Having the Right Partners Is Everything: Business Valuations

By Trip Holmes

If you’ve known me just for a few minutes or most of my 35 years as a business broker working with family-owned businesses in the middle market, you know that one of my guiding values is working with a collaborative approach.  There are many reasons to cultivate a partnership ethos in your business, especially when you map those reasons back to meeting the needs of your clients.

None of us can be all things to all people, yet we know that there are certain areas where we need to develop our own proficiencies, while there are other areas where we need to realize the limitations of our expertise and allow others the opportunity to optimize our transactions.

One of the areas where we’ve chosen to have very strong partnerships is in the business valuation space. While some M&A firms attempt to do this in-house—and we certainly can when circumstances dictate that it makes more sense for the client—we’ve chosen to bring in multiple partners. As a general rule though, we enjoy letting our strategic partners do what they do best in helping our clients achieve transaction outcomes that exceed their expectations.

For more general valuations, we enjoy working with multiple CPA firms across the state and region. We would like to this this opportunity to congratulate Mr. Tom McCann, CPA on his recent retirement.  Tom was a longtime valuation consultant to our firm, and we can’t thank him enough for all the quality work and professional assistance over the years.  Most recently the firm Carr Riggs & Ingram, has  become a valuable partner with our valuation work.   We are thrilled to be working at CRI with a young and talented professional, Mr. David Amiss, CPA, CVA. By the way, David just earned a well-deserved promotion to partner, and he takes such great care to ensure the level of service and expertise dedicated to each project are of the highest degree of excellence.

CPAs are great to work with on business valuations, as they can not only assess the financial health of a company, but see its potential and read between the financial statement line items to find items of concern or celebration.

But in our world, we can’t limit ourselves to the generalists, no matter how great they are. There’s actually a quite large need for specialty business appraisers. In our work with entities as diverse as asphalt and paving, printing, and agriculture concerns, we’ve enjoyed working with Brumbaugh Appraisers, the go-to firm in the nation for evaluating machinery and equipment. This process can be incredibly difficult, and they make it look easy. They perform work in 42 states, and they happen to be based right here in Raleigh and Charlotte.

The bottom line is that having the right partners is everything, especially when it comes to business and asset valuation. While we certainly have our competencies at Sabre Capital, perhaps our greatest assets are our ability to pull together and collaborate with a great team of legal, accounting, banking, and other partners, including valuation specialists, as well as our ability to leverage our considerable network of professionals to source buyers and sellers across a wide, diverse range of industries and geographies.

When everyone is in a position to succeed, performing to the best of their capabilities within their chosen competencies and areas of expertise and leadership, our clients benefit most of all!