Two identical businesses can sell for wildly different multiples. The gap is a handful of value drivers buyers pay up for, and engineering them before a sale is the highest-ROI work an owner can do.
Published January 10, 2026
General education for a broad audience, not advice about your situation. Figures are illustrative or from the cited sources, and any projection assumes the inputs hold. Talk to a qualified financial adviser and an attorney before you start, buy, sell or finance anything.
10 min read
Two businesses earn the exact same profit. One sells for two and a half times that number; the other sells for four. The difference is not the market, the broker, or luck. It is a short list of value drivers that buyers reward with multiple, and the owner who understands them can move a sale price by hundreds of thousands of dollars without adding a single dollar of earnings.
The same earnings, a different price
Most owners assume their sale price is set by their profit. Earn more, sell for more; that is the whole story. It is not. The price of a small business is its profit multiplied by a number, and that number, the multiple, is set almost entirely by how risky the business looks to the person writing the check. Two companies with identical seller's discretionary earnings can carry multiples a full turn and a half apart, and on a mid-sized deal that gap dwarfs anything an extra year of growth would add.
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