The reframe, the number that matters and the trap that wipes out retirements. The sales stage is way too late to start thinking about your business’s value. Knowing your number early turns valuation from a verdict you receive into a tool you steer by.
Graham Stephen is CEO and co-founder of bizval, a valuation firm he built to make valuations fast, affordable and founder-friendly. A chartered accountant by training, he’s run thousands of valuations across multiple markets.
And he’s blunt about how many founders leave it far too late.
The move: treat your valuation as a pulse check, not an exit step
Most people think a valuation is something you do when you want to sell. The founders who actually build value do it regularly — to know what they’re working towards and to make better decisions along the way.
Graham’s analogy is the Discovery Health age. If you’re 40 and your health age is 50, you need to change something. If it’s 30, you’re doing well. Your business value works the same way; a number that tells you whether what you’re doing is making the business more valuable or less.
How to know what your business is worth
1. Get your first number now, not when you need it
The single most important shift is timing. Don’t wait for a sale, a partner conversation, or a retirement date to find out what your business is worth. Get a baseline number while you still have years to act on it.
Around 80% of private businesses never end up selling or aren’t sellable in the first place. Knowing your number early is how you find out which side of that line you’re on while there’s still time to cross it.
2. Understand what the number is actually measuring
You don’t need to run the calculation yourself, but you need to know what drives it.
“A valuation is the summation of future cash flows — a function of risk and reward.”
Once you see the number that way, you stop treating it as a mysterious verdict from an accountant and start seeing the levers underneath it that you can actually pull.
3. Use it as a yearly scorecard
A valuation isn’t a one-time event. The founders who get the most from it treat it like the annual health check it resembles, a number they revisit each year to see whether they’re improving or slipping.
Are you more valuable than you were 12 months ago? Did the decisions you made move the number up or down? That yearly comparison turns valuation from a snapshot into a direction.
4. Let the number guide your decisions, not just your exit
The point of knowing your value early is that it changes what you do. Founders who take their valuation seriously usually pick one to three things to focus on (the levers that actually grow the number) and let that shape their hiring, their strategy, and especially their investor conversations.
It even helps in rooms where nobody asks the number directly. Investors quietly assess whether a founder understands how value is created. Knowing your number and what moves it signals exactly that.
The big payoff
Know your number early, and you stop flying blind. You find out whether your business is sellable while you can still fix it, you make decisions against a real target, and you walk into partner and investor conversations without making promises that put you on the back foot.
It costs you a valuation today instead of a nasty surprise in a decade. For most founders, that’s the cheapest insurance they’ll ever buy.
Want the full playbook?
This is one piece of Business Valuation for Founders, Graham’s full masterclass inside the Founder Collab, part one of a three-part series that takes founders from understanding their numbers to actively growing them:
How valuation actually works; risk, reward, and why the same business is worth different amounts to different buyers
The five pillars of a business that can actually sell, starting with owner independence
Why your earnings get “normalised” and what that does to your number
The value drivers and detractors that move your number up or down
How the three core valuation methods differ — and when each one applies
You’ll also get access to 40+ other masterclasses from SA founders and operators on sales, fundraising, UX, paid media and more inside The Founder Collab.
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