Value creation for mid-market companies

Making businesses worth more.

Performance is only half of it. The other half is proving where it came from: the data, process, and reporting behind the number.

Book the Alignment Analysis See the proof

Sponsor, M&A advisor or family office? Start here.

Nine‑figure

increase in company valuation ExGuard Manufacturing

Eight‑figure

increase in company valuation ModTek

3× EBITDA

within twelve months of the engagement Confidential client

The valuation gap

Every business knows what it earned. Fewer can prove where it came from.

Ask most owners which product line carries the margin, or which customers actually renew, and the answer takes three weeks. Nothing about that delay changes what the business earned. It changes what the business can do about it, and eventually what someone will pay for it.

When a business is being sold, that gap gets priced in quietly and usually nobody tells the owner it happened. When it is not being sold, the same gap shows up as a product line nobody realises is losing money, or a customer nobody realises is the most profitable one.

Either way it is not a performance problem. It is a proof problem, and unlike the market or the rate environment, it is buildable.

Most owners find out what their reporting is worth during diligence. We get there first.

The two levers

Every business has two numbers.

EBITDA What the business earns. Moved by operational efficiency: cost out, cycle times down, waste down, and knowing which parts of the business actually pay. Where most technology firms stop
MULTIPLE What someone will pay for those earnings. Moved by agility, and by how credibly you can answer a question about your own business. Where we also work
WORTH What the business is actually worth to the person buying it.

Move the first and the business earns more today. Move the second and every dollar of those earnings is priced higher when the business is valued. It is the same work.

In practice

Eight revenue streams. Three of them carried the profit.

The business was already profitable. It ran eight distinct revenue streams and reported on all of them together, which meant nobody could say which ones were carrying the others.

Six months of work on the data and the reporting changed that. The answer was not the one anyone expected: almost all of the profit was coming from three of the eight. What the owners did with that information is to their credit, not ours. Within a year, EBITDA had tripled.

Nobody in that story was preparing to sell. They wanted to know where the money was actually being made. That is the whole argument: a business that can prove where its value comes from runs better now, and is worth more whenever someone finally looks.

How we do it

The Alignment Quadrant Analysis

Think about your business as a kitchen. You have ingredients, recipes, tools, and a chef. We grade all four, not one of them.

Data

The ingredients

If the inputs are wrong, or defined differently in each part of the business, everything downstream inherits the error: the weekly report, the pricing decision, and the number anyone is later asked to trust.

Process

The recipes

Undocumented process means the answer changes depending on who you ask and when. That is what makes a business slow to answer questions about itself, and expensive for anyone else to take on.

Platform

The tools

The most examined of the four quadrants, and the least often guilty. Sometimes the system genuinely is the problem. Usually it is not, or not only.

People

The chef

Judgement, ownership and the capability to keep it running after we leave. Fix the other three without this one and the gains leak back out.

Better tools will not save you. If the recipes are vague and the ingredients are spoiled, better tools just help you fail faster.

70%

of digital transformations fall short of their objectives.

BCG, Flipping the Odds of Digital Transformation Success, 2020. Based on 825 senior executives surveyed and BCG's work with 70 client companies.

16%

of organisations both improve performance and sustain the gains.

McKinsey Global Survey, 2018. 1,793 participants.

Two firms, two methods, one answer. BCG names six factors that separate the winners. McKinsey names five. In each list, exactly one of them is the technology.

We tell you which quadrant is actually holding you back. Sometimes that costs us the software project.

For PE & advisors

We work on your problem, not only the portfolio company's.

Sponsors, M&A advisors and family offices bring us in at four points in the life of a holding.

Where to start

The Alignment Analysis

A short, fixed-scope diagnostic that tells you which of the four quadrants is holding the business back, and what it is costing you: in profit now, and in valuation whenever the business is priced.

  • Fixed feeScoped and priced up front. No retainer.
  • Under three weeksBoard-ready findings, not a discovery phase.
  • No sales sequenceYou get the findings whether or not you engage us.
Book the Alignment Analysis

Contact

Start the conversation.

Tell us roughly where the business is and what prompted the question. We will come back to you ourselves. There is no sequence behind this form.

Or reach us directly:
Info@tekstakgroup.com
617-918-7038