pay has no ceiling — and it is the side almost everyone is currently retreating from. That is the whole opportunity, and it is where this practice works.

We work by situation, not by sector.

The same pattern shows up in food, software, services and manufacturing. What decides whether we can help is not your industry — it is which of these you are living in.

  • Growth has stalled, and spending more isn’t fixing it

    “We’ve raised the budget twice and the numbers are flat.”

    What’s usually trueYou are spending harder on capture when the thing that’s stuck is what people will pay. More pressure on the same lever.

  • You’re priced like a commodity and you don’t want to be

    “We keep getting beaten on price.”

    What’s usually trueWillingness to pay has collapsed to the category average. This is a position problem wearing a pricing costume, and discounting makes it permanent.

  • You’re entering a new market, segment or offer

    “We’re launching into this and want to get it right.”

    What’s usually trueThis is the one moment when what people will pay is genuinely open to being set rather than defended. It is the cheapest time to get it right and the most expensive to get wrong.

  • You’re preparing for a sale, a raise or a handover

    “We’re two years out from a transition.”

    What’s usually trueWhat the business will be worth is being decided right now, by choices that look purely operational and are not.

  • The business is declining and the decision keeps getting deferred

    “We can’t tell whether to double down or wind down.”

    What’s usually trueThe rarest and highest-stakes room we work in. The answer is usually a subtraction, it is usually unpopular, and it is usually worth more than anything else on this list.

Strategy, planning, execution — in that order.

You can start anywhere. You cannot skip backwards: a plan without the strategy behind it is a list, and execution without the plan is just activity with a budget attached.

  1. Strategy

    Where does value actually get created here — and what are we going to stop doing?

    A clear read of where your willingness to pay is set today, why it sits there, and the few things that would move it.

    The honest limitThis cannot fix a product that doesn’t work.

  2. Planning

    What are the moves, in what order, worth how much, owned by whom?

    A value-creation plan: each move named, sized against today’s baseline, sequenced, and given an owner. Not a theme with no number behind it.

    The honest limitThis cannot substitute for a decision you are unwilling to make.

  3. Execution

    Did it work — and what does the evidence say to do next?

    The moves delivered against the plan, with the number tracked against the baseline we agreed before starting.

    The honest limitThis is not agency capacity. We don’t run your media.

Made from every seat in the market.

Most people advising on go-to-market have sat on one side of it. Fourteen years, five companies, three countries — and the view was different from every chair.

  • Product sideOne TechnologiesFlows, wireframes and product data architecture across 130+ configurations. Built the company’s first competitive intelligence program.
  • Agency sideColle McVoy → Havas → CaratHow the firms you hire actually work, what they cost, and how they win. A $15M account won across six markets as strategy lead.
  • Client sideGeneral MillsThe internal machine a strategy has to survive: finance, R&D, sales, and the calendar. Five brands, one new brand launched.
  • OwnerCULT+MATH LLCCurrently carrying the same risk we advise on. Not a theory about running a business.

In every one of those seats, the thing that got built was the system, not the deliverable — a competitive intelligence program, a pricing playbook, a planning framework and the training to run it, a cross-functional innovation guide. That is the habit you are hiring.

What we can’t do for you.

Published here rather than discovered in month three.

  • We can’t create value where the product doesn’t work or the market isn’t there. Go-to-market cannot rescue either one, and we’ll say so in the first conversation rather than the third invoice.
  • This work is slower than demand capture. If what you need is this quarter’s number, we are the wrong call.
  • We’re not an agency. We don’t run media, and we don’t want to.
  • Sometimes the value-creating decision is to shrink, sell or stop. Businesses kept running past their usefulness destroy value — their own, and other people’s. If that’s what the evidence says, that’s what you’ll hear.

Start with one conversation.

No deck, no pitch. Tell me what you’re navigating — the call you keep circling — and I’ll tell you plainly whether I can help, and which way of working fits.

Request a Conversation