Are You Planning To Buy A Start Up? Read On Before You Do

Accurate valuation, no matter you are big or small company, or you are

Man or Women seeking New Business Loans, then it becomes more important when you are planning to buy out a small business which is not into operations for long i.e. a start up. A new organization which has just commenced its operations, does not necessarily gives clear picture by numbers alone, and there is not much past to go by.

Apart from factual valuation you need to assess the viability of the idea and of the industry it is dealing in.

So how should one evaluate a startup? It’s pretty complex, because the company doesn’t really has any revenue, assets or perhaps established industry to accurately reach at a price.

The method expounded below is one of the most widely used. At the very least, this method provides a starting figure to be adjusted according to a variety of external factors.

Terminal Value:

Terminal value of a company is the value at some point in the future. This point may be an expected liquidity event or a point where the company starts earning profit. The easiest way to do this is to compare with a similar company.

Another method is to check out the price/earnings (PE) ratios for the existing companies in the industry, and factor in the expected earnings in the terminal year.

Note: this terminal value is the best case scenario - everything goes right. Discount rate method recognizes the possible negative events to arrive at a figure.

The Venture Capitalist’s Required ROI:

In this method a VC decides upon the one time investment figure and its expected annual rate of return, and then using the formula [(1 + IRR)^years x Investment] arrives at final figure at the end of the period.

Apart from above described methods there are two other methods of valuing a start up. They are discount rate method and multi-stage financing. I will discuss them in my next post.

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