Not a Numbers Person? Neither Are Most of the Owners We Work With.
Not knowing your numbers doesn't mean you're unprepared to sell. It means you're exactly like most business owners we work with.
Every founder we sit down with is, in some way, the expert. They know their customers by name. They can tell you which client will ask for a change of scope once again, and which employee is quietly holding the whole operation together. They've built a reputation as the person who has the answer, for employees, for customers, for their industry.
Then we ask what their business is worth, and the room changes.
"Honestly, I don't know the numbers side of things." "We're not a numbers-focused industry." "I've never really looked at it that way." We hear some version of this constantly, and it's not a confession of incompetence, it's a signal of how specialized expertise actually works. A founder who has spent 20 years mastering operations, sales, or craft has not spent that time mastering discounted cash flow models or EBITDA normalization. There's no reason they should have. But when the moment comes to sell, that gap suddenly feels personal, and for someone used to being the one with the answers, it can be genuinely disorienting.
This isn't a fringe experience. It's close to universal, and the data backs it up.
The Numbers Behind "I Don't Know the Numbers"
RBC Wealth Management's 2024 survey of business owner clients found that two-thirds of surveyed business owners lack a documented plan for selling or transitioning their business, and 41 percent haven't completed any type of valuation analysis to know what their business is worth. That's consistent with an earlier, more extreme finding: a study cited by the Business Exit Institute found that 98% of business owners have no clue what their business is worth.
That imprecision tends to show up on both ends of the price range, not just at the extreme of having no number at all. Some owners, after years of sacrifice and personal investment, attach an emotional premium to what they've built, but buyers don't pay for effort, they pay for earnings, risk, and growth potential. Others go the opposite direction, pricing conservatively out of uncertainty simply because they've never had a clear, defensible number to anchor to. Either way, the absence of a real valuation is what leaves money on the table, in both directions.
The stakes of that gap are especially high given how concentrated an owner's wealth typically is. Most business owners have 80 to 90 percent of their net worth tied up in their company, yet many enter a sale process without knowing what it's actually worth. That gap between assumed value and market reality is where deals collapse, retirement plans stall, and years of effort fail to convert into financial security.
Survey data backs up how widespread the underlying unfamiliarity is. A Gallup study found that the owners of roughly half of U.S. businesses surveyed either plan on closing their business or simply do not have a plan for what happens next.
None of this reflects a lack of intelligence or effort. It reflects the fact that valuation is a specialized discipline, built on a different body of knowledge than the one most owners have spent their careers mastering. That mismatch is fixable, and it comes down to three things: who you choose to work with, what you actually need to understand about your number, and recognizing the skills you already have that translate directly into a successful sale.
1. Find the Right Partner
If you don't know the numbers, the fix isn't to become a valuation expert overnight. It's to find someone who can bring you along at the pace you need, without ever making you feel like you should already know what they know. The right advisor doesn't just deliver a number, they build your understanding of how that number came to be, so every decision from there forward is one you're actually equipped to make.
A few qualities are worth screening for when you're choosing that partner:
They've run a business themselves, ideally, they've exited one. An advisor who has actually sat in the owner's chair understands the emotional weight of the decision, not just the technical mechanics of it. They know what it feels like to have most of your net worth tied to one asset, and they know the anxiety of not knowing your own numbers because they've likely felt it too. That lived experience changes how they explain things and how patient they are with the process.
They never assume you already speak the language. M&A and valuation come with a dense vocabulary: multiples, add-backs, quality of earnings, working capital pegs. A good advisor translates as they go, without making you feel behind for asking what a term means. If a conversation leaves you nodding along to jargon you don't actually follow, that's worth naming.
They don't rush you toward a listing. Be wary of anyone eager to slap a number on your business and get you to market immediately. The advisors worth working with slow down first, walking you through how the valuation was built, what's driving it up or down, and what you could still do to change it. T. Rowe Price's research on this found that an effective business exit strategy typically takes three to five years to execute, which tells you that education and preparation, not speed, is the actual job.
2. The Factors That Actually Drive a Valuation
You don't need to become a valuation analyst. But there are a few concepts that, once you understand them, will change how every future numbers conversation with your advisor feels, from opaque to collaborative.
Industry and the Industry Multiplier
Valuations aren't calculated in a vacuum, they're benchmarked against what similar businesses in your sector have actually sold for. A landscaping business and a specialty food manufacturer with identical revenue will not carry the same multiple, because buyers price in industry-specific risk, growth expectations, and capital intensity. Your industry sets the ceiling and the floor before anything else about your specific business even enters the conversation.
EBITDA and SDE as the Starting Point
Most small and mid-sized business valuations begin with either EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization) or SDE (seller's discretionary earnings), depending on the size of the business. These numbers attempt to show a buyer what the business would actually generate in their hands, adjusted for one-time expenses, owner perks, and accounting quirks that don't reflect the true operating picture. This is the number the industry multiplier gets applied to, so getting it wrong throws everything downstream off as well.
Transferability and Owner Dependency
This is often the factor that surprises owners most, and it's the one that separates good valuations from great ones. A business that runs smoothly without you in the room is worth substantially more than one that grinds to a halt the moment you take a vacation. Buyers apply a real discount to a business that cannot function without its owner, since they're effectively pricing in the cost and risk of transition. The more the business depends on you personally, the more that risk shows up in the number they're willing to pay.
Financial Documentation and Quality of Earnings
Buyers pay a premium for numbers they can trust. Audited or reviewed financials, clean books, and consistent record-keeping reduce a buyer's perceived risk, which directly affects the multiple they're willing to pay. This is one of the more fixable factors on this list, and often one of the most overlooked.
Together, these four factors explain most of the distance between what an owner assumes their business is worth and what a buyer is actually willing to pay, which is exactly why walking through them with an advisor, well before you plan to sell, changes the outcome.
3. The Skills That Made You a Successful Owner Are the Skills That Will Make You a Successful Seller
Here's the reframe we come back to again and again with clients: you are not starting from zero. The instincts that built your business are directly transferable to selling it, you just haven't had to point them in this direction before.
You Already Know How to Read People, Now Read Your Buyer
Every day as an owner, you work to understand what your customers and employees actually need, not just what they say. That same skill applies to a buyer. Work with your advisor to understand buyer psychology and the objections a prospective buyer is likely to raise: concerns about your dependency on the business, questions about customer retention, hesitation about deal structure. You've spent years reading a room to close a sale or retain a key employee. A buyer conversation is not fundamentally different.
You Already Know How to Negotiate, Use It Here, Too
You negotiate with vendors, with landlords, with employees about compensation, probably every week. Selling your business is the highest-stakes negotiation of your career, but it draws on exactly the same muscle. The difference is simply that your advisor can now tell you what "good" looks like in this specific context, so your instincts have the right information to work with.
You Already Think in Scenarios, Apply That Here, Too
Most owners build conservative, baseline, and stretch forecasts for their business as a matter of course. Exit planning works the same way. Your advisor will give you a realistic range of value rather than a single number, and from there, you can run your own scenarios: how a lower or higher sale price shifts what you'd need in seller financing, how much room you actually have to negotiate up or down, and what different outcomes mean for your personal tax obligations. This is planning under uncertainty, something you already do constantly, just usually about inventory or hiring instead of a sale price.
The takeaway: A valuation isn't a test you either pass or fail. It's a starting point built collaboratively with a partner who fills in what you don't know, so the decisions from there are yours to make with confidence.
The Bottom Line
Not knowing the numbers doesn't make you unprepared to sell your business. It makes you human, and it makes you exactly like the vast majority of owners we work with. What determines the outcome isn't whether you walk in already fluent in EBITDA multiples and quality-of-earnings reports, it's whether you find a partner who will build that fluency with you, patiently and honestly, instead of rushing you past it.
With the right advisor beside you, the knowledge gap closes faster than most owners expect. And once it does, you'll find that the hardest part of selling your business was never really about the numbers, it was about trusting that the skills that got you here are still the ones that matter most. They are. You just need someone in your corner who knows how to translate them.
Not sure what your business is really worth?
Jade Partners takes the time to walk you through your numbers, your options, and what drives your value, so you can make your exit decisions with confidence, not guesswork.
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Gallup, "Most Small-Business Owners Lack a Succession Plan" (2025) — news.gallup.com
RBC Wealth Management, "Business exit planning: Overcoming emotional and financial roadblocks" (2025) — rbcwealthmanagement.com
T. Rowe Price, "Adding value with exit strategy planning for small business owners" (2025) — troweprice.com