What Your Business Is Worth

Owners asking what their business is worth are usually given a rule of thumb: a round number of times earnings, with no sample size and no error. This book replaces it with evidence. It draws on the FairlyValued archive of 10,212 company sales from September 2014 to July 2025, 2,108 of which disclose a revenue or EBITDA multiple, together with the Market Pulse survey of business brokers and M&A advisors for Main Street businesses, and the SBA and IRS rules that decide what a buyer can pay and what a seller keeps.

It covers SDE and EBITDA, multiples by industry with their sample sizes, size and margin, who buys and what they buy, the SBA debt ceiling, earnouts and seller notes, asset and stock sales, getting a valuation done properly, timing the sale, and preparing for it. Every figure is sourced in the notes, contested claims are graded for strength of evidence, and the book reports how often valuations miss, including the author's own model.

• A multiple is a range, not a number. The middle half of 826 disclosed EBITDA multiples runs from 6.3x to 12.9x; eight deals in ten fall between 4.4x and 21.9x. Chapter 1
• Main Street sells on SDE. In the Q2 2026 Market Pulse survey, advisors reported about 2.0x SDE below $500,000 of price, 2.8x up to $1 million and 3.1x up to $2 million. Chapter 3
• Size pays, once the censoring trap is removed. The median EBITDA multiple rises from 7.0x for businesses with $1 million to $3 million of EBITDA to 10.25x for those with $10 million to $30 million. Chapter 5
• Valuations miss. Priced from the median of its sector, a deal's estimate was off by a factor of two or more in about a quarter of cases. The author's own blended model, tested on deals it had not seen, missed by 3x or more 6.6% of the time. Chapter 7
• For an SBA-financed buyer, the lender sets the ceiling. With a 1.25x coverage rule, moving the interest rate from 6.15% to 10.25% cuts the maximum supportable price in a worked example by about $540,000, or 16%. Chapter 9

Every table behind these figures is on the book data page, with its sample size. The live archive is on Comparables, and the per-sector buyers on Who buys what.

• How to Read This Book
• Introduction: The Number Every Owner Wants

• Appendix A: How the Data Was Analyzed
• Appendix B: Multiples and Acquirers by Industry
• Appendix C: Worksheets and Checklists
• Appendix D: Glossary
• Selected Sources
• About the Author

Neil P. Bostick founded FIH, a lower-middle-market M&A advisory firm that works for owners of privately held technology companies when they sell, and operates FairlyValued.com, which publishes the comparables archive analyzed in the book.

Disclosure: his businesses earn fees when owners sell and when valuations are prepared, so he has a stake in what owners believe their businesses are worth. He also earns royalties on every copy of the book sold, including through the Amazon links on this page. That stake is why the book reports how often comparable-sales valuation misses, including the error rate of his own model, alongside the medians.

General education, not an appraisal or tax, legal, lending or investment advice.