Someone Is Going to Offer to Buy Your Business. Your Price or Theirs?

<p>Kim wrote a press release announcing the sale of Lewis Howard Insurance Group for eighteen times earnings. It has not happened. She wrote it because until you write it, somebody else writes it for you, and when they write it, they pick the number.</p><p>Then Hal read his. One sentence, and it says something else entirely: the agency has acquired its eleventh location. Hers has a multiple in it. His has a count. Neither of them heard the difference until it was read out loud.</p><p>This one is a Coffee Table Conversation with no tidy ending, because they have not tied it up at home either. Hal makes the case for going and getting the next one, from years spent in rooms with the people who write the checks. Kim worksbackwards from the number instead, and lands on the arithmetic that names the episode: a small independent shop trades at six to nine times earnings, a scaled platform at seventeen to twenty. Same industry, sometimes the same town.</p><p>The hinge is Hal in the buyer&#39;s chair, saying out loud what a buyer is actually paying for. Not effort. Not how nice everybody is. What he can predict. And if the answer is trust me, I know every customer, then he is not buying a business, he is buying a job, and the day the owner leaves it walks out the door with him.</p><p>Also in this episode: the x-date and the one week a year a customer is actually buyable, the reversibility rule that resolves fast thinking against careful thinking without either host losing, and the quiet part about the roll-up buyercoming to your market. He is not better than you. He has capital and a spreadsheet. And he is betting you never write down where you are going.</p><p><strong>Ready to Take Action?</strong></p><p>Website and IMPACT:https://smallbusinessbigai.com/</p><p>Kim Lewis Howard on LinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/in/kim-lewis-howard/</p><p>Hal Howard on LinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/in/halhoward/</p><p>Insurance assessment, commercialor personal lines: https://asklewishoward.com</p><p>---Q1. What is my small business actually worth, and why dobigger companies in the same industry sell for so much more?</p><p>Size changes the category, not just the number. A small independent operator in insurance trades somewherearound six to nine times earnings. A scaled platform in the same industry, sometimes serving the same customers in the same town, sells at seventeen to twenty. The spread is not a reward for revenue. It is a price on predictability. A buyer paying the