What is my business worth
How a private business is actually priced, and why two companies earning the same profit can sell for very different amounts.
You want a number, and you want to know whether it can be believed. The short answer is that your business is worth a multiple of its adjusted profit, and the multiple depends on how risky that profit looks to somebody who is not you.
That is the entire model. Everything else on this page sits underneath those two variables. Get the profit right, understand what moves the multiple, and you can estimate your own value inside a range that will not embarrass you in front of a buyer.
One caveat belongs at the top rather than buried at the bottom. A valuation is an estimate of what a buyer would probably pay. A price is what one specific buyer actually pays on one specific day. Those are different numbers, and the distance between them is not an error in the method.
The model, in one line
Value equals adjusted profit, multiplied by a multiple, less debt, plus surplus cash.
The word doing the work is adjusted. The profit in your statutory accounts is not the profit a buyer prices, because your accounts were prepared to satisfy a tax authority and to reflect how you actually choose to run your affairs. A buyer wants to know what the business earns in someone else's hands.
A business turning over €4,000,000.
Adjusting the profit| Operating profit in the accounts | €420,000 | |
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| Add back your salary above the market rate | €60,000 | You pay yourself €150,000. A hired manager doing the same job costs €90,000. |
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| Add back one off legal costs | €35,000 | A dispute that settled last year and will not happen again. |
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| Add back personal costs run through the company | €25,000 | The car, the phone, the trip that was mostly a holiday. |
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| Market rent you do not currently pay | -€45,000 | You own the building personally and charge the company nothing. A buyer will pay rent from day one, so this comes off. |
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| Adjusted profit | €495,000 | |
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At a multiple of 6.5 that is an enterprise value of €3,217,500. Take off €400,000 of bank debt and add €150,000 of surplus cash, and the equity is worth roughly €2,967,500.
Look at what just happened. The profit in the accounts was €420,000. The profit a buyer prices is €495,000. At the same multiple that difference is worth about €487,000, and it came entirely from writing down things you already knew about your own business.
This is why we say most owners undervalue themselves. Not because they are pessimistic, but because they compare their statutory profit against multiples that were calculated on adjusted profit, and the two are not the same measurement.
Normalisation is the whole subject of a guide of its own, with the full list of what can legitimately be added back and what a buyer will refuse. EBITDA and normalisation
Why two businesses with the same profit sell for different amounts
Two businesses, each earning €500,000. One sells for four times and one for eight. The difference is risk, and risk is not a mood. It is made of specific things a buyer can list, and most of them you can work on.
- Customer concentration. If one customer is thirty percent of your revenue, a buyer is not purchasing a business. They are purchasing a relationship they have never had. This is the most common single reason a good business receives a poor multiple.
- How much of it is you. If the answer to how this runs without you is that it does not, then the buyer is purchasing a job that requires your specific abilities. The multiple falls accordingly, and no amount of goodwill in the accounts changes that.
- Recurring revenue. Revenue that arrives next year without being won again is worth several times revenue that has to be earned from nothing. Contracts, subscriptions, maintenance agreements and genuinely long standing repeat patterns all count, in roughly that order of credibility.
- Growth, and whether it is believable. Growth lifts the multiple only when a buyer believes it will continue without them doing anything remarkable. A sharp upward curve in a forecast, with no evidence behind it, reduces trust rather than raising price.
- Margin, and which way it is moving. A stable margin says you have pricing power. A falling margin says you are buying revenue, and a buyer will have noticed before you finish presenting.
- The quality of your numbers. Reviewed or audited accounts, a monthly management pack that actually arrives, and a forecast you have hit before. Buyers discount uncertainty, and from the outside they cannot distinguish between numbers that are wrong and numbers that are merely unverifiable.
- Sector and country. A logistics business in Germany and the identical business in Greece do not price the same, because the cost of capital is different. Properly done, that difference belongs in the discount rate rather than in the multiple, but it reaches the final answer either way.
What the published benchmarks actually say
The Argos Mid-Market Index is a quarterly index published by Argos Wityu, a European private equity firm, with Epsilon Research. It tracks what buyers actually paid for mid sized European businesses.
In Q1 2026, the overall median was 8.6×. Trade buyers paid a median of 7.8×, while investment funds paid a median of 10.0×.
Scope: eurozone UNLISTED companies, equity value €15M to €500M, majority-stake acquisitions, six-month rolling median.
EXPLICIT EXCLUSIONS: financial services, real estate, and high-tech / technology sectors are not included in the Argos Index universe.
Read the source from Argos Wityu / Epsilon Research
Two warnings before you apply any published benchmark to your own business.
The first is scope. The index above covers companies with an equity value from fifteen to five hundred million euros. Most owners reading this sit well below that. Our view is that smaller businesses generally trade on lower multiples, because customer concentration and owner dependence tend to be greater, and those are exactly the things the multiple is pricing. We state that as our view because we have not seen a published European dataset that measures it cleanly at the small end.
The second is that a sector median is a starting point, not a finding. Half of all transactions in any sector happen below the median. If your business is the reason a buyer should pay above it, you should be able to say why in one sentence, and that sentence should contain something a buyer can verify.
Why the answer is a range
A single number implies a precision that does not exist. We give a range because the honest answer is a range, and because the width of that range is itself information.
A narrow range means your business looks predictable from the outside. A wide one usually means something specific is unresolved, most often customer concentration or a profit that moves around from year to year. If your range comes back wide, the useful question is not what the real number is. It is what is making it wide, because that is the thing a buyer will price.
In a real negotiation the range is more useful than a point estimate anyway. It tells you where to open, and more importantly it tells you where to stop.
A valuation is not a price
This matters practically, in both directions. A buyer who needs your capacity to service a contract they have just won will pay above the model and will not explain why. A buyer running three processes at the same time will pay below it, because you are the one they are least worried about losing.
So use a valuation for the things it is good for. Deciding whether to start. Recognising when an offer is strange. Choosing between the routes open to you. Do not use it as a floor you refuse to move from, and do not treat an offer above it as proof that the valuation was wrong.
There are four methods in common use and each is unreliable in its own predictable way, which is why a serious valuation runs more than one and then explains the disagreement. Valuation methods
Your own number, not an average
Everything above is the method. Running it on your own numbers is the useful part.
It is free, it takes about ten minutes, and it returns a range with the reasoning and the benchmark it is calibrated against, so you can see which risk factors are holding your number down.
Step one of three: see your number, free, with no account and no name.
See what it's worth